Why is there a conflict of interest at all between realistic and unrealistic aerodynamics?

[Accelerando]

@Levelord

The Super Guppy is the cutest thing ever. Also, the Caproni looks like it's trying to be all like, "GUYS LOOK! I'M A REAL JET NOW GUUUYS"

I'd also love to see KSP designers break out the weird aircraft shapes; our own aircraft don't have to be the norm on another world. Perhaps Kerbal engineering took a different turn, or the needs of Kerbal society turned out different such that tail-sitting XFY Pogo-style interceptors or Vought Flapjack-style circular fighters turned out to be more economical or otherwise left the R&D phase on Kerbin. Just look at this thing:

There is one issue with KSP that I can see hampering this design work, though, and that's the way aircraft are currently built. Building wings out of "modules" is sort of awkward and sometimes mandates a fairly extensive repositioning of modules where a Procedural Wings-style system would just let you adjust points on the wing, in the vein of a vector graphics program. I'd really love for SQUAD to get on it with a more intuitive procedural/tweakable design system for wings and control surfaces in that way, along with other parts.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

Let's see. Making games realistic isn't fun.

Operation Flashpoint was released in 2001. And it was realistic. It modeled bullet physics, and a basic flight model. It modeled fatigue and injury. And it was very fun. Why? Because it had a editor, and mods. To many people, this was the most realistic game ever made. And it was, to a point.

Flash-forward 8 years, and ARMA 2 was released. This was the most realistic game, to the point where a slightly advanced, MORE REALISTIC version was developed by the same company to give to many militaries for training. But the base game was still realistic, adding a semi-real flight model, bullet physics, fatigue, injury and all of that. And it was STILL FUN. Why? Because it was REALISTIC (To a point).

Now, I don't want KSP to become a N-Body, wait 5 years for a perfect launch window, worry about weather game. But, I do want it to have realism. DCS shows what can be achieved with a perfect simulation, and you will see it has a very niche audience. But KSP however, isn't that. It should have shock heating, aerodynamics that make sense, BASIC orbital physics, and that. But it shouldn't be so real that I have to worry about decaying orbits. (In the stock game).

[NathanKell]

Just a note, bit tired of the 'lifting body' canard. Regular fuselages are lifting bodies too, we generally use the term lifting body to mean a craft that doesn't get lift from anything *except* its fuselage, not that it's somehow something totally different. Yes, the fuselage has a bit of a funky shape, but that just makes it somewhat more efficient, not "it produces lift where a regular fuselage does not."

[ShadowZone]

KSP is a game about little green men trying to get into space. So much for realism.

For me, there are to killer features for KSP:

- the first is the accessability... getting a hint of how it must be to fly rockets to other planets.

- the second is the ability to create ludicrous vehicles, things that we know would never be able to lift off in real life.

So... if you add two and two together, you get this: KSP is fun because it simplifies something that in reality would be way more complicated. If the aerodynamics can hit that same sweet spot KSP has found for rocketry, I'm all for it.

Just crying "realism yay/nay" is a little bit short sighted in my opinion.

[klgraham1013]

KSP is a game about little green men trying to get into space. So much for realism.

I hate this retort so much. I started playing because it was the first time I'd heard of a game attempting to simulate orbital mechanics. The little green men and lighthearted feel made the crashes and death less horrendous and generally tolerable. At the games core, though, it was about building ships capable of reaching space and beyond in a realistic manner.

[NonWonderDog]

It sounds to me that you don't like people building planes that don't conform to your views of how a plane should look like rather than an actual concern on the aerodynamics model.

It isn't always about wingspan, and plenty of planes have existed that flew perfectly fine without massive wings (plus they don't even have lifting bodies). I find them retarded, but fascinating to look at because they are real planes that were fully capable of flight.

In FAR, and in real life, long skinny wings have better L/D ratios. That's why sailplanes have long skinny wings.

