Need some examples of FAR-capable space plane with forward-swept wings

[RainDreamer]

I am looking into some fancier designs of space planes and forward swept wings really strikes me as one of the fanciest designs. So now I want to check how I can possibly achieve that in KSP, and I want to see some examples of those who did manage to do that.

If possible, can someone also explain how the plane perform with such wings?

Edited January 16, 2015 by RainDreamer

[Van Disaster]

And a couple of larger ones:

The main reason for forward sweep with those was to get the wingtip engines at the CoM and still have a short chord. The cockpit balances the rear engines, there's equal fuel at either end and the CoM & CoL end up right in the centre of the cargo bay all the time. Admittedly the largest one has crept a bit off-centre but that had some fuselage cut in later.

This was just to have a daft wing, though...

The main real life benefits of forward sweep are the fuselage acting as a dam for air coming down the span so there's no drag inducing vortices, and the root stalling first instead of the tip. As far as I'm aware FAR doesn't model spanwise flow, but these aircraft are certainly tame in a stall - mind you with a canard layout I try & get the canard to stall first anyway.

Edited January 12, 2015 by Van Disaster

[eddiew]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1650498&viewfull=1#post1650498

Naturally Wanderfound has a few models

[RainDreamer]

Huh, Wanderfound has forward swept wing with forward control surface too. That is interesting. And nice planes, Van Disaster!

[Van Disaster]

Yeah, that daft UAV-ish thing rotates the entire end of the wings for roll control, somewhat forward of CoL - theoretically if I could stop it confusing the game I should be able to fly it in either direction ( front is the right hand side in normal flight ).

Forward sweep has some slightly unusual characteristics in sideslip - the craft will tend to roll into the slip because the outer wing is more face on to the airflow, rather than self-correcting like more conventional aircraft. The little winglets at the span tips go a long way to correcting that as well as providing a bit more directional stability. Those are the sort of things you tweak to attempt to get all your static stability derivatives green in FAR's diagnostics panel.

Random front-ish view to show the sort of angle they're at:

To be honest I'm not sure if little tweaks like that are curing real world conditions or just making FAR happy, but making FAR happy is a good thing regardless...