Wings and how to directly control them

[MaverickWoe]

Hey people.

First, sorry for the wing vocabulary, I'm not entirely sure I'm using it right.

I'd like to understand if it is possible to take control, through the API, of the angle of a controllable air surface without using the Flight control Pitch / Yaw / Roll inputs.
Is there a way to directly set an angle on any controllable flap/wing ?

I see that I can fetch the result of the drag and lift vectors (liftForce & dragForce of ModuleLiftingSurface) which is great, but can't see any input. (It is not the deploy feature I think)

I'm also slightly confused between the class ModuleLiftingSurface, ModuleControlSurface and ModuleAeroSurface and not sure if one of those three allows to do what I'm looking for.

Anyone is familiar with what I'm looking for ?

 

[MaverickWoe]

Still very confused on this.

I tried changing the winglet's ".part.orgRot.z" or ".angleOfAttack"

None of them seem to have an effect on the part.

I'm wondering if it's possible at all...

[MaverickWoe]

Hi guys. Just bumping up the question.

Do you know how to control the angles of a wing, similarly to how you can control the thrust of each engine individually ? Thanks

[wasml]

I would think the AOA of the wing would be what KSP computes each frame based on the vessel orientation - if your trying to move the flaps I think you want to target the control surface.

[MaverickWoe]

Thanks wasml. Sorry, I didn't see your notification. I couldn't get access to the control surface when using the part. It was not accessible from outside.

So, I think I found out and it's much more indirect than I thought.

I have to implement a new class inheriting from ModuleControlSurface.

By doing so, you can overwrite the method CtrlSurfaceUpdate(Vector3 velocity) inside which you have access to the vector ctrlSurface.localRotation

At the game loading, you have to replace all Parts that implement ModuleControlSurface so that they implement this new class instead and now I can now change the angle of the wings at will with my own laws.

So indirect, but finally found out.

[MaverickWoe]

Ah, damnit. Despite the wing being at the right angle. It seems that the aero forces are not following / not taking in account the modified angle. I wonder what I forgot. Do you know if I need to reimplement something so that the angle is taken into consideration ? I thought the rotation would suffice

[MaverickWoe]

Ok, finally found how to udpate the aero forces:

the property "deflection" needs to be updated too as well as forcing aero to recompute by setting alwaysRecomputeLift = true;

ctrlSurface.localRotation only affects the visuals of the part