How do you fly planes in NEAR/FAR?

[RizzoTheRat]

Do most people use joysticks or keyboards? SAS on or off?

I thought I'd give FAR a go as I'm starting to get the hang of planes in the stock game and figured I should have a go at doing it properly. However I can't manage to keep anything in the air. I've downloaded Wanderfounds Kerbodyne Evangelist from here http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread/page11 on the assumption that I was building unstable aircraft,but I'm not much better with them.

With the keyboard I find all movements are really jerky and unsettle the aircraft so it's quite easy to lose control, and SAS spends ages flapping the controls around trying to fly in a straight line. If I turn SAS off I fall out of the sky in a matter of seconds.

With a joystick I can keep it in the air in something approaching straight and level flight without SAS, but no hope of doing much maneuvering. With SAS on it's not too bad but still fairly easy to lose control and I find having to moving the camera angle with my left hand a pain. Chase cam doesn't real help either, especially when the plane's porpoising about.

[Kerboman]

For me, I design my planes using Pwings to get a perfect CoL-CoM balance, then give it just enough control authority to fly well and take off easily. Also, DCA is your friend. My more stable designs can fly with SAS on or off, but trim is also very good for unstable aircraft.

[Klingon Admiral]

Keyboard, SAS on, although I should probably hook up my ancient joystick, because analog controls aren't great at all.

[wasmic]

I play FAR with keyboard controls, SAS on. Maybe your CoL is too far forwards? That will both make your plane more maneuverable but also less stable. Maybe you should try with less control surfaces?

[Wanderfound]

Another keyboard flyer here.

Controls: tap, never hold unless you need absolute maximum pull.

You've got three control settings: normal, precise and trim. Most of the time you should be using normal (after trimming for level flight), controlling the turn by altering the rate of your taps. If the situation is so extreme that this will break your wings, hit Ctrl to engage precise controls and keep tapping. Holding down a button with precise controls on gets you just as much turn as without precise control, just a bit slower, so don't do it.

If even precise controls are breaking your wings, use trim. Alt-up or whatever and again, tap tap tap. In all cases, watch the G-meter more than the nav ball. When it approaches dangerous levels, stop tapping and wait for it to settle. Aim to keep it steady rather than surge and plunge.

[merendel]

I'd respond to the topic with "Very Very Carefully" I prety much fly all mine with the keyboard, the joystick I have is too twitchy on its deadzone to be useful for fine controll (have to make DZ really big for it to not start sending spaz inputs) I generaly have to be very careful to get the COL/COM right to avoid flipouts. My more stable craft can fly with SAS on but most of the time I do SAS off and use trim (mod+direction) to adjust how it flys. SAS overrides trim and zero's it out so you cant use them togeather. For example on windows if you have a plane that likes to nose down slightly hold alt and tap D till it holds itself level. Alt X resets the trim if you mess something up badly such as seting roll trim causeing you to barrel roll.

[Wanderfound]

However, also: the current release of FAR has massively increased both wing strength and weight. This means that small aerobatic things are much easier to build and fly, but large cargo stuff is much harder to construct and tricky at high altitude.

There may be a patch in the works to make the strength/weight tradeoff a tweakable.

[Alshain]

You've got three control settings: normal, precise and trim. Most of the time you should be using normal (after trimming for level flight), controlling the turn by altering the rate of your taps. If the situation is so extreme that this will break your wings, hit Ctrl to engage precise controls and keep tapping. Holding down a button with precise controls on gets you just as much turn as without precise control, just a bit slower, so don't do it.

Tab in Windows, Ctrl is throttle.

I use NEAR and the keyboard and use SAS when ascending an SSTO, but usually fly atmospheric planes without it.

Edited October 10, 2014 by Alshain

[SkyRender]

Here are my top tips for building spaceplanes with FAR installed.

1. The stock fundamentals do still apply: CoM slightly ahead of CoL, fuel drain balanced so CoM does not shift, enough intakes per engine to actually reach a decent altitude.

2. Make sure you have enough wings! 2 delta wings and a pair of connector wings are not gonna cut it for a 50T payload, even if they totally will in stock.

