Change to how planes handle?

[KincaidFrankMF]

(Edit: Ignore my comment about planes handling horribly in KSP1 - it turns out I didn't understand how trim works, oops. I'm keeping the thread because a) I think the advice below re. making planes fly well without SAS will help a lot of us, and b) SAS for planes does seem to have changed. When KSP2 dropped, SAS provided an awesome pilot assist which has now vanished. And I do think pilot assist is something the game needs, given how complex it is to get aircraft right...)

Is it just me, or have planes started handling the way they used to in KSP1, i.e., horribly? When KSP2 launched, planes were an absolute joy to fly - it was one of the most obvious improvements between the two games, beyond the graphics. Now they seem to have gone back to being wallowy messes again.

I don't *think* it's just me, but wanted to check if other people are experiencing the same issue? Just in case it's a quirk in my current design (or if I somehow magically hit the right formula in every design I created when KSP2 first dropped).

Edited February 10 by KincaidFrankMF

[Icegrx]

What issues are you having exactly? 
I had some sas wobble, but was able to fix it in the VAB

[shdwlrd]

What problems are you having? The only real issues I have is the lack of lift with horizontal stabilizers. Easy enough work around, just make them bigger. (Sometimes it will destroy the look you're going for though.)

The rest is just KSP being KSP.

[rogerawong]

It would be easier if we had the Wind Tunnel mod in KSP2 to evaluate flight performance before launching a plane.  Without it, it is just frustrating trial and error. 

For example, I hit upon a great design for an SSTO that has a Kerbin takeoff speed of 60 m/s and that theoretically can go to Laythe and back on a single SWERV engine.  But changing the design a bit to make a plane with two SWERV engines results in "You will not go to space today."

A contributing factor to "wallowy"ness is the frame rate.   I basically have to fly my space plane in 1:7th real-time.  Which means controls are sluggish and slow to respond.  If it weren't for the time compression, it would be easier to fly and would feel more responsive. 

[KincaidFrankMF]

5 hours ago, Icegrx said:

What issues are you having exactly? 
I had some sas wobble, but was able to fix it in the VAB

It's the thing with SAS where as soon as you rotate or try to adjust pitch, the plane noses down. You drag the nose up again until the plane is steady... but as soon as you touch the controls again for any reason, the nose collapses. Without SAS, you have to make constant adjustments to pitch to maintain level flight, so either way is an absolute pain. My CoL is fractionally behind CoM and nothing seems weird about the build as far as I can tell.

As I understand it (I'm not exactly an expert, so apologies if I get things wrong), a well-designed plane is supposed to nose down when left to its own devices - it helps you e.g. pull out of a stall if things go wrong. A joystick or control column lets you correct for this easily and without much effort, but a keyboard doesn't. Planes aren't meant to be flown by keyboard - there's no button for "slightly up". So SAS allows you to pitch up slightly to maintain level flight. It just does it really, really badly. Mods used to fix this for KSP1. The release version of KSP2 fixed it too - it was absolutely perfect. Then suddenly it reverted to behaving exactly the way it did back in KSP1. Which is just horrible. Or have I just been doing something wrong all these years? Do planes fly well for everyone else? 

[Icegrx]

42 minutes ago, KincaidFrankMF said:

Planes aren't meant to be flown by keyboard - there's no button for "slightly up".

There is actually! I just learned of this recently. 
Holding down ALT + W,A,S,D will “trim” your control surfaces in that direction.

a well balanced plane will require just a touch of trim to keep the nose pointed up correctly, and allow you to turn off SAS completely, and it’s a game changer. 

sounds like you’re doing the balancing correctly, COL within the COM circle, yet still behind it. 

another thing to note, the closer COL is to the COM the less stable, yet more maneuverable a plane will be. Based on your comments it sounds like you might need to pull your COL back just slightly for a more stable flight. That plus using trim, I think you’ll be golden. 
 

finally I like to ensure my control surfaces for pitch and yaw are biased towards the thrust. Meaning. I like to make the control points bigger in the back towards my engine so that the engine is swinging around more helping the maneuverability and smoothing things out. Any control surfaces towards the nose should be smaller and there to “help” 

Edited February 8 by Icegrx

[KincaidFrankMF]

3 minutes ago, Icegrx said:

There is actually! I just learned of this recently. 
Holding down ALT + W,A,S,D will “trim” your control surfaces in that direction.

Oh holy hell, that does sound like a game changer!! Thank you so much, will try that ASAP 

Wonder why SAS was working so well previously though? It was just brilliant for a while there.

[shdwlrd]

13 minutes ago, KincaidFrankMF said:

Oh holy hell, that does sound like a game changer!! Thank you so much, will try that ASAP 

Wonder why SAS was working so well previously though? It was just brilliant for a while there.

If the SAS was working good for you before, consider yourself lucky. The current SAS has been flaky as hell since release for me.

@Icegrx is correct with his assessment of the situation and how KSP handles planes. I'll add that you need to balance your plane with both full and empty tanks. It's surprising how much your CoM can shift between full and empty tanks. Don't rely on the trim completely. As your speed changes and your plane gets lighter, your trim will need to change. (Alt-X resets your trim) 

Another tip is use the fine controls for twitchy planes. (Fighters and acrobatic planes.) Caps Lock is the toggle for fine controls.

If you want to know all the current keybinds, they are in the KSP2 dev update section of the forum.

[KincaidFrankMF]

10 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

If the SAS was working good for you before, consider yourself lucky. The current SAS has been flaky as hell since release for me.

Well, only for planes lol Patchy elsewhere.

10 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

@Icegrx is correct with his assessment of the situation and how KSP handles planes. I'll add that you need to balance your plane with both full and empty tanks. It's surprising how much your CoM can shift between full and empty tanks. Don't rely on the trim completely. As your speed changes and your plane gets lighter, your trim will need to change. (Alt-X resets your trim) 

Yeah, I'd tried manually tweaking the tailfins before and one setting never worked in all circumstances - being able to alter trim easily on the fly should be a life saver.

Re. fuel tanks, I tend to position them so that half the fuel is stored above CoM and half below, so the balance never changes. Will be interesting to see if I still feel the need to do that after this.

[shdwlrd]

9 hours ago, KincaidFrankMF said:

Well, only for planes lol Patchy elsewhere.

Yeah, I'd tried manually tweaking the tailfins before and one setting never worked in all circumstances - being able to alter trim easily on the fly should be a life saver.

Re. fuel tanks, I tend to position them so that half the fuel is stored above CoM and half below, so the balance never changes. Will be interesting to see if I still feel the need to do that after this.

If you do decide to adjust wing angles, do the main wing only. Adjusting the horizontal stabilizers will only bring grief. 

I primarily use the deploy angle override for trimming my craft. You can get finer control and quicker control inputs compared to using the built-in trim settings. (The over sized PAL window gets annoying while doing this though.)

KSP really needs an auto-trim function for planes. In all reality, all of the control inputs are either too much, too little, or too slow for keyboard flying. It wouldn't hurt if the devs made the whole stabilizer part move when you trim out your craft so you don't lose any control authority or increase the maximum deflection of the control surfaces.

I typically try to keep the fuel tanks around the CoM to minimize the CoM shift. But there are times where you can't to that. (Cough, cargo/passenger planes, cough)