FAR: What is a good plane?

[Enigma179]

So I've been using Ferram Aerospace Research for a little while and designing a plane, but I'd just like to know, and not just for space plane, how do you know if your design works? For example, my plane will stall if I pitch too far up without reactivating ASAS, because it will generate too much lift and end up flipping end over end into a stall, but I can't tell if that's because the plane is poorly designed, or because I made a piloting mistake. After all, oversteering any rocket or plane will result in bad stuff happening no matter how well designed it is.

Essentially I'm asking how do you tell whether the plane is good or not, whether you need to improve the design or the piloting, and if so how to improve the design?

Example craft files would be nice, and here is my shockingly unoriginally named jet I talked about. It's all stock, for use with FAR.

[longhornchris]

Well, I can't give you everything, but here's a few general tips.

1: Center of lift behind but not too far behind your center of mass. This is important as if the COL is in front of the COM the aircraft will be unstable. If your COL is too far back from your COM then you won't have enough pitch authority to take off.

2: Its probably worth grabbing at least the landing gear out of Taverios' Pizza and Aerospace part package. The larger gear makes it easier to get off the ground without tail strikes.

3: Place your main (rear) gear far enough forward that you can actually pitch the aircraft up. If your landing gear is too far back you can't takeoff... if its too far forward then you risk tail strikes. Also, I've found that removing the nose gear from the braking action group will prevent the aircraft from pitching over the nose when landing or throttling up while braking.

4: The bulk of your mass will be fuel tanks, engines, and the cockpit. Build your fuselage & engines w/o wings first. If at all possible have an equal amount of fuel ahead and behind your COM so it doesn't move to much during flight. For spaceplanes I've found that 3-1 ratio of rocket tanks (fuel + ox) to jet fuel tanks (just fuel) gets me to space w/ enough jet fuel in reserve to have a powered landing. This does require having enough total fuel to get to space and move around.

5: TAC fuel balancer is almost necessary for space planes. Default fuel drain goes front to back, so w/o the fuel balancer you risk going unstable

6: Avoid having mixed control surfaces - have elevators for pitch on canards or a horizontal tailplane, a rudder on the vertical tailplane for yaw, and ailerons at the edge of your wings for roll. Adjust the max deflections to keep from stalling.

7: Read the help file for the graphs and stability derivatives - this explains what the terms and plots mean and how they should trend. Play around with the flight conditions. Also, remember when adjusting stability derivatives it is possible to create 'nonsensical' flight conditions like high mach #, low actual velocity conditions where the derivatives won't make sense.

8: FAR makes KSP more realistic - so start with designs that look like real airplanes. You should have success with something that looks like an F-16.

[espm400]

Longhornchris puts pretty much all the good points down. I really don't have any more to add except a few example crafts based on real world aircraft (most are from .20 and I haven't imported them into .21 yet).

(also note, all of these require, at the very least, B9 Aerospace):

First, a couple of CoM v. CoL pics, just as an example.

XB-70 (with moving wingtips

A bunch of real-world fighters (more or less faithfully re-created):

My personal favorite (centre plane in the previous pic), the F-15 MTD/ACTIVE. The most maneuverable plane I've ever built: