You can post now and register later. Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible. my center of lift is always slightly infront of my mass. I have built lots of spaceplanes. Another trick is to move the rear landing gear forward, closer to the center of gravity. This would indicate two problems. When flying straight the plane is pretty stable but pitching up causes a sharp roll and I cant figure out why. Angled landing gear create rotational force for whatever reason. Tell ya what, I'm gonna try to recreate that thing in my sandbox and see what I get. 1. make sure your main gear is not wobbling (ie. Suggest a Correction Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. Does anybidy have any tips on how to build spaceplanes? 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 . 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. To avoid wobble, wheels need to be absolutely vertical, and they shouldn't be attached to something that is likely to flex as speed builds up, as this could also affect the vertical alignment. Doesnt make sense so just do this: Nope that didn't solve anything, even when the plane is past the runway and gliding on the little bit of space before the ocean it will slowly lower to the ocean, what am I doing wrong? I also used Intake build aid to balance the intakes. There are several forces in Kerbal Space Program which have an effect on the flight characteristics of SSTO craft. The rudder is mostly used when landing and when attempting to line up a shot (in a fighter plane). Try disabling friction control with on the front landing gears. 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. 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. It is advised to place your control surfaces as far from your center of mass as possible. Take the large delta wings and place them on 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 issue is my plane rolls very sharply to the left any time I pitch up. #2 DaSkippa Mar 14, 2014 @ 2:56am as Shkeec said check gear check gear check gear. I scoured the entire web for a solution, but found no working solution or at least dont work every time. Either one of those being misaligned will cause instability on the runway during takeoff (and the engines misaligned will cause flight problems). Plane wobble during takeoff - KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials - Kerbal Space Program Forums Is there a way to place landing gear so that i can guarantee my plane can remain stable on the runway even at high speed in excess of 200m/s? LV-N has less than 25% of its full power at Kerbin sea level. They could go up to 120 m/s on the runway and still not lift up. 4. That will align with the craft axis. An alternative is making sure you have complete control of the craft. At around . They sometimes coincide with ailerons on some, more space-economical, aircraft. 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. if mounted on not struted part) 2. put your main gear slightly behind center of mass. However, I want to place my wheels where i want to and not only on X parallel surfaces. With initial passes, you start off with a periapsis at 50-60 km and gradually lower your apoapsis until you're in an almost circularized low orbit and then transition to your usual re-entry approach. In subsequent missions, you may want to launch with less fuel to cut down on cost and make landing a quicker and easier process. Try not to place your gears to wings, especially wingtips - if they wobble even slightly, your plane lose the balance. For your first flight, it may be easiest to ignore yaw altogether and just maneuver by rolling slightly and pitching. Here is the best aircraft I have created to date: Jet Aircraft. For all your gaming related, space exploration needs. I've had stability issues in planes where I'd have proper gear setup, balanced weight and lift. - KSP Matt Lowne 527K subscribers 1.3M views 2 years ago I've wanted. It is due to the spinning up of the engines. The problem could be about the angle of wheels, though there could be more problems with the COM and wheels placement. You probably won't have much luck landing the fuselage intact if your Mk3 plane gets its wings scorched off on reentry. All you need to do is add landing gear (one right before the cockpit, and two on the tips or middle of the wings), and you're done! When your altitude reaches 35km, start pulling up gently. 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. Geometric shape of the body you attach the landing gear to. Now put on center of mass and center of lift view, and move the delta wings until the center of lift is slightly behind of the center of mass - not in front, otherwise your aircraft will be able to easily flip out of control. It's strongly recommended to keep your landing gears well-spaced from each other to ensure that the aircraft will be difficult to roll into a collision. 