Vulture - Flying Wing

[Cupcake...]

UPDATES:

27/6/17 - New version added with 2 additional reaction wheels, wing tip landing gear and a doubled eleven control which doubles as an air-brake.

CRAFT FILE:

https://goo.gl/jYPQ7J

RECOMMENDED MOD:

It took a lot longer than I thought but I've finally come up with a flying wing design that I'm happy with. Say hello to the Vulture.  

Powered by extremely efficient Wheesley engines the Vulture can stay aloft in excess of four hours while still cruising at a respectable 515m/s.

One thing this design isn't short of is lift with stall speeds approaching 30m/s at sea level!

Speaking of which the craft can handle water landings/takeoffs with ease.

Despite it's size the Vulture is extremely maneuverable with the widely spaced control surfaces providing lashings of torque.

While it doesn't share the tightly harmonized handling of the Storm it's still a hoot to fly and is almost guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

CONTROLS:

1 - Toggle Engines

2 - Toggle Thrust Reversers

ABORT - Toggle Air Brake

 

PILOT NOTES:

As with all my designs a joystick is highly recommended and the SAS should be left on at all times.

While the craft won't go supersonic at sea level it is possible to break the sound barrier at high altitude and dive down to low levels doing in excess of 600m/s. This will eventually cause the engines to overheat and explode!

The craft has very little in the way of reaction wheel toque so you'll need to push air over the control surfaces in order to get decent maneuverability. At speeds below 100m/s the handling can be sluggish for this reason.

I've set the ailerons to a cautious 20%, this can be ramped up according to your preferences but setting it to the max will make the plane so agile it becomes uncontrollable!

I found adding ladders resulted in an unacceptable drag penalty so in order to board/exit your Kerbal fold the landing gear in when the craft is parked up.

The design is often not in a great hurry to slow down which can make landings tricky, liberal use of the thrust reversers will help you reach a safe landing speed.

 

CRUISE PROFILE (PILOT ASSIST):

Start the engines, set full throttle and pull back hard on the stick, there's no danger of tail strikes with this design.

Climb at an initial angle of 45 degrees and level off at 10,000m. Use pilot assist to hold this altitude.

It can take a little while but eventually the craft will break through the transonic drag and reach a speed of 515m/s.

Once this happens you can use Pilot Assist to slowly increase altitude in return for longer flight times.

 

Anyway folks, I hope you enjoy this design and I'll try and get its sister ship (The Wisp) posted over the next few days.  

 

Cupcake...

 

Edited June 27, 2017 by Cupcake...

[HvP]

Elegant and clean design. Nice!

[Thingymajigy]

Beautiful as always. Also had no idea ladders added drag. Interesting

[Cupcake...]

51 minutes ago, HvP said:

Elegant and clean design. Nice!

Thanks!

16 minutes ago, Thingymajigy said:

Beautiful as always. Also had no idea ladders added drag. Interesting

The didn't use to but they sure do now.

 

Cupcake...

[Raptor9]

Well this is a break from your usual stuff @Cupcake....  But I see your keeping with your simple & elegant style of building.  Very cool.

[Dafni]

Very good looking craft indeed. I'll definitely give it a spin. Thanks for sharing.

[Firemetal]

Looks great! Reminds me of the B2! Keep it up, Cupcake!

Fire

[Castille7]

A whole lot of impressive in a small package! You seem to hold that title 

[Cupcake...]

19 hours ago, Raptor9 said:

Well this is a break from your usual stuff @Cupcake....  But I see your keeping with your simple & elegant style of building.  Very cool.

The more I build the lower the part count seems to get, this one only clocked in at 21 parts!

19 hours ago, Dafni said:

Very good looking craft indeed. I'll definitely give it a spin. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks man, hope you enjoy it.

18 hours ago, Firemetal said:

Looks great! Reminds me of the B2! Keep it up, Cupcake!

Fire

The B2 was a big inspiration even if it isn't a part for part replica.

12 hours ago, Castille7 said:

A whole lot of impressive in a small package! You seem to hold that title 

I don't know about a small package, this is the biggest thing I've built in a long time!

Building big can be fun too.

 

Cupcake...

[Dafni]

@Cupcake... The Vulture flies lovely! It has great roll authority, naturally, and the other axes of control are also surprisingly responsive. Amazing craft. I just used it to test and fine tune my new joystick, what a joy!

The range at cruise altitude is unbelievable, but I enjoy it a lot down in the denser atmosphere too, where it is really surprisingly maneuverable. And it has the looks too!

(as an added bonus, the super low part count was so easy on my laptop, even on my visual mod install it gave me constant green timer. Nice!)

Edited February 17, 2017 by Dafni

[Cupcake...]

12 hours ago, Dafni said:

@Cupcake... The Vulture flies lovely! It has great roll authority, naturally, and the other axes of control are also surprisingly responsive. Amazing craft. I just used it to test and fine tune my new joystick, what a joy!

The range at cruise altitude is unbelievable, but I enjoy it a lot down in the denser atmosphere too, where it is really surprisingly maneuverable. And it has the looks too!

(as an added bonus, the super low part count was so easy on my laptop, even on my visual mod install it gave me constant green timer. Nice!)

That's a great looking pic! Thanks for the test report, it's always good to hear people's feedback. BTW what visual mods are you rocking?

 

Cupcake...

