Some tips to make your airplane experience more enjoyable

[milosh]

When flying a plane with default settings, the SAS will be all over the place when making just a small input, flaps are going crazy and even with just a short key press to roll or pitch, it will often go too far and you have to correct back, which goes too far and you have to correct back, and so on...

But there's a simple solution to this: right click on the wing, click on advanced controls and lower the authority limiter. The default is 30 but you can easily bring it down to 15 for a smooth flying experience that feels more like a real plane to fly. If you feel that the reaction of the plane is too slow, increase it slightly, on my acrobat jet I've set it to 22. This can be set permanently in the VAB or temporary during flight.

To prevent nose planting your plane while breaking after landing: right click on the front wheel and set Breaking Power to 0.

Lastly, always disable stearing on the rear wheels, makes it much more easy to hold course during take off.

Hope this helps

Edited March 2, 2023 by milosh

[Chilkoot]

These are great tips.  Unfortunately, I have no more thumbs left today

[Fernir]

One better trick is not to use SAS for atmospheric flight at all because it is terrible at it. Use trim instead Alt-WASDQE to adjust axes and Alt-X to reset.  Also Precision controls activated with CapsLock is your friend especially for larger aircraft and precision maneuvering.

[K^2]

Yeah, the rules for building airplanes are an odd mix of these for early KSP, late KSP, and some that are completely new.

One more thing that I wanted to point out, which goes for both KSP and KSP2, is that I keep seeing people place all landing gear far away from the CoM and then struggle to take off. Don't make it harder for your plane to leave the runway than it needs to be. Roughly, for weight and balance, I follow these steps before finalizing design for the plane.

1. Enable the Center of Mass and Center of Pressure overlays.
2. Make sure that the fuel is balanced around the Center of mass. To check, empty all tanks and make sure CoM stays put. If it shifts forward, less of your fuel needs to be in the back, etc.
3. Make sure that the center of pressure is very close to the CoM. The spheres have to be at least touching, better of CoP is inside the CoM sphere, with CoP slightly behind or slightly above the CoM.
4. Make sure your rear most landing gear is only slightly behind the CoM. You can move the forward gear as far forward as you like for stability, but rear landing gear is your pivot for takeoff. It has to be close.
5. Make sure that the front landing gear is slightly lower, giving your airplane a very slight nose-up attitude.

Do all of the above, and you'll have the plane that rolls neatly into the rotation off the runway, is easy to fly, will stay stable even as the fuel is consumed, and will glide to a safe landing just as easily as it takes off.

[Periple]

I'll add one more: in Advanced Controls, make sure that each control surface only controls one axis: wingtip ailerons -- roll, tailplane/canards -- pitch, rudder -- yaw. If you leave more axes enabled you'll get a much more wobbly experience.

[Sequence]

Make sure your wings are set only to roll and put them in line with your CoM. It will help prevent unwanted pitching when rolling. 

Put yaw and pitch control surfaces as far away from CoM as possible to increase their effectiveness.

Have your wings in a very slight Y shape so your CoL is slightly above your CoM, it will aid in flight stability.

Wing shape is important. For subsonic speeds narrow wings with a long wingspan are the best for lift. But you want a delta shape for supersonic flight stability (not sure how important this is in KSP2 currently). 

Edit:

Keep CoT in line with CoM so you don't pitch whilst under thrust 

 

Edited March 3, 2023 by Sequence