Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. This aircraft can takeoff at just above 50 m/s and can glide for a few minutes without engine. For an example, see the A-10 Warthog's landing gears: link. It's said that takeoffs are optional but landings are mandatory. And above all: have fun! Now for the engines. mods used are OPT for most of the body and the front canards and tail plane, B9 procedural wings for the wings, and mk4 spaceplane parts for the engines. Obviously jet engines are air-breathing, so you need to include air intakes in your spaceplane. Having said all that, these are the issues you must contend with. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, make sure to use struts when placing landing gears on the far edges of a multi-part wing because they may sag enough to cause a fuselage collision with the runway during landing. How wide is the base. It is due to the spinning up of the engines. Note that no wings will tolerate more than 2400K, so the difference in temperature tolerance between Mk2 and Mk3 fuselages isn't terribly significant. Keep your spaceplane pointed about 90 degrees above prograde so that the wings and body of your aircraft slow you down as much as possible. if mounted on not struted part). This plane will be able to take off, travel somewhere, perform a crew report, and then land. You could do it the kerbal way by attaching two SRBs to the nose of the plane pointing upwards. I removed them and it works fine now. Tips aplenty in this thread: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/13851-The-woes-of-building-a-space-plane?highlight=woes+spaceplane It taught me everything I know, except for the stuff I learned elsewhere. This makes design easier, eliminating all concern for balancing jet fuel against rocket fuel. I don't have any mods but sometimes a problem may be a simple bug. The rudder is mostly used when landing and when attempting to line up a shot (in a fighter plane). Depending on which surface you place them on, they might not be parallel to the axis in which case. The default max stress value is just ridiculous, its like flying in hair gel, everything gets torn apart so easily, like that will ever happen in real life. Even with a stable landing, you may find that you don't have enough room on your desired landing area to come to a stop before you reach the end. my center of lift is always slightly infront of my mass. And at the extreme, producing down force, which I'm sure would cause more gear issues. Rapiers generally provide less thrust than a Whiplash at speeds below mach 2, but provide more thrust at higher speeds. You can also use parachutes on landing, but care must be taken to ensure that an adequate length of runway remains since you'll only get one chance to use them. Because of how small Kerbin is and how high its gravity is, a perfectly flat surface just north of the equator will cause planes taking off to bias to the right of the runway, as if they were rolling downhill. Drive gently off the runway and use the huge grassy field to take off, without care in the world about the plane veering to a side. Nothing bad will happen. Landing is hard. everytime i make a powered plane, it always flips over and points backwards after i take off. For a Mk1-based aircraft, your rear landing gears should not be tightly tucked together on the fuselage. I see absolutely no need to be traveling that fast down the runway. Because of how small Kerbin is and how high its gravity is, a perfectly flat surface just north of the equator will cause planes taking off to bias to the right of the runway, as if they were rolling downhill. Display as a link instead, The reverse also happens. If you can maintain level flight at about 30-40 m/s, you should be able to perform an ocean landing if needed. Does anybidy have any tips on how to build spaceplanes? For all your gaming related, space exploration needs. Keep at around 15 degrees to allow the plane to accelerate past 1000m/s. Elevators are usually places in the front or back of an aircraft, and their function, as the name implies, is to change the pitch of the nose up and down. Also, excessive use of the rudder usually causes the plane to spin out of control and crash. When your nose is stable at about 10 degrees above the horizon, pull up hard and keep it pulled. 3. make sure your center of mass is slightly in front of center of lift force. Geometric shape of the body you attach the landing gear to. After a successful touchdown, high-speed motion on the runway (let alone uneven ground) can be unstable, causing the aircraft to careen to one side or the other, potentially resulting in loss of a wing and sometimes the entire aircraft. Landing speed (minimum speed for level flight) can be reduced by adding components to increase maneuverability, by using larger wings, by increasing wing angle of attack on the fuselage (3-5 degrees is the recommended range for a spaceplane to achieve the best lift-to-drag ratio [source]), and by decreasing the weight of the aircraft. The only drawback to the reduced friction is reduced steering control, so this setting may need to be adjusted when taxiing to/from a runway, but should otherwise be kept minimal for takeoff and landing. The problem could be due to several issues. The tutorial below explains everything very well. This is also the same reason why