Die Schwalbe (an experiment)

[busted]

Hi everyone,

the last weeks i had an awesome time playing KSP, and thought I'd share how the game won my heart.

Soo... the other day I was parachuting down to the surface of Eve with a plane that had radial decouplers. I knew that they have quite a bit of flex, but I was surprised when I got the whole thing to oscillate and flap arround. I could actually swim arround in the atmosphere using W and S and choose my favourite place to land.

After that I experimented with the decouplers back on Kerbin and built "Die Schwalbe" (sorry, but that's its name ):

Here is a video of me taking it for a flight:

(It's a bit sped up so you don't have to endure the lag)

So my thoughts are that flapping the wings probably isn't be the most efficient way of flying, because you are off prograde a lot, but you get a lot of change in momentum if you control it right. Gliding works pretty good however, you can hold altitude with a 10-20% thrust of the aerospike and can land it without any fuel (it is quite tricky though, i smash my wing tips a lot).

If you wanna try it yourself, here it is:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2929681/Die%20Schwalbe.craft

Happy for your thoughts on this

[musketeer]

Lots of fuel, and the flapping looks nice.