3. Aim for a TWR of 1.2 to 1.5. That seems to be the sweet spot for whatever reason.

4. Make sure you toggle flap controls appropriately! Tailfins should only control yaw, outer elevons should only adjust pitch, and inner control surfaces can handle both pitch and roll (though you may want to disable roll and just use reaction wheels/capsule torque for that).

5. Set up your landing gear appropriately: rear wheels should be behind CoM and about 50 to 75% of the way between wingtips and center of plane, front wheel(s) should be fairly far forward and as near to the center as possible (for single-front-wheel configuration) or also 50 to 75% from the center vs. wingtips (for double-front-wheel configuration). If your rear gear is too close in relative to the size of your spaceplane, it will induce a pendulum effect (ie. your plane will rock back and forth as it goes down the runway and flip itself over).

6. Struts! I cannot stress enough how important it is to strut spaceplanes. Floppy wings are dangerous wings in FAR.

Edited October 10, 2014 by SkyRender

[Empiro]

After takeoff, I don't use SAS until I switch to rocket motors and pitch up to burn out of the atmosphere.

I like using the FAR flight assist for Level and Yaw. For controlling pitch, after takeoff I almost completely rely on trim settings. I find that this gives me much more precise control and lets me control my ascent very carefully to maximize both altitude and forward velocity before switching to rocket motors. For small heading corrections, I lightly tap the Q/E keys to roll slightly and let the auto-level level itself out.

I do pretty much the same during landing. Using trim lets me maintain a nice even glide slope without too much effort.

[Taki117]

the real trick with FAR is to design it like a real aircraft. Keep you CoL and CoM oriented and it should fly just fine. I personally use keyboard and SAS, but i don't need SAS to fly, i just like having it to keep my plane oriented at the AoA i want.

[Voculus]

I never go anywhere without my flightstick. For spaceplane flights or VTOL craft, I use SAS most of the time. It gets turned off for takeoff, landing, and any kind of drastic maneuvering. I've read about a lot of people having issues with peripherals, thanks to Unity, so I'm grateful I've never had any issues. What I would really love, is to be able to map trim controls to the trim hat on the stick.

[Vlk]

I dont know, something broke for me in 0.25. I installed the latest FAR, but all my previous planes are unusable now above 15km, even after adjusting the CoL. And they fly much different in low altitude too. They are a lot slower, air drag feels huge. For me, when i first installed FAR, there was no problem at all, flying just became more fun. Ok, maybe it was harder to loose velocity when landing, but i just needed more space for that and it was good. But now...

[Wanderfound]

I dont know, something broke for me in 0.25. I installed the latest FAR, but all my previous planes are unusable now above 15km, even after adjusting the CoL. And they fly much different in low altitude too. They are a lot slower, air drag feels huge. For me, when i first installed FAR, there was no problem at all, flying just became more fun. Ok, maybe it was harder to loose velocity when landing, but i just needed more space for that and it was good. But now...

FAR is having some issues. Wait for the next release.

[Tex_NL]

One important FAR/NEAR feature to keep your eye on is stall. Especially when it comes to canard wings. If your nose keeps dropping and you continuously have to pitch up in an attempt to maintain level flight you might be tempted to increase the max deflection of the canards. Contrary of what you might think you should instead reduce the max deflection.

What happens when you pitch up hard is your canards will stall and loose lift, dropping the nose. To compensate you'll have to pitch up even harder causing even more canard stall and loosing even more lift. With a reduced max deflection angle it might take a few seconds longer to pitch up but you will not stall as quickly and you'll keep the nose up a lot easier.

[O-Doc]

I've just started using FAR. Tappy tap tapping my to orbit!

Two things you are going to keep in mind with your design. Make sure you have a decent control surface to wing ratio(EDIT: not too much control surface) or you can throw yourself into a stall very easily. I prefer this behaviour but it's not so good for rank beginners. The second piece of advice is to make sure you have enough wing to deflect your aircraft direction when turning. If you don't have enough wing you either won't turn or you will stall out, most likely you will do both.

FAR is having some issues. Wait for the next release.

Is this wing weigh related or is the CoM/CoL moving around in a buggy way. Because, I've been getting CoM/CoL all over the shop each time I load the identical craft. I'v ended up ignoring it and designing my craft the way I do in real life. Guesstimation and flight testing.

Edited October 11, 2014 by O-Doc