planes start rolling toward the middle of the runway; because both ends of the runway are further from the center of Kerbin than the middle (because it's totally flat), the runway is a valley from a gravitational frame of reference. Heavy Cargo Space Plane SSTO Download. I just thought my planes were too heavy or not enough control surfaces. (However, it must be noted that it is bad practice to use ailerons as elevators since it makes it hard to control the aircraft), The rudder moves the tip of the plane left and right; it is rarely used, since it is hard to put it both up and down due to the possibility of hitting the ground. To maximize lift, your aircraft should rest on the ground with the fuselage tilted upward at anywhere up to a 25-27 angle so that the wings will end up tilted back at up to 30. An active front brake can cause your aircraft to rapidly and uncontrollably pivot left or right during landing, and high friction from the front wheel can potentially cause your plane to swerve violently both in landing and takeoff. The same principle applies here. FOX 56 News Video More Videos If you can't slow down in time, you can simply flick your engines back on to take off and turn around for another try as you pass over the coast. my planes keep flipping backwards on take off . This helped immensely and if you haven't been doing this already, do it. If you pull up and cause the tailwheel etiher to hit the ground if it was already up or push it into the ground if it was still in contact, you will create bounciness. It provides a wider, more stable wheel base while keeping the wheels straight up and down (no camber). First of all, since the launch happens horizontally, you will have to include landing gears, and you will most likely want to include jet engines for the first stage for excellent fuel and cost efficiency. T-1 "Dart" engines are unique amongst conventionally-fuelled rocket engines: They have close to the highest efficiency in both vacuum and low atmosphere. If you use an Advanced SAS, and raise your front landing wheel so that it is higher than the rear wheels, by just turning the SAS on and going full throttle, due to the 10 degree angle of the plane, it should eventually take off by itself. And, of course, try to take off and land as slow as possible. As long as you're in space, your spaceplane won't differ from any spacecraft: you will probably want to add batteries and generators to prevent the command pod from running out of power. As you would expect, spaceplanes need wings: they have various shapes and dimensions, and they differ basically in lift rating: you will want to have enough lift to keep your fuselage approximately prograde during your ascent to orbit. You want to start by attaching a Mk 0 Liquid Fuel Tank under the wings, making sure you're mirrored so it goes under both wings. At around . It doesn't really matter if you angle them or not, there is not a single configuration for the wheels that can work on all plane parts. A Mk1 Cockpit, two Mk 1 Liquid Fuel Tanks, and then cap the back with a round nose cone (use the A/D keys to rotate it as necessary). A FedEx cargo plane in Austin nearly landed on a runway where a Southwest flight was preparing to take off. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. Wow, if you need 200 m\s to take off, you should think about adding more lift. Paste as plain text instead, Everything looks perfectly symmetrical as far as I can tell. Powered by Invision Community. mods used are OPT for most of the body and the front canards and tail plane, B9 procedural wings for the wings, and mk4 . To survive re-entry, it's recommended to start your approach back into the atmosphere at a shallow angle, ideally with a periapsis of around 30-35 km. If your aircraft is burning up during this stage, you may need larger wings to slow you down faster, radiator panels to carry away the heat more effectively, parts with a higher temperature tolerance (like the Mk2 liquid fuel fuselage instead of the Mk1 liquid fuel fuselage), or parts to increase your maneuverability, like RCS thrusters, reaction wheels, or canards and elevons. Although I usually only need 50 m/s for most planes to wobble out of control. Keep your nose pointed prograde as you descend through the atmosphere. These occur at their worst when your center of gravity is far ahead of your rear landing gears and you have a heavy plane at high speeds and a high angle of attack on landing, resulting in your front landing gear rapidly striking the runway after your rear landing gears touchdown. Just after having taken off, the plane will immediately start rolling to the right, and completely uncontrollably. * Unlock steering and disable brakes on front gear. They sometimes coincide with elevators. if mounted on not struted part) 2. put your main gear slightly behind center of mass. You probably won't have much luck landing the fuselage intact if your Mk3 plane gets its wings scorched off on reentry. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one. These have extremely poor temperature tolerance and will almost inevitably break up during atmospheric reentry. Thank you and happy landings. 