Balancing a wide-winged aircraft?

[Shiny]

This plane can't fly correctly - once it gets off the runway, it does large loops backwards that I can't control. I assumed it was too much wing lift in the front / too much weight in the back, but even after putting a lot more wings in the back, it continued to do the backwards uncontrollable loop.

Helps?

[duckunlimited2]

Well it has too much lift now. Take like 25 wings off of it. Put the most lift on the back, attach control surfaces on it too. Add two canards on the front. The control surfaces on the front would angle downwards to help it from flipping backwards. If it still flips backwards, manually angle the canards downward from the SPH using the wasd keys while holding down shift. If the angle becomes way to ridiculous, get rid of the canards. Put a small hard point on the nose of the plane (straight up like its a tail peice) and attach a control surface on the top of the small hard point. the control surface by itself has very little lift value but it still a control surface so it can still control the pitch of the plane. That last method helped my last space plane fly stable.

Small hard point and control surface on the front. Very little lift, but still able to control the pitch of the plane.

My plane also liked to flip backwards. but I moved most of my lift to the back and I had virtually no lift in the front except for that control surface on the small hard point. That solved the flipping.

Edited August 8, 2012 by duckunlimited2

[Shiny]

Ah, well the problem is, I'm going looks over performance. I can't exactly take off 25 wings, as they make up the main body if the aircraft. One of my other wing-bodied aircraft flies fine with around the same amount of wings, so it can't be that anyways. And the nose hardpoint canard thing just looks bad IMO. I did take off some wings in the front and replace them with tailfins that have less lift and more weight. I also added two canards to the front. And, well, it flies now. Kinda. With SAS, it flies straight, but trying to actually do anything makes it do mad flips in every direction.

Edit: Scratch that. Too many wings are probably the problem. My other plane has less then half of the wings as this one Let's see how many wings I can take off this thing...

Edited August 8, 2012 by Shiny

[Clouds]

It's not so much having too many wings - it's having too much lift-value forward of the center of mass. As it is, any tiny wobble away from a perfectly straight course will make those wings catch the air, like trying to throw a dart backwards. It keeps flipping because there's thrust.

You'll need to move the center of mass forward, or add a lot more wing-drag in the rear to overpower it. (Or add a ton of control surfaces and let ASAS muscle it in line...)

[trbinsc]

See that fuel tank at the back with the wings sticking out of it? Take off the wings, and put a structural fuselage on there, followed by that long tail thingy. Then add some vertical and horizontal stabilizers. I had the exact same problem on one of my designs.

[harry c]

strap a booster and put a ton of struts

[MrMadGameplay]

duckunlimited2 is right, but maybe you should try moving the tanks forward a little just so it isn't back heavy.