Fighter jets don't have long skinny wings because long skinny wings are horrible for supersonic flight -- wings don't work correctly when they have shockwaves forming on them. Luckily, the nose makes a conical shockwave that wings can hide behind. Past Mach 1, you want your wings swept backwards to stay within this cone. The higher the Mach number, the steeper the shock cone angle, so faster jets have more sweep (or longer noses).

You can't make swept wings too big, or they'd be structurally weak and the center of lift would be too far back. So you add wing area with a delta wing instead. Delta wings have another nice property in that they can generate lift at very high angles of attack without stalling (lift is roughly proportional to angle of attack). This means that a delta-winged plane can land at slow speeds (lift is proportional to airspeed squared), as long it doesn't mind doing so with the nose 30 degrees above the horizon. But big enough long skinny wings could make just as much lift at 12 degrees angle of attack, and with less drag.

All this is pretty simple, as evidenced in that it can be explained in 10 sentences. But it's enough to understand why the F-14 had mechanized wings, and why Concorde had a droopy nose.

KerikBalm's concern was that if the aerodynamic model was simplified by leaving out the supersonic effects, there would be no reason to use a delta wing. At all. Ever. The best space plane designs would look like sailplanes. And that would be stupid, because everyone knows that space planes don't look like sailplanes.

Most people have heard of the F-14, too, I'd imagine. So they would expect that changing wing geometry actually does something, or else the F-14 wouldn't have big heavy wing actuators. An aerodynamic model where it does nothing would be less fun, if only because you wouldn't try to build swing wings.

Edited January 17, 2015 by NonWonderDog

[rynak]

Besides of the effect on gameplay, there is performance. FAR takes a major chunk out of the FPS. That does not neccessarily imply that FAR is unoptimized - it might very well operate close to optimal efficiency for what it does - but it still is expensive.

On the other hand, SQUAD does not exactly have a track record of optimized implementations. Even with people crashing because of RAM/VRAM shortages, SQUAD happily continues to load duplicates of textures into memory, and adds more duplicates with each new version (though, to be fair, there are some modders that are even worse offenders in this regard - how some of them waste dozens of megabytes for really ridiculous things, is bat**** insane. Nevertheless, the point here is that SQUAD is no saint in terms of optimization either). So, even a simplified aerodynamic model might end up as CPU-heavy as FAR, despite of doing less.

- - - Updated - - -

KerikBalm's concern was that if the aerodynamic model was simplified by leaving out the supersonic effects, there would be no reason to use a delta wing. At all. Ever. The best space plane designs would look like sailplanes. And that would be stupid, because everyone knows that space planes don't look like sailplanes.

It's not just about what to simulate, but also how strongly. Effects that are simulated realistically - i.e. supersonic effects - tend to make plane design much more unstable and fiddly, unless you're familiar with the details and/or constantly check graphs - as opposed to going by common sense. The more of such effects you simulate to a realistic degree, the more this becomes guesswork and feels unpredictable to a "rookie".

However, say you for example do simulate supersonic effects, but make them much less pronounced, then to the less knowledgeable they would become less of an obstacle... you could say it would be more "forgiving" - while at the same time, an optimized plane for supersonic flight still would have benefits compared to an unoptimized one - just less pronounced.

[Levelord]

I highly doubt supersonic effects will suddenly make the game fun. I also doubt the assertion that nobody uses the swept wings ever, it's laughable. People use swept wings all the time in the spacecraft exchange, if not for aerodynamics, it's for aesthetics. On a short note, the Concorde has a droopy node for landing, not for supersonic flight. It droops (drops mechanically) so that the pilots can see the runway when they are coming in for landings. Having a droopy nose in supersonic flight is ludicrous.

Either way if a player doesn't want to use a swept wing, why should that bother you? Does a player playing his singleplayer game somehow make you tingle with rage?