3. angle of the wheels. Your previous content has been restored. As the title says, my plane dips and turns to the side, clips its wing on the runway and loses it, does the same on the other side, then crashes and explodes, without even getting airborne. For some reason, when the plane is trying to take off and pulling up, the plane begins to bounce on it's front wheels (the back wheel kicks up), which hinders the plane taking off. Re-entry heating can destroy parts of your spaceplane, or destroy it entirely. In an aircraft with two or more engines, this can potentially cause you to enter a flat spin which can be unrecoverable if your center of mass is behind your center of lift. All of them had one thing in common though. For more information, please see our You can even try refueling it before recovering your spaceplane further increasing your recovering value. Here is the best aircraft I have created to date: Jet Aircraft. See the tutorial below. Keep in mind that lift rating and control surfaces are not connected: lift rating is basically the capacity of your wings to sustain the weight of your spaceplane, while control surfaces are parts of wing that can be moved to change the flow of the air around the plane and through this change a plane's direction, angle of attack or inclination. Here is an example of landing gear place on a complex geometric surface: Unstable plane Rear landing gears only seems to work on cylindrical fuselage, if you place them on a fuselage intake or anything other than a cylinder, the wheels can behave strangely. They could go up to 120 m/s on the runway and still not lift up. Is there a way to rectify this problem. wings, unless they're very well braced). Either one of those being misaligned will cause instability on the runway during takeoff (and the engines misaligned will cause flight problems). In fact, nothing will happen at all, and that's probably bad, so put an air intake on your plane anyway. For this to happen, I'm assuming you're using rocket fuel tanks. I have created planes that have landing gears place right under the wing tips but they still won't work. So if I start encountering wobble it's time to pull back on the stick and get in the air. Lift maxes out at 30 and declines beyond that point, so avoid excessive fuselage tilt.[1]. KSP 2 speculation: I believe terraforming will be a feature of the game. 200 m/s runway stability just doesn't seem to have a worthwhile purpose to me, and is inducing counter productive engineering challenges. Secondly, it would suggest that your spaceplane's center of lift is too far forward compared to its center of gravity (causing the uncontrollable spin). This thread is archived . I'm making sure that I keep trying to get it up but it just wont go! After that, you face the challenge of touching down on the ground and coming to a stop safely without rolling and breaking off a wing or taking a nosedive and blowing your aircraft up on touchdown, or rolling off of the runway and into the ocean. I believe the issue is there is not enough control surfaces to offset this issue, but it comes up very easy so it is not a very big deal. https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?title=Tutorial:_Basic_Plane_Design&oldid=97453, In the front of the plane - In this position, the control surfaces are also known as , In the back of the plane, on the tail - The most usual position; usually, close to the rudder. For example, having your landing gears located near the ends of the wings is an easy way to ensure that you don't roll and shred your wings when landing or taking off. In contrast, if you attempt a landing at the KSC runway on a 270 degree bearing, you run the risk of colliding with the upward slope shortly beyond the runway if you can't slow down initially and then can't speed up fast enough. This plane will be able to take off, travel somewhere, perform a crew report, and then land. 6.4K Downloads Updated Jun 7, 2017 Created Jun 7, 2017. . Similar principles apply when finding suitable landing sites away from the KSC. Hopefully this gets you your first aircraft that can take off and land, which is the biggest hurdle to being able to make KSP aircraft. Increasing the number of intakes will not allow you to continue using your jet engines at higher altitudes. Note: This tutorial was last updated for version 1.7.2. EDIT: So, I set the front landing gear spring and damper to 0.5, and also set the tail gear spring and damper to 2, and the problem was fixed! I feel tat it is either due to the symmetry placement in this game being inaccurate or certain parts where i anchor my landing gears on are not perfectly symmetrical and the physics calculation is just too sensitive about even the slightest misalignment. They all had to use the runway drop to take off. symmetry building makes them face slightly towards (or away from) each other, with wobbly results. Safety note: Disable the brakes on the front landing gear. 4. Now for wings, the "Wing Connector Type B" is the largest you have so far; connect a set of those where the centre of mass is. Just like with rockets, get some courageous Kerbal in the cockpit and let's get started! KSP v.22 Takeoff Troubleshooting Guide/Tutorial Lots of info to help get your plane off the runway! Remember how you want your center of lift/drag to be behind the center of gravity? Basic structure Firstly you're going to want to make a short fuselage. You can either go with four "LY-O1 Fixed" or a tricycle of two LY-01 near the back and one "LY-05 Steerable" at the front; either is fine for