Folding Fins

[peadar1987]

Sometimes, I need to launch large payloads destined for Laythe, Dune, or Eve that need large control surfaces in order to operate properly.

At the moment, it's pretty horrible trying to get things into orbit with a load of wings and stuff right at the top of my rocket, things tend to get pretty tumbly quite fast.

I'd love to see a few folding wings and control surfaces that can be retracted for launch, then extended when you need them.

[cziken20]

The only way to do this now that i know is to get the mod called infernal robotics and fold it in some interesting way.

[Nuke]

ive considered doing some wing animations for things like flaps and stuff, i dont see why the wing cant telescope or something, then scale the collider as part of the animation. assuming the collider is used for aerodynamic calculations.

makes me think of something like what is used on cruise missiles (remember the lets nuke the aliens scene from id4). you have a fuselage section with a wing that is rotated 90 degrees for stowage, and rotates out for flight. if the wings also fold at the midpoint between root and tip, you can fit a wing with a span 4x the length of the fuselage section. couple problems though first off i havent figured out how to put more than one control surface on a wing without moving them as one piece, i would need 2 independent ailerons for this to work. also the alerons need to move with the rotating wing segment. setting up the hierarchy in unity is easy, but im not sure the game would respect it. the wahy the game handles wings doesn't seem to be very versatile.

as a stock part something like that would be great.

Edited March 6, 2014 by Nuke