Have you seen spaceplanes in KSP that look like giant flying cardboards? Almost all the planes I've seen on the forums here have at least a delta shaped wingspan and most have emulated real life spacecraft to one degree to another. The idea that we should make an aerodynamics model specifically to influence player's spacecraft design is not a valid reason why we are changing the aerodynamics model in the first place. We need to change the aerodynamics because of the infiniglide bug and because we feel like we are moving through soup, and not because Johnny over there is building planes that I don't like.

[TimePeriod]

Nobody dictates how you choose to play your game.

I for one, will play however I choose.

Regardless of zealots.

[Moar Boosters]

Nobody dictates how you choose to play your game.

I for one, will play however I choose.

Regardless of zealots.

Yup.

If they change the aerodynamics and my stupid craft no longer fly, I'll just stick moar boosters, reaction wheels and struts onto them until they function how I want them do.

[Renegrade]

We need to change the aerodynamics because of the infiniglide bug and because we feel like we are moving through soup,

Those two bits are the meat of my complaint with current aero.

If they could address those, I'd be 70% happy with aero (and 90% having to do with rockets and rocket-planes).. and that's a passing grade.

(the rest of my complaint has to do with jet engines and #lolintake, which is something that can be dealt with separately from actual aero; it's more of an engine balance problem anyhow)

[SorryDave]

I do not believe that fun comes at the expense of realistic, unless fun is not the goal.

SQUAD seems to have the right idea by developing lift and drag models as well as better tools in the SPH. Spaceplane development is not intuitive in either FAR or the current model.

[NonWonderDog]

I highly doubt supersonic effects will suddenly make the game fun. I also doubt the assertion that nobody uses the swept wings ever, it's laughable. People use swept wings all the time in the spacecraft exchange, if not for aerodynamics, it's for aesthetics. On a short note, the Concorde has a droopy node for landing, not for supersonic flight. It droops (drops mechanically) so that the pilots can see the runway when they are coming in for landings. Having a droopy nose in supersonic flight is ludicrous.

Either way if a player doesn't want to use a swept wing, why should that bother you? Does a player playing his singleplayer game somehow make you tingle with rage?

Have you seen spaceplanes in KSP that look like giant flying cardboards? Almost all the planes I've seen on the forums here have at least a delta shaped wingspan and most have emulated real life spacecraft to one degree to another. The idea that we should make an aerodynamics model specifically to influence player's spacecraft design is not a valid reason why we are changing the aerodynamics model in the first place. We need to change the aerodynamics because of the infiniglide bug and because we feel like we are moving through soup, and not because Johnny over there is building planes that I don't like.

The droopy nose is because of the delta wing. Since Concorde has a smallish delta wing, it landed at something like 35 degrees angle of attack (unlike most planes that land at closer to 12 degrees angle of attack). And so it needed a droopy nose for the pilots to see the runway. And it had a delta wing because of supersonic flight.

I thought that could be pretty easily inferred from my post.

It's just that things in real life look the way they do for a reason. I think that "aha" moment when you figure out why they look the way they do is fun, and more fun that just using swept wings because you think they look cool.

Edited January 17, 2015 by NonWonderDog

[klgraham1013]

Nobody dictates how you choose to play your game.

I for one, will play however I choose.

Regardless of zealots.

Imagine how different this statement would be if Squad wasn't so mod friendly.

[TimePeriod]

Imagine how different this statement would be if Squad wasn't so mod friendly.

Mods are the only feature which allows me to play the game how I want to. I don't care what Squad, you or anyone thinks/wants. I want to play the game my way and I'll be damned if I let someone else dictate how I choose to use the game I BOUGHT FOR MY OWN MONEY.

*cough* I think I made myself clear.

[Levelord]

Players make their planes have delta wings because it's a common and simple concept that going faster means that your craft will have to look more streamlined and thin. You don't really need the extra bells and whistles of supersonic physics to tell people that. I'm not going to assume that fellow players are too stupid to not know something this intuitive already.

