I am definitely aware that there are multiple reasons as to why the plane flips. Next you need landing gear. Balanced fuel saves Kerbal lives. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries. #2 DaSkippa Mar 14, 2014 @ 2:56am as Shkeec said check gear check gear check gear. I have never successfully landed a single aircraft before as they all tend to roll over when landing at high speed. 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. Ailerons to roll your aircraft should be placed as far off to the edges of your wings as possible. 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. Be aware that landing on water is an option if your spaceplane can fly level at less than ~40-50 m/s. 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. I was attaining high speeds on the runway without getting off the ground, which made the plane yaw back and forth. Spaceplanes generally ascend best on a 10-30 degree incline, often leveling out towards higher altitudes to pick up the maximum horizontal velocity before switching to rocket motors. Clear editor. You can post now and register later. Hit the launch button and watch your magnificent bird fly! See if there is still a problem when only travelling slowly, say <20m/s. Thanks for all the help. - SF. I have doubled the max stress value for aerodynamics failure in FAR for every category. Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible. Slowly pitch up to avoid overheating. I started investigating why this was happening. 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. Even a small deviation can cause serious instability, making your aircraft bounce and jolt left and right even during takeoff. 2022 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. My plane usually take off at a little over 120m/s. I don't have any mods but sometimes a problem may be a simple bug. Make sure that all of your landing gears are pointing in exactly the same direction. 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. 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. They all had landing gear placed at the front and at the back. Note: Some high-efficiency rocket engines lose most of their power and efficiency in low atmosphere. You main problem is your landing gear. I removed them and it works fine now. 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. Any plane needs speed - so you need thrust (usually). Install S5 moon rocket By lightbreaker_64. The tutorial below explains everything very well. 2022 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. For spaceplanes, avoid the FAT parts (wing, tail fin, and control surface). Obviously jet engines are air-breathing, so you need to include air intakes in your spaceplane. 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. 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! Your wings provide the lift, and they cant provide lift if your wheels are too far back because then your base is to stable and the craft wont pivot upwards. Re-entry heating can destroy parts of your spaceplane, or destroy it entirely. Unfortunately, with only these basic parts, landing on the runway won't be easy; a viable alternative is to throttle down to nothing, then belly-flop in the ocean. 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. 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? Subscribe! 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. 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. (Source). If, instead, all goes well, then once your jet engines have shut down you will need to start the second part of your space mission by switching to rockets. As with everything in KSP, experiment, experiment, experiment. 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. Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible. Then you want to put something called a "Small Circular Intake" on the front of the tank, and a "J-20 Juno" engine on the back of the tank. A plane is any craft which flies horizontally in an atmosphere utilizing lift primarily generated by wings, winglets, or control surfaces. The same principle applies here. 2022 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. This page was last edited on 14 April 2021, at 01:04. I checked my planes and I found the problem. How do I fix this? 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. This allows you to avoid the extra weight and mass of additional fuselage parts, so you only have to deal with the extra weight of the fuel itself. Either put more engines or reduce the amount of rocket fuel. You can post now and register later. 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. Otherwise, you can either shift your wings till it's right (though this may crowd them near the back), or you can very slightly rotate the big wings so they're slightly higher near the front of the plane. This is for the same reason that you keep your fuel balanced. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com, Press J to jump to the feed. Firstly you're going to want to make a short fuselage. KSC's runway is slightly north of Kerbin's equator and perfectly flat. All of them had one thing in common though. I was wrong. 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. Suggest a Correction Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. Note that the lift rating does not mean that the wings will automatically lift a spaceplane into the air when it's moving forward. When I Start Why Engine, It Goes Straight But As Soon As I Takeoff. I took off and at 60 m/s I was in the air! Mechjeb Spaceplane Guidance. But be careful and don't crash it! 3. make sure your center of mass is slightly in front of center of lift force. If you are using B9 Rocketery or other parts that utilize Firesplitter, this is normal. 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. 