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. If you can give a craft file and a mod list I could take a look. mods used are OPT for most of the body and the front canards and tail plane, B9 procedural wings for the wings, and mk4 . The FedEx plane pulled back up in time to avoid a collision. Similar principles apply when finding suitable landing sites away from the KSC. First, I'm sure this is WAY overengineered, but I haven't gotten to the point of caring about that yet. The issue is my plane rolls very sharply to the left any time I pitch up. Note that the lift rating does not mean that the wings will automatically lift a spaceplane into the air when it's moving forward. If your spaceplane is difficult to land when full of fuel but easy to land when empty, then it may be helpful to burn off or transfer out most of the excess fuel before landing to make the aircraft lighter. 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. All rights reserved. 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. 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. It is also advisable to add some control surfaces to your plane to have some control in the atmosphere: you can manually add them to the wings or choose winglets with effective control surfaces, like the Standard Canard. 2 will usually do nicely, but 3 or 4 are usually better (but of course heavier, and this tutorial assumes you use 2). I was wrong. Keep your nose pointed prograde as you descend through the atmosphere. Subscribe! If your rear wheels are too far back the aircraft will not be able to pivot on the wheels and lift its nose up. This aircraft handles smoothly, no matter how you turn, roll and flip this aircraft, it will never lose control. 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. Alternatively, you can try landing at higher speeds with your nose pointed further down, but this increases challenges with stability and deceleration while on the runway. All of these problems can be exacerbated or reduced by adjusting the amount of fuel in your tanks during landing. Note that as you fly higher the air intakes will become less effective and you may come to a point when the engines will shut down due to the lack of air. 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. Check out the following guide for some good info: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52080-Basic-Aircraft-Design-Explained-Simply-With-Pictures Make sure that all of your landing gears are pointing in exactly the same direction. Also, try this mod: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/99660-0-25-Adjustable-Landing-Gear-v1-0-4%28doors-fixed%29-Nov-14 (still works in 0.90 if you get updated firespitter.dll). 200 m/s runway stability just doesn't seem to have a worthwhile purpose to me, and is inducing counter productive engineering challenges. I have also thought about a wider base. Flying a Space Station through a GAS GIANT! To minimize the risk of such a situation, try to land on a large patch of flat open ground approaching a downhill slope. I don't have any mods but sometimes a problem may be a simple bug. 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. 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. Center of Mass and Center of Lift are the usual causes of instability. Then at the top, we'll put one tail fin, centred on the end of the fuselage. if mounted on not struted part). Thermal turbulence, caused by convection, happens below clouds and typically only impacts planes during takeoff and landing. Thanks for the help guys. They sometimes coincide with elevators. So yesterday I was playing some KSP2, and resumed the game from a save where I had landed in Duna. 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. Aim to get your speed below 50m/s, and have plenty of water ahead of you; keep the plane level, and pitch up to shed velocity. Enable mirror symmetry to save yourself some alignment effort. For more information, please see our Mk2 aircraft may be able to get away with it, but even then it's often best to space them further out. You cannot paste images directly. It helps to have a center of gravity which is close to your engines so that the landing gears can be close to both. Just after having taken off, the plane will immediately start rolling to the right, and completely uncontrollably. Thanks for all the help. All lift-rating means is that the wing section will resist motion perpendicular to its plane. This makes them a very effective choice for SSTOs since they do a good job of getting maximum velocity out of air-breathing mode, and then allow you to use oxidizer without needing the added weight and drag of a separate rocket engine. Why is it doing this? As you approach 35-50 km, your aircraft will most likely level itself out, at which point you can try aiming about five degrees above the horizon line. My plane usually take off at a little over 120m/s. To takeoff and land at low speed, it's helpful to rotate the wings so the leading edge is slightly above the trailing edge. Your very own tutorial.). A good example of this is at the KSC runway when landing on a 90 degree bearing. 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. Also avoid the basic fin for the same reason. But, likely guess is your craft is not producing enough lift. And above all: have fun! Close to empty tanks will allow you to fly slower, decelerate faster, and reduce touchdown strain. A FedEx cargo plane in Austin nearly landed on a runway where a Southwest flight was preparing to take off. 