[KerikBalm]

It sounds to me that you don't like people building planes that don't conform to your views of how a plane should look like rather than an actual concern on the aerodynamics model.

Oh look, a strawman argument!

Did I say I didn't want people to be able to build lifting bodies or fat stubby wings?

No, I did not.

However, I do want a reason to build long skinny wings, other than aesthetics.

In real life, in subsonic flight regimes, higher aspect ratios are more efficient... yet not every plane is going around with 60:1 aspect ratios, because there are other concerns (one large one is the structural strength...)

Also, regarding swept wings, even without mach effects, we should have a reason to use them.

Swept wings are inherently yaw stable. That is why every flying wing has a swept wing.

That is why hang gliders (which I fly) have swept wings... its certainly not mach effects.

[NonWonderDog]

Players make their planes have delta wings because it's a common and simple concept that going faster means that your craft will have to look more streamlined and thin. You don't really need the extra bells and whistles of supersonic physics to tell people that. I'm not going to assume that fellow players are too stupid to not know something this intuitive already.

Isn't that an argument in support of realistic aerodynamics? I want aerodynamics in which craft that go faster need to look more streamlined and thin. That isn't true in the stock aerodynamics, at all. It's only partly true in NEAR (it doesn't apply to wings). It is true in FAR. Physics models that match (correct!) intuitions are good. Physics models that contradict them are bad.

Also, regarding swept wings, even without mach effects, we should have a reason to use them.

Swept wings are inherently yaw stable. That is why every flying wing has a swept wing.

That is why hang gliders (which I fly) have swept wings... its certainly not mach effects.

Well, yeah, but a fuselage also provides yaw stability. But certainly it should make a difference to any Kerbal hang gliders!

Edited January 17, 2015 by NonWonderDog

[Levelord]

You call it a strawman, then you circle around again to dictate how other players should design their planes.

You don't need the game to spoon feed you reasons to build rockets or aircraft. If the game has to spoon feed you reasons to get you to fly a plane/rocket then I have to question why you even bought this game if you're not enjoying launching stuff into space.

Just play the game the way you like it and let SQUAD decide how they want to balance out the aerodynamics when the update arrives. You seem well aware of how your planes should look and perform, so why in the world would you need a reason to apply something you already know into the game? Nothing's stopping you from doing it, just do it!

My stance on this better described by how Geschosskopf describes it,

Most people have a strong tendency to ascribe their own values and motives to everybody else, whether in real life or in games. Now combine this inherent human trait with the type of gamer who measures his self-worth by "beating the game" (however that is defined) on the hardest difficulty, in the shortest time, etc., so he can say "I'm better than you." Because this guy has fun playing this way, he assumes everybody else does, too, so for a while he thinks his accomplishments make him king of the community. But eventually he discovers that other players do things differently. This is a huge blow to his self-esteem, not only because now he can only measure himself against the minority of like-minded players instead of the community as a whole, but also due to the realization that most other players don't even care about his accomplishments.

As a result, this player starts lobbying to change the game, to force everybody to play his way. Part of this is sheer egoism, so everybody else will have to take notice of him and he can feel genuinely superior. And part of it is the misguided belief that it's for the good of the other players, whom he thinks would have more fun if they played his way; if they won't do so voluntarily, he'll make it so they don't have a choice.

When SQUAD rolls out the aero update I'll be happy with what they do. I'm not interested in facetious reasoning to make others conform to a single aircraft design. I enjoy seeing other people's crazy aircraft designs as well as those who choose to go the ultra realistic route.

- - - Updated - - -

Isn't that an argument in support of realistic aerodynamics? I want aerodynamics in which craft that go faster need to look more streamlined and thin. That isn't true in the stock aerodynamics, at all. It's only partly true in NEAR (it doesn't apply to wings). It is true in FAR. Physics models that match (correct!) intuitions are good. Physics models that contradict them are bad.

