All of these problems can be exacerbated or reduced by adjusting the amount of fuel in your tanks during landing. How do I fix this? symmetry building makes them face slightly towards (or away from) each other, with wobbly results. 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. It is usually placed back because it can be placed further back than it is possible in the front (if it is placed in the front, it can obstruct the view of the pilot, which is undesired) as well as making the plane unstable (by the same effect that you would get if the center of lift (horizontal lifting surfaces) were in front of the center of mass, but with vertical 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. Thermal turbulence, caused by convection, happens below clouds and typically only impacts planes during takeoff and landing. 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. 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. Clear editor. Depending on which surface you place them on, they might not be parallel to the axis in which case. 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. 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. 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 front landing gear touches down first and has its brakes on, it's going to make the rest of your aircraft pivot around it as it's pressed into the ground. Powered by Invision Community. When your altitude reaches 35km, start pulling up gently. Either put more engines or reduce the amount of rocket fuel. This page was last edited on 19 February 2020, at 07:08. This page was last edited on 17 December 2021, at 13:14. This is starting to get really frustrating. - Have enough lift, either by a big wing area or high speed. Your previous content has been restored. I moved the back landing gear to right underneath the COM. 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. if its too far behind plane cannot lift. For a Mk1-based aircraft, your rear landing gears should not be tightly tucked together on the fuselage. And also place them further apart. At around . All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries. That will align with the craft axis. As such, you may want to line all forward Mk1 radial nodes on your aircraft with shock cones, if possible. Obviously jet engines are air-breathing, so you need to include air intakes in your spaceplane. Does anybidy have any tips on how to build spaceplanes? An alternative is making sure you have complete control of the craft. 1. make sure your main gear is not wobbling (ie. Center of Mass and Center of Lift are the usual causes of instability. This helps to keep the performance of your spaceplane stable with any amount of fuel. However, they are extremely heavy for their power, weighing as much as a conventional rocket nearly 11 times more powerful. You can post now and register later. My plane tends to wobble on the runway with the stock game so i decided to download FAR, but the problem still persists. After placing wheels I always use the rotate gizmo on snap with absolute orientation. Your very own tutorial.). And, of course, try to take off and land as slow as possible. I worked through the tutorials and I think my problem was most often a lack of lift, or perhaps more accurately sufficient control surfaces. Thanks for everyone trying to help! While I am not a great plane builder there is a part in the structural (I think it is a pylon?) my center of lift is always slightly infront of my mass. Those and the fixed main gear are NOTORIOUSLY bouncy. Hello, I am having a small problem with a plane I have built. All rights reserved. Also, excessive use of the rudder usually causes the plane to spin out of control and crash. Paste as plain text instead, In vanilla KSP, wings have a predefined lift factor. This allows you to takeoff at lower speeds and on shorter runways, and likewise for landing. DO NOT ANGLE THEM! 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). 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. Why is it doing this? Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one. - SF. 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. An altitude set to 18,000 meters tops off at 19,000 meters and drops to 15,700 meters . KSP v.22 Takeoff Troubleshooting Guide/Tutorial Lots of info to help get your plane off the runway! Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Note that dropping off cargo from the back with a Mk3 Cargo Ramp is bad for more than one reason. Now imagine what happens like that. Valve Corporation. 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. EDIT: It was the b9 procedural wings. LV-N has less than 25% of its full power at Kerbin sea level. 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/. All of them had one thing in common though. http://www.youtube.com/user/Cruzanak?. Lift maxes out at 30 and declines beyond that point, so avoid excessive fuselage tilt.[1]. The design I used is similar to what I normally used for planes but I had to swap out parts and make it smaller to compensate for Career mode changes. 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. Wing shapes do not appear to have a significant impact on drag or drag-to-lift ratio at this time, but swept wings are still an easy way to help ensure that your center of lift stays behind your center of mass. Basic structure Firstly you're going to want to make a short fuselage. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Also avoid the basic fin for the same reason. Angled landing gear create rotational force for whatever reason. 200 m/s runway stability just doesn't seem to have a worthwhile purpose to me, and is inducing counter productive engineering challenges. Note: The large delta wing will ensure you won't backflip. They sometimes coincide with elevators. For heavy rockets, it might be required to use structure to space the gears away from the body to allow more pitch. 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. T-1 "Dart" engines are unique amongst conventionally-fuelled rocket engines: They have close to the highest efficiency in both vacuum and low atmosphere. Now I'll walk you through a basic aircraft; fancy stuff like science equipment can be added later. However, it's not a matter of "atmosphere or not", just a matter of air pressure which decreases rapidly with altitude. For myself, it always was the position of landing gear in terms of pitch. If you are using B9 Rocketery or other parts that utilize Firesplitter, this is normal. Try not to place your gears to wings, especially wingtips - if they wobble even slightly, your plane lose the balance. Be aware that landing on water is an option if your spaceplane can fly level at less than ~40-50 m/s. 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. I started investigating why this was happening. Keep in mind that as your altitude increases, your control surfaces and winglets will become increasingly ineffective and will no longer work at all once you leave the atmosphere, so you may need to add alternative control systems like reaction wheels or RCS thrusters. 