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. This can turn into a fatal scenario if the center of mass gets behind the center of lift and you enter a flat spin. . To do this, take a few barrels of your jet fuel, stick them on the back of your aircraft. As such, don't use control surfaces as substitutes for wings, and don't use more control surfaces than you need. Or maybe launching it in a vertical, Space Shuttle-style config. Your link has been automatically embedded. For an example, see the A-10 Warthog's landing gears: link. So I started a new career file after not really playing for a long time and I'm now at the point where I just dropped 45 Science to unlocked Aviation to get some of the plane parts that I need. 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. Slowly pitch up to avoid overheating. Here, the. 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. Safety note: Disable the brakes on the front landing gear. And, of course, try to take off and land as slow as possible. DO NOT ANGLE THEM! If you keep all of the fuel in the front, you may find that your center of mass drifts backwards as your fuel drains. You can post now and register later. Note that canards are somewhat more efficient than horizontal tail fins since canards provide an upward force with upward rotation, and downward force with downward rotation. Note: The large delta wing will ensure you won't backflip. Is there a way to rectify this problem. That way you can use aerodynamics to lower the tail, rather than trying to raise the nose. 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. 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. Alternatively, if you're returning from a high orbit or from an interplanetary trip, you can try repeated shallow passes through the atmosphere. Temperature tolerance is the primary consideration for fuselage choice. When I Start Why Engine, It Goes Straight But As Soon As I Takeoff. @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. Powered by Invision Community. Easier just to bring the rear wheels closer as well as a in line reacton wheel. Those and the fixed main gear are NOTORIOUSLY bouncy. Try getting the wings to deflect the air down, either by lifting the front end up using canards or by mounting them at an angle using shift + wasdqe. 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. Though, I use the FAR mod which will change things, so I can't guarantee the results will be useful, but it might be interesting. The Whiplash's ridiculous fuel efficiency allows a spaceplane to climb high into the atmosphere and gain a lot of speed while barely using any fuel at all. * Unlock steering and disable brakes on front gear. 1. tilt of the plane. For heavy rockets, it might be required to use structure to space the gears away from the body to allow more pitch. First try speed over land reached over 210 m/s before flipping in the last second. These have an ISP of 800 in a vacuum which is significantly better than all other rocket motors except the very weak IX-6315 ion rocket. 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. You're going to have a bad time. This aircraft can takeoff at just above 50 m/s and can glide for a few minutes without engine. To minimize drag, vertical tail fins can be kept minimal, since aircraft can be maneuvered adequately by roll and pitch alone. Increasing the number of intakes will not allow you to continue using your jet engines at higher altitudes. You should be able to navigate fairly readily, and with the superb efficiency of jet engines, you should have plenty of fuel to go anywhere you need to go. 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. While all other cargo bays are fine for making spaceplanes, the Mk3 Cargo Ramp produces obscene amounts of drag, which can easily prevent reaching orbital velocities by itself. 5.whether the body you anchor the landing gears to are firm. Paste as plain text instead, Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one. 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. Note that when your jet engines shut down simultaneously while climbing in otherwise normal flight, it is generally due to a lack of pressure from the altitude you're flying at. 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. Be aware that while this angle will provide the lowest possible landing speed for your spaceplane, it will create problems if your center of gravity is too far ahead of your rear landing gears (causing a high-speed nose collision on touchdown) or if your rear landing gears are too far ahead of your engines, causing them to strike the runway first. 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), whichhinders the plane taking off. If you're planning on landing on a somewhat uneven surface, like an open grassland somewhere on Kerbin or an island on Laythe, consider packing some parachutes for deceleration. However, it's not a matter of "atmosphere or not", just a matter of air pressure which decreases rapidly with altitude. 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. Kerbal Space Program 2's simulation is a lot more in-depth than its predecessor, where it was feasible for any wannabe Goddard to punch through the atmosphere with overwhelming thrust. I can not get any aircraft-style spaceplane take off from the runway, they will stay on until the end, where the engines crash into the ground and explode. Also, lift is usually placed in the middle-to-back of the wing, depending on the shape. Now for the engines. Notice how the landing gears are placed out on the wings.