I never said I didn't support realistic aerodynamics, just the reasoning that others have used to get to that conclusion is wrong. I've been maintaining the stance that it's best left to SQUAD to decide how to balance the aerodynamics. I'm not prepared to tell other people how they should be enjoying the game because of demands made by a crowd that, for all I know could simply be a vocal minority.

If the aero is made realistic and everybody likes it, then yay let's rejoice. But if the aero is preventing a lot of people from having fun, then I won't hesitate to have it removed. The important thing I want to express is the balance between plausibility and fun and how it's impossible objectively tell people that it's 'fun' and 'that it's for their own good' since fun is a subjective matter.

What I said previously is a response to the statement that the supersonic model is needed to force players to design their planes a certain way. I'm arguing that people aren't stupid and intuitively know that planes need to be streamlined to go fast, so some make conventional designs while others chose to make crazy designs anyway. I don't fault them for that and I'm not going to tell them that they aren't allowed to do in their own games.

It's much like how I don't consider intake stacking or clipping as 'cheating' in the single player game. I think people should be free to mess around however they like. It only becomes relevant when we are comparing crafts for competitions or perhaps multiplayer where things need to be normalized.

Edited January 17, 2015 by Levelord

[NathanKell]

Yeah, I think KSP should default to 100m/s to orbit. If you design a larger rocket, as real life tells you you need, that's enough; why should the game force you to do so!? I don't need the game to spoonfeed me reasons to make large rockets.

Yeah, all engines can develop the same thrust, and we can use bigger engines just for aesthetics. We don't need to be spoonfed reasons to use Mainsails.

...but of course that's ludicrous: the game does all sorts of things to make you design craft of a certain type, using certain parts. I mean, engines have different roles (even with different sizes, they could all share the same Isp and TWR...but they don't), why shouldn't wings?

[klgraham1013]

snip

It almost seems as though you're saying, you're not sure your qualified on the matter, so whatever Squad does is fine. I'm not completely against this, except, then you seem to be criticizing people for having an opinion on the matter. Which we are allowed to have, and expressing that said opinion can be valuable criticism for Squad to consider.

[Levelord]

That's pretty much it. I don't feel entitled to tell SQUAD how to run their game (unless there is a very obvious game breaking flaw) and neither do other people since most of us aren't video game developers. Being here on the forums long enough I've come to the conclusion that a lot of players here often don't have a clue what they actually want in the game, and know/care less about what other people want in the game either. I just feel that most of the opinions here for realism seems to stem from a more selfish need to mold the game to their own specific view of their modded game, without regard for if it actually make the game more enjoyable or tedious for others.

SQUAD so far has a very good track record at progressing the game and making the majority of us happy with what they've included, so I'm quite comfortable placing my trust in them to keep the game going in their image.

Edited January 18, 2015 by Levelord

[SaturnV]

I‘ve though about this for days, then I found that what I concern most is performance.

So I would like to see a simple aerodynamic system that won‘t drop my FPS too hard.

[tater]

I want physics to tell me what I can build. Strike that, I can build anything, anyway. I want physics to tell me if it gets to orbit, or explodes.

[Higgs]

The droopy nose is because of the delta wing. <snipping rest>

The droopy nose has NOTHING to do with the delta wing of concorde. I found a picture of a view from the Concorde's Cockpit with the nose in the "droop" position. Not exactly a picture window view. The nose of the Concorde is exceptionally long and pointed. It has to be, as you did point out, Concorde was capable of supersonic flight, and the nose needed to elongated and pointed to cope with 1400+ MPH speeds. Take a look at the view:

Like I said, this isnt because of the wing. its because the engineers had to compromise with the aircraft and flight crews needs while actually on the ground or coming in on final approach. They could have chosen to NOT do this, but, then, you would have had a LONG aircraft with almost NO visibility, and absolutely NONE for about 15 feet from that window out ahead of the aircraft.

Edited January 18, 2015 by Higgs