Space Planes and Vertical Wings

[Drokken]

I’ve been a long time lurker on the forum (0.14 is when I started playing, you decided if that’s a long time), and time and time again I keep seeing space planes that appear to be perfectly balanced (CoL to CoM, asymmetrical ladders etc.) that are prone to “flipping outâ€Â, either just after take off or once they reach high speeds. I think I may have found a reason why…

As we all know “wings and wing parts†create lift. This is good for making space planes not crash (I’ll let you/Jeb decide if that’s a good thing or not). What is also good for not crashing is putting wings in asymmetric pairs, horizontally attached to the fuselage. What is NOT good, it to use a single wing vertically attached to the rear of the craft (like the tail on a traditional aircraft).

The use of a vertical wing will create sideways lift, which is fine if they are used in pairs as they balance each other out. If they are used individually, they create lift only to one side. Now the amount of lift created is not huge, but at high speeds this can easily cause the craft to “flip out†to one side (emphasized with flameouts) causing an uncontrollable terminal descent…

A good way to test this is to just delete all of the horizontal wings on the craft in the SPH (don’t be a fool and save after you have done this... like I did), and have a look at the CoL; if it is pointing sideways at all, then there’s your problem!

So I’ve posted this just to make people aware of this issue, and also to ask if there are any wing mods that don’t create lift? Or if there is an easy way for comptards like myself to edit the preexisting parts to create no lift?

Disclaimer:

I’ve had a good look through, and can’t find anything else about this on the forum, but sorry if there already is a thread about this and I dun derped… Wrist slapping will be accepted…

I’ve not posted much… so apologies if this is in the wrong section… and thanks to the mods if they move it to a more appropriate place...

I can't upload pictures from this computer, but I might do from my home comuputer if some clarification is needed.

[Nao]

The “wings and wing parts†only create lift when they are angled in respect to current velocity vector. (have non zero angle of attack). What SPH shows in your example is direction vector with zero lift value. If you want to find how it will affect the plane in flight try picking up the base part (command pod or something) and rotate it with shift around.

Also if you don't want your ship to flip under yaw, try putting base of the wing closer to the centerline or use two wings that are angled toward CoM like they are on SR-71 Blackbird.