Landing with Ferram.

[Dizzle]

I installed Ferram for the first time since .20, and honestly, I don't see how it's even possible to land. There seems to be no drag whatsoever, and the only way to slow down enough to touch down at the island runway (my trial for new planes) is to idle the engine long before getting there. It stalls and drops like a rock long before it reaches a slow enough speed to touch down.

Any help is much appreciated.

Edited December 19, 2013 by Dizzle

[Taki117]

have you tried flareing? The whole point of the maneuver is to kill horizontal velocity before landing. You could also install Realchute which has a nice drag chute for just that purpose.

[ferram4]

You should be landing at ~70 m/s. Take the plane in on a shallow glide slope, ~3-5 degrees. Keep the angle of attack low, you don't need as high angle of attack as you're used to. Smaller control inputs, not big sudden movements.

Don't start off flying planes with canards, the canards stall easily during landing. Use traditional tail designs for pitch control.

[Hodo]

Landing with FAR is much like real life. You have to find your stall speed and land just a hair faster than that.

The best way to find out what your landing speed is, is to take your take off speed, the speed at which your plane actually leaves the ground and subtract 5m/s. This is a pretty safe number to start at and work your way down from there.

Really aerodynamic craft, that dont produce much drag have problems with stopping, so this is why I use flaps and airbrakes as much as possible for my "slick" craft. You may also have a REALLY high power to weight ratio making it difficult to find that engine balance point for landing. I had this problem with one of my Mach 6 aircraft, it would not slow down quickly for landing, so I would start my landing approach over the ocean to the west of KSC and idle the engine until I hit the mountain range west of KSC, then go one tick on the throttle till final approach. Then I would glide it in from there. And even then it's landing speed was around 200m/s.

[Dizzle]

I do flare before landing, but it's not much use when I can't seem to come in below 130 m/s.

[Hodo]

I do flare before landing, but it's not much use when I can't seem to come in below 130 m/s.

I land at about that speed on some of my craft. It isn't that bad.

[arq]

Try making planes with bigger wings to learn. You are complaining that your plane stalls before you can get it slow enough, which would be alleviated by bigger wings. It's easiest to land below 50m/s and very difficult above 80m/s, in my experience.

[ferram4]

I think you're too used to how suddenly drag slows you down when you come of the throttle in stock KSP. The stock drag is about 2-5 times as high as it should be, and you need to account for this. Stop being overly aggressive during your landings and take the time to slow down.

[Dizzle]

Thanks guys, I think I've got it. Like you said, my landings were too aggressive, I think I just needed to idle the engines earlier on. I was able to land one of the FAR stock planes, at least.