now. Hello, I am having a small problem with a plane I have built. and our The SSTO I took to Laythe recently has only one minor flaw using this design, I have to raise the landing gear and pull back slightly to take off. I shouldn't have placed landing gears on the fuselage, I found that placing landing gears on flat surfaces like wings make landing gears a lot more stable. Control surfaces are heavier than wings. A Mk1 Cockpit, two Mk 1 Liquid Fuel Tanks, and then cap the back with a round nose cone (use the A/D keys to rotate it as necessary). Pasted as rich text. This page was last edited on 14 April 2021, at 01:04. To minimize drag, vertical tail fins can be kept minimal, since aircraft can be maneuvered adequately by roll and pitch alone. One idea I haven't noticed here yet: "wire up" the landing gear, with strut connectors. All rights reserved. Now right click each elevon and the tail fin and set what movement each controls; the ones on the large wings control roll only, the ones on the back wings control pitch only, and the tail fin controls yaw only. I was wrong. While I am not a great plane builder there is a part in the structural (I think it is a pylon?) I worked through the tutorials and I think my problem was most often a lack of lift, or perhaps more accurately sufficient control surfaces. If you have seen the examples above, I have planes that have angled landing gear and they work perfectly, yet some planes with straight landing gears don't. Your aircraft might just be too heavy - there might not be enough wing lift for it to take off the ground. Managed to fix it with some different wings; idk what was going on with the other ones but I was just thr FAT aeroplane wings. Description: "Originally called the Cockpit-plus-two, the 5 seat "Cockatoo" is a second-generation command pod that provides both safety and comfort It is rumored to have enough room to pack several days of emergency snack rations and board games" Useful stats: As the description states this large command pod holds 5 kerbals A relatively low-drag alternative is to use an inverted cargo bay and some hydraulic cylinders with structural panels as a cargo elevator. It is advised to place your control surfaces as far from your center of mass as possible. However, I want to place my wheels where i want to and not only on X parallel surfaces. They all had landing gear placed at the front and at the back. Alright, it's late where I live so I'm gonna hit the hay and come back to it tommorrow, I read on the guide someone sent me and I think it is taht it doesn't have any way of pointing the up, so I'll tinker with some of the wings and see what I can do. If the problem has to do with lift then travelling very slowly, possibly even slower than that, should counteract the effects of lift and you won't drift nearly as much. Controllability of a plane is on you. - Make sure the landing gear is as close to the center of gravity as possible, just slightly behind it (for nosewheel aircraft). This allows you to takeoff at lower speeds and on shorter runways, and likewise for landing. FAR says it would take an Angle of Attack of 24.3 degrees at 119 m/s to generate enough lift to get it to take off. You cannot paste images directly. Note: This is ONLY to be used to report spam, advertising, and problematic (harassment, fighting, or rude) posts. I have no problems using Mechjeb to launch rockets into orbit, rendezvousing and docking with other craft. Landing also often requires rapid deceleration to avoid running off the end of the runway or crashing into a slope when landing on open terrain. That way you can use aerodynamics to lower the tail, rather than trying to raise the nose. Ideally, the wings should be tilted upward at an angle about 3-5 from the fuselage for optimal lift-to-drag ratio.[1]. One FL-T100 tank can't power any rocket into space, yet a Shock Cone Intake, a Mk1 Inline Cockpit, a half-filled FL-T100 and a J-X4 "Whiplash" Turbo Ramjet Engine aimed in the general direction of "up" will let you laugh your way past the 70km mark at nearly 1200m/s. For spaceplanes, avoid the FAT parts (wing, tail fin, and control surface). Plane bouncing on takeoff - Gameplay Questions and Tutorials - Kerbal Space Program Forums Hello, I am having a small problem with a plane I have built. Hot ground causes air to rise, cooling as it moves away from the heat, which leads to increased density and a resulting fall back down. However it's huge size can make it tricky to take off from the runway without destroying the engine. And also place them further apart. KSC's runway is slightly north of Kerbin's equator and perfectly flat. I dont really need 200m/s for take off. Any ideas? Clear editor. Notice how the landing gears are placed out on the wings. Consider placing your rear landing gears close to the spaceplane's center of mass, but be careful to avoid an engine collision with the runway. This is most likely the standard jitterbugging problem. Before you can make a successful plane, you must understand what makes a plane go in places other than the ground - the wings. You can slow down either by deploying landing gears (and airbrakes if you have them) or by repeatedly pitching up and then back down to increase your drag. Check out the following guide for some good info: Your wheel base is the problem. I had this one plane, very fast, It would go to 170 m/s on the runway then drop of the end and soar very nicely. This helps to keep the performance of your spaceplane stable with any amount of fuel. LV-N has less than 25% of its full power at Kerbin sea level. If you have a very short length of runway remaining and your parachutes can't slow you down fast enough, you'll be forced to cut the chutes and attempt a second landing without them. 32.5K Downloads Updated Dec 11, 2014 Created Dec 11, 2014. If you plan on either dropping off cargo or picking up cargo and traveling with it, you'll generally want to locate your cargo bay at the middle of your center of gravity. 