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. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com, Press J to jump to the feed. When flying straight the plane is pretty stable but pitching up causes a sharp roll and I cant figure out why. Try disabling friction control with on the front landing gears. You can deploy your chutes just prior to touchdown for rapid deceleration. 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. They all had to use the runway drop to take off. Set up for a long glide path, and watch rate of climb indicator at top of screen, aim for -5 m/s. To slow down faster, you can increase the braking strength of your rear wheels. Note: This is ONLY to be used to report spam, advertising, and problematic (harassment, fighting, or rude) posts. I am definitely aware that there are multiple reasons as to why the plane flips. At that point, the plane could potentially start spinning around as a result of losing the benefit of the gimbal control of the engine. In subsequent missions, you may want to launch with less fuel to cut down on cost and make landing a quicker and easier process. This tutorial will help you with the basics of spaceplane flight, and will help you avoid the most common errors that could ruin your day as a spaceplane pilot! Maybe ;making the tailwheel less stiff would help, too. I'm making sure that I keep trying to get it up but it just wont go! Control surfaces are heavier than wings. All rights reserved. And at the extreme, producing down force, which I'm sure would cause more gear issues. Your plane is almost finished. A FedEx cargo plane in Austin nearly landed on a runway where a Southwest flight was preparing to take off. The problem could be about the angle of wheels, though there could be more problems with the COM and wheels placement. and our Edit: I made a simple easy plane in career mode that is both stable and cheap: A trick i've used before is to put modular girders on the sides of the fuselage and putting the gear on the bottom of the girders. In fact, nothing will happen at all, and that's probably bad, so put an air intake on your plane anyway. 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). You need to make sure that the Orange axis on the rotate sphere is parallel to your, nose-tail axis. Let it get good and clear of the ground before applying any control to it. To minimize the risk of such a situation, try to land on a large patch of flat open ground approaching a downhill slope. First try speed over land reached over 210 m/s before flipping in the last second. See if there is still a problem when only travelling slowly, say <20m/s. All of them had one thing in common though. This ensures that your aircraft will go up once it achieves a high enough speed, and also helps with placing ailerons. You probably won't have much luck landing the fuselage intact if your Mk3 plane gets its wings scorched off on reentry. Be warned that if you do not provide sufficient air intakes for the engines you've placed, you may find that some of your engines shut down before others. 32.5K Downloads Updated Dec 11, 2014 Created Dec 11, 2014. Your link has been automatically embedded. This page was last edited on 14 April 2021, at 01:04. Thank you and happy landings. You cannot paste images directly. Here is the best aircraft I have created to date: Jet Aircraft. I've had stability issues in planes where I'd have proper gear setup, balanced weight and lift. Conversely, if you keep all of the fuel in the back, you may find that your center of mass gradually drifts so far in front of your center of lift that you can't keep your nose up anymore, also potentially resulting in a fatal scenario. As you reach 100m/s, hold S to pull the stick back, and you should be in the air! Plane spins/lurches to the side during takeoff? Go on, and take the plane capsule which looks like a converted fuel storage device. 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. 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. Privacy Policy. 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. 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. Make sure that all of your landing gears are pointing in exactly the same direction. Then this tutorial is for you. KSP Stock Space Shuttle by _ForgeUser18393701. When flying straight the plane is pretty stable but pitching up causes a sharp roll and I cant figure out why. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. Flying a Space Station through a GAS GIANT! For spaceplanes, avoid the FAT parts (wing, tail fin, and control surface). A Ravenspear Mk3 taking off from the Runway in version 1.0.5. The centre of mass was between the 2 landing gears. 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. "Type E" is the smallest you should have, and you want a set of those connected at the back of the fuselage. Increasing the number of intakes will not allow you to continue using your jet engines at higher altitudes. 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. I have built lots of spaceplanes. Works well on small craft. Similar principles apply when finding suitable landing sites away from the KSC. 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. Place your rear wheels/gear in front of the flaps on your wings. When your jet engines stop working, it is time to ignite the old, reliable liquid fuel engine. Remember how you want your center of lift/drag to be behind the center of gravity? 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. I do add a strut to each wheel out of habit since my earlier versions use to roll, better safe than sorry. You can also angle the wings themselves slightly upwards (using WASDQE) in order to make them generate more lift when horizontal. 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. Pasted as rich text. Here are a few pictures of it: Take a picture with center of mass and center of lift turned on. Your link has been automatically embedded. 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. 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. Install S5 moon rocket By lightbreaker_64. You want to get up to get the gear tucked away and reduce drag. Note that the lift rating does not mean that the wings will automatically lift a spaceplane into the air when it's moving forward. They could go up to 120 m/s on the runway and still not lift up. When your nose is stable at about 10 degrees above the horizon, pull up hard and keep it pulled. If you keep all of the fuel in the front, you may find that your center of mass drifts backwards as your fuel drains. Not sure why you would want that stability for speeds in excess of 200 m/s though, as most planes will take off and land at far slower speeds. 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.