Tweakable Airfoils

[Jonfliesgoats]

Would it be possible to get tweakable wings which allow players to adjust mean camber, leading edge radii, etc?  The sliders would affect the performance of given wings and wing panels.  If players don't want to get into that level of detail, they can simply avoid playing with the sliders.

[Wjolcz]

Procedural wings (and tanks) would be great to have.

[panzer1b]

I honestly think its about time for @SQUAD to give up on the age old anti-procedural train of thought.  There are way too many advantages to having at least a few procedural parts to keep it out of stock indefenetely.

For starters, it cuts down on that all important part count.  I dont think im the only one that considers high part count lag one of the biggest problems right now which severely limits anything large scale (capital ships, stations, land bases, ect).  Having just 3 procedural categories would do wonders for this situation.  One basic procedural wing with just 3 parameters (length of the 2 edges, and a offset to allow the rear to move back and forth to determine the angles of the front and rear) would cut a 20 part wing into like 2-3 parts.  One fuel tank (well 1 per each size with a selectable length) would allow people to cut those long fuel stacks out of the ship and cut down as many as 3-5 parts per fuel stack.  Procedural structural panels and girders/ibeams would allow people to nolonger be forced into stacking like 10 girders to get a ship's skeleton of a reasonable length, ect.

Also, proc parts would cut out alot of the clutter in the part list, instead of tons or fuel tanks and wings, you select one of a few styles and then pick what size you want them to be.  Also, provided the proc parts are of similar style to the old parts, save compatibility would not suffer as you could just have the old wings per say turn into new proc wings of that same size and shape despite the proc wing likely being a single part to save on resources.  I dont see any considerable issues with upgrading old saves (except possible the inability to open newly made ships in older game versions). 

Finally, while i do understand the concept of lego style and limitations, there is nothing stopping the new procedural parts from being made out of preset lengths and sizes and something like and adv tweakable that enables fine control.  I think that'd be the best of both worlds since the lego style remains, and you still get the benefits of reduced part count (by enabling larger sizes in the presets as options, something like twice or even 4 times the length of current tanks/wings.  That and it isnt liek procedurals will take the engineering out of teh game or anything, there are still plenty of situations where you want a smaller fuel tank or perhaps even make a ship out of 2 wings instead of 1 for redundancy (i never have one wing on a aircraft since it is dead if that wing is shot off, 2 wings offer better redunbdancy and less likely to get 1 shotted out of the sky)...

[Guest]

@panzer1b wow much text with no connection to the topic whatsoever, nice derail +1

 

@OP your best bet would be to suggest this in the B9 proc wing thread and to the guy maintaining it. 

Though in my opinion there is no point to have this because the way both FAR and vanilla wings work, airfoil shape doesnt count, so it'd be only esthetic.

Secondly this sounds like a complicated feature. so yea complicated + useless = very unlikely.

[Jonfliesgoats]

The point of tweakable airfoils is to affect aerodynamic properties rather than aesthetics.  I would imagine the same models of parts being used.  Tweakable airfoils would modify the lift and drag properties of each wing and wing panel.

Really a mean camber and leading edge radius could work.  Even simpler, you could have the option t select supersonic, high speed, low speed and aerobatic airfloils.

With regard to procedural parts, I am all about it.  The problem is getting accurate modeling of fluid dynamics around those parts.  That's a tricky feat, unfortunately.