Hinges and/or adjust wing tips!

[Arugela]

The ability to take any wing(or heck any item) and add a bend to it particularly good for aerodynamics. Also potentially good for fitting stuff in cargo bays. Maybe it could add structural weakness or whatever it naturally would. but it could be invaluable for plane design. Preferably the ability to effectively define a line and place it anywhere on the wing at any angle to bend it there or add a hinge etc.

Edited January 24, 2016 by Arugela

[Pds314]

This would be difficult to code. I'm all for being able to bend an orange tank into a 60- degree pipe, but I'm not sure you appreciate how difficult it would be to arbitrarily bend and kink parts.

 

The thing is, any system that allows this needs to work for unintended input. What if I want to bend a Mk3-Mk2 adaptor, and I want to do it by bending some line along the curvilinear edge? If you're using FAR, the aerodynamics could probably make sense of the result, but what would the result be?

Edited January 25, 2016 by Pds314

[Pds314]

Like, let's pretend they didn't have to work with the constraints Unity imposes on altering meshes, and just imagine that they need to write this code independently. You give it a mesh, and an axis on which to bend out, as well as a bending distance, and their function needs to pop out a new mesh ASAP, and if that part is animated, the animations need to be recomputed as well, so, for example, bending a cargo bay in half means the door animation needs to be automatically fixed.

[capran]

Infernal Robotics gives you motorized hinges and other parts. It has it's own learning curve, but it's pretty cool. I once made a lander that fit into the mk3 cargo bay length-wise, but had the small radial mounted rockets along the sides, and they could swivel to face down or up.