Runway Swerves: The Scourge Of Jet Builders

[shoveycat]

I'm sure its happened to you, you made your perfectly, 100% symmetrical jet, and for no reason at all, right when you hit that space bar, it go swerving off the runway and slams into the ground, if anyone knows how to fix or deal with this bug, me and many others would be very appreciative

[allmhuran]

The three most common causes of this:

1) Rear landing gear is not perfectly straight. This can occur if you are attaching landing gear to wings, or to parts connected to wings. Some wings, like the large delta or swept wing, result in surface attachment that is not perfectly aligned with the fuselage. It is, in fact, less than 5 degrees out, which means there is no way to get it them perfectly aligned. The best solution to this is to add a second layer using structural wings, and attaching gear to that, since the structural wing attachment will be perfectly aligned.

2) Too much weight on the front landing gear. In this situation your landing gear is OK, but when you get rolling the weight on the front landing gear causes it to flex out of alignment. To solve this, begin providing pitch-up input shortly after you start rolling to take weight off the forward gear.

3) Too much overall weight. This occurs when you have too few landing gear parts for the weight of the vessel, and particularly when your landing gear is not attached directly to the fuselage, but instead to parts that can flex. Once again, the flex of the vessel causes the landing gear to lose alignment. The solution to this is either, or both, of the following:

1) Make sure your landing gear is directly under the heavy parts of the craft. For example, if you were building an SR71 replica, make sure that the two huge engine sections on the wings have landing gear directly below them.

2) Add more landing gear to distribute the weight.

[Mirai The Kerbonaut]

Try putting the landing gears on the wings that should help if not try a different design this happen to me alot when i was a newb

[arq]

If this happens, remove the wheels and put them back with angle-locking disabled. This fixes most of the weird effects that happen when attaching wheels to wings or other awkward surfaces.