2022 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. You can post now and register later. However, don't bother going overboard with intakes because your engines will still shut off at high altitudes due to the low air pressure regardless of how many intakes you have. KSP Stock Space Shuttle by _ForgeUser18393701. 2022 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible. Make sure that all of your landing gears are pointing in exactly the same direction. That will align with the craft axis. Privacy Policy. Espaol - Latinoamrica (Spanish - Latin America), http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484107795, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484107807, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484107735, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484107761, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484119427, http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52080-Basic-Aircraft-Design-Explained-Simply-With-Pictures, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484137556, http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/443953434412162923/42B3BB54A6A524CCC2E5C102AD88C8E521790F55/. Even if you can takeoff, landing will usually destroy tat aircraft so survival rate on an aircraft for a typical kerbal is nearly zero. First try speed over land reached over 210 m/s before flipping in the last second. Whether you're storing your fuel in fuselage sections, wing sections, or attached inside of cargo bays, it's generally a good idea to keep equal amounts of fuel at equal distances from your center of mass. Note: The large delta wing will ensure you won't backflip. But also check to make sure that your wheels are placed symmetrically and your engines are aligned properly. This can easily cause you to crash on landing. Unstable Aircraft: "FAR Firehound" (Stock). You can also angle the wings themselves slightly upwards (using WASDQE) in order to make them generate more lift when horizontal. This is just a general briefing section with lots of "to do" or "not to do" things: when you think you've got it, check the Aeris 4A tutorial mission to learn how to get into space easily. Set up for a long glide path, and watch rate of climb indicator at top of screen, aim for -5 m/s. For your first flight, it may be easiest to ignore yaw altogether and just maneuver by rolling slightly and pitching. I am accelerating it to over 200m/s on the runway just to test the stability of those wheels since the faster you go, the more likely the plane will wobble and flip on the runway. Another trick is to move the rear landing gear forward, closer to the center of gravity. Place your rear wheels/gear in front of the flaps on your wings. But I am still not sure if there are more reasons or perhaps it is just a physics bug which I am wasting my time on. Finally you need to make sure it's all balanced, this means the centre of lift marker needs to be very slightly behind the centre of mass marker. @TheEnvironmentalist There is one more method I'm sure would work in your case, although I didn't write about it because I think it's cheesy and wouldn't solve the root problem. Now imagine what happens like that. Display as a link instead, What you ought to be using is the Swept Wings and Elevon 1s instead of the Delta-Deluxe Winglets. Slowly pitch up to avoid overheating. Here are a few pictures of it: Take a picture with center of mass and center of lift turned on. Also note that for maximum efficiency, you should make sure that your horizontal control surfaces are rotated to exactly the same pitch that you've rotated your wings. Cure: Draw a mental axis from the nose to the tail of the plane and use the rotate tool (summetry on), on one of the wheels. Saves a lot of headache in wheels placement. So the answer is: in the SPH, click on your front gear, set the spring to .5 and set the damper to .5 -- then save it and give it another shot at launching. They could go up to 120 m/s on the runway and still not lift up. At that point, the plane could potentially start spinning around as a result of losing the benefit of the gimbal control of the engine. Note that a Wheesley or Goliath engine can reverse its thrust to allow rapid deceleration during landing, but these are not recommended for a spaceplane due to being unreasonably heavy and inducing excessive drag when attempting to transition to orbital velocities. An altitude set to 18,000 meters tops off at 19,000 meters and drops to 15,700 meters . Alternatively, if you're returning from a high orbit or from an interplanetary trip, you can try repeated shallow passes through the atmosphere. I checked my planes and I found the problem. I took off and at 60 m/s I was in the air!