Wind Tunnel Mode Revisited

[Jonfliesgoats]

A wind tunnel mode has been suggested before.  Listening to others suggest modifications to science I think we could have great ways to incorporate exploration into improved craft design.  Imagine if you have the options to to set sliders in the wind tunnel for speed and altitude and get numeric data regarding lift and drag in kilonewtons and temperature in degrees kelvin.  Adjust your craft angle to see these values at various angles of attack and sideslip.  

If you want to see these values for a particular planet, you can toggle Duna, Eve, Laythe or Jool providing you have explored them with probes and conducted atmospheric analyses.  A separate, toggleable interface would give a much more detailed engineering report, provided you have invested sufficiently in R and D and perhaps, hired a specific engineer.

KSP already computes these values in flight, so the code exists.

Similar things could exist for testing suspension in the R and D center provided you have conducted gravimetric surveys of particular planets.  

This would be an additional reason to return to a body and conduct more science after you sufficiently improve your R and D center.  Sending probes would make your larger designs much more efficient and reliable.

Fun or no?

This would also make the R and D center a much bigger part of the game than it already is.

[p1t1o]

I have talked about this before, so I am definitely a supporter.

Planning for flighton other bodies was not something I considered, but would definitely be extremely useful. Maybe you want to fly a glider on another planet - how do you know what its aerodynamic properties would be without flying a full mission there to find out?

And not for nothing but - how do they plan for this in the real world? Wind tunnels.

With FAR installed, you get a rudimentary version in that it can overlay some data whilst you are in the VAB/SPH, but its a little clunky/maths-heavy, a bespoke feature could be made quite handy I wager.

I imagine it would take some work to put it in, but the functionality/calculations are already there, or seem to be.

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

NB:  

If someone replies with "Why are you talking about this when we havnt even got such-and-such-a-feature yet?" I swear to god I will type so many frowny faces that you will forget what a smile looks like.

Is that what you want? Do you want children to look at you and cry?

Edited October 27, 2016 by p1t1o

[Jonfliesgoats]

Hopefully we can drum up support so wind tunnel mode arrives for KSP 3.0.

[DrunkenKerbalnaut]

On October 28, 2016 at 6:02 PM, Jonfliesgoats said:

Hopefully we can drum up support so wind tunnel mode arrives for KSP 3.0.

It would make a great expansion. 

/s

[Adelaar]

Yes pls