[Dafni]

Just now, Cupcake... said:

That's a great looking pic! Thanks for the test report, it's always good to hear people's feedback. BTW what visual mods are you rocking?

 

Cupcake...

Thank you! And you are welcome. You know I always enjoy to fly your craft around and take them apart in the SPH etc, its a great inspiration and influenced my builds a lot.

I want to point out the almost unbelievable amount of glide this craft has too! Thanks the Kraken for the thrust reversing in those engines, otherwise I could never land that glider. On another note, I managed to land it back on the strip first try, after flying along the coastline and around the mountains for what felt like forever.

As for the visual mods, this is some version of Scatterer with some of the taxing goodies turned off  and EVE with "stock" configs. Not visible on this pic is Planet Shine and Distant Object Enhancement. These four are usually my standard visual mods nowadays. Unfortunately SVE does not seem to work good on my system, I get some weird artifacts in the clouds and bad performance, but I found when I mix EVE and scatterer myself and disable what I dont want I get great performance and nice clouds too. Flying through the volumetric layer with bigger craft can get the timer to flicker yellow sometimes though.

[vitekc45c]

I made some adjustments to it

[Jigglebone]

How long has it been since you made a craft with a normal cockpit?

[Cupcake...]

2 hours ago, Jigglebone said:

How long has it been since you made a craft with a normal cockpit?

A long, long, long time.

 

Cupcake...

[Exothermos]

Needed more air?  Why the adjustments?  Though, I do like the position of the vertical stabs.

 

Edited July 17, 2017 by Exothermos

[DeltaDizzy]

On 2/16/2017 at 1:20 PM, Dafni said:

*snip* I just used it to test and fine tune my new joystick, what a joy! *snip*

 

 

*cough*

This is me testing my joystick. The only button I touch is Spacebar to activate the engines. Everything else is either KSP or the joystick.

Yesterday, without the Joystick, it flew like a charm.

 

[Cupcake...]

16 hours ago, DeltaDizzy said:

*cough*

This is me testing my joystick. The only button I touch is Spacebar to activate the engines. Everything else is either KSP or the joystick.

Yesterday, without the Joystick, it flew like a charm.

 

Well er... Practice makes perfect I guess!  Also having SAS turned on will surely help.

 

Cupcake...

[He_162]

You took smooth to a whole new level!

[DeltaDizzy]

4 hours ago, Cupcake... said:

Well er... Practice makes perfect I guess!  Also having SAS turned on will surely help.

 

Cupcake...

I then unplugged the joystick and proceeded to, within 5 minutes, skim 1m above the ocean at Mach 1.03.

Also, My Joystick is a Sidewinder Precision Pro.

I turned on SAS and it stopped spinning. 270 Degrees later. 

 

Edited July 28, 2017 by DeltaDizzy

[AeroGav]

On 13/02/2017 at 9:36 AM, Cupcake... said:

I'd given up on airliner wing SSTOs with recent changes to heating, but I did manage to make your airplane into one in 1.31 with 1400dV or so.    Tried adding strakes ahead of the main wing, with the idea of providing some heat protection.  Not sure if that's doing anything or not (other than spoiling the looks !)

It's lost a lot of its nimble handling though,  now flies like an Airbus !

Action group 1 - nose up trim

Action group 2 - neutral trim

Action group 3 - nose down trim

Action group 4 - nukes toggle

Action group 5 - afterburner cancel

Fly with prograde on ,  navball in surface mode.    Nose down trim during speedrun, at 700m/s activate nukes.   Neutral trim above 750 m/s.   When heat bars appear, go to nose up trim.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8bgg5svqp4kx74n/Vulture - Flying Wing.craft?dl=0

[Cupcake...]

On 12/12/2017 at 9:56 AM, AeroGav said:

I'd given up on airliner wing SSTOs with recent changes to heating, but I did manage to make your airplane into one in 1.31 with 1400dV or so.    Tried adding strakes ahead of the main wing, with the idea of providing some heat protection.  Not sure if that's doing anything or not (other than spoiling the looks !)

It's lost a lot of its nimble handling though,  now flies like an Airbus !

Action group 1 - nose up trim

Action group 2 - neutral trim

Action group 3 - nose down trim

Action group 4 - nukes toggle

Action group 5 - afterburner cancel

Fly with prograde on ,  navball in surface mode.    Nose down trim during speedrun, at 700m/s activate nukes.   Neutral trim above 750 m/s.   When heat bars appear, go to nose up trim.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8bgg5svqp4kx74n/Vulture - Flying Wing.craft?dl=0

It's a pity the heat tolerance isn't higher for that set of parts, I'd love to use them for SSTOs.

 

Cupcake...

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Loving it man!

I feel like you somehow made the older, more powerful brother to one of my own flying wing planes. Although when you use those huge wings, I guess they are bound to look similar! (Also I'm sure yours is actually useful unlike mine, which is severely under-powered and pointless. Lol.)

Really nice job! I gotta say though, personally; I preferred the Yaw stabilizers out on the wingtips, just looked cool.

Spoiler

 

Edited December 12, 2017 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Matuchkin]

Wait... where are the air intakes?

[Rocket In My Pocket]

3 minutes ago, Matuchkin said:

Wait... where are the air intakes?

Looks like he's prolly using Engine Nacelle's between the Nose cones and the Engines.

They have built in air intake, the game doesn't care if you "block" it off either really.

Works very well as it saves on drag.

Edited December 13, 2017 by Rocket In My Pocket