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! The centre of mass was between the 2 landing gears. To recover the most value from your spaceplane, you should try to land on the runway at the Space Center (this tutorial, although it has been written for spacecraft and not spaceplanes, is a great help). Besides the good advice others have given, I would also be very careful with that little tailwheel. However, I want to place my wheels where i want to and not only on X parallel surfaces. 1. tilt of the plane. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. if its too far behind plane cannot lift. However it's huge size can make it tricky to take off from the runway without destroying the engine. and our When I use it for spaceplane guidance it keeps me on the correct heading, but the flight is very busy sine wave of a path. This plane will be able to take off, travel somewhere, perform a crew report, and then land. 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. 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. An aircraft without control surfaces is like a rocket without RCS or reaction wheels - it will hardly turn and will be equally hard to control (perhaps even impossible!). Thank you and happy landings. 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. Upload or insert images from URL. If your Mk3 design jam-packed full of heavy gear can't seem to survive reentry, one option might be to reduce the payload a bit. Here is the best aircraft I have created to date: Jet Aircraft. I found biggest cause of this as well as not being able to possibly correct is having sas on during takeoff, make sure that is off during take off and should find problem is less likely to occur, but I too struggle to make working space planes even when center of lift, mass, thrust are all as needed. if mounted on not struted part). This can turn into a fatal scenario if the center of mass gets behind the center of lift and you enter a flat spin. the I place on the wing and attach landing gear on those, it sometimes takes a few tries to find the right spot but well worth it. In subsequent missions, you may want to launch with less fuel to cut down on cost and make landing a quicker and easier process. Ideally, you ought to test landing the spaceplane with full fuel tanks and with nearly empty fuel tanks prior to taking your spaceplane to orbit. That's over 2x the normal recommended max. LV-N "Nerv" nuclear thermal rockets are commonly used on SSTOs for the rocket stage if Rapiers are not used. Place your rear wheels/gear in front of the flaps on your wings. 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. * Unlock steering and disable brakes on front gear. - KSP Matt Lowne 527K subscribers 1.3M views 2 years ago I've wanted. My plane tends to wobble on the runway with the stock game so i decided to download FAR, but the problem still persists. Valve Corporation. This page was last edited on 19 February 2020, at 07:08. 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). This allows you to takeoff at lower speeds and on shorter runways, and likewise for landing. Depending on which surface you place them on, they might not be parallel to the axis in which case. 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. 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/. If you forget to put an air intake on your airplane, don't worry! Geometric shape of the body you attach the landing gear to. They are able to operate at higher altitudes and can even continue operating in a vacuum by switching to a rocket mode. Thanks for everyone trying to help! For more information, please see our Close to empty tanks will allow you to fly slower, decelerate faster, and reduce touchdown strain. Do agree that the rear wheels either need to be brought closer or or the Nenter of mass needs to be move closer to the rear wheels. mods used are OPT for most of the body and the front canards and tail plane, B9 procedural wings for the wings, and mk4 . Similar principles apply when finding suitable landing sites away from the KSC. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. 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. You cannot paste images directly. Valve Corporation. Set up for a long glide path, and watch rate of climb indicator at top of screen, aim for -5 m/s. my planes keep flipping backwards on take off . Even if you can takeoff, landing will usually destroy tat aircraft so survival rate on an aircraft for a typical kerbal is nearly zero. 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. You cannot paste images directly. 67K subscribers in the KerbalAcademy community. But regardless of that, try very hard to let the plane fly itself off the ground without you applying any controls. I do add a strut to each wheel out of habit since my earlier versions use to roll, better safe than sorry. KSP Stock Space Shuttle by _ForgeUser18393701. Mk2 aircraft may be able to get away with it, but even then it's often best to space them further out. I've had stability issues in planes where I'd have proper gear setup, balanced weight and lift. This is generally an issue of not spacing your landing gears out far enough apart. A Ravenspear Mk3 taking off from the Runway in version 1.0.5. They all had to use the runway drop to take off. wings, unless they're very well braced). 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. This can easily cause you to crash on landing. I have found a solution to my problem. 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. With a tail-dragger, the plane is already angled up just sitting on its wheels so once the speed is high enough, it should just float up by itself. The most dangerous part of a spaceplane flight is returning from orbit. Although I usually only need 50 m/s for most planes to wobble out of control. 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. 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. 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. You could do it the kerbal way by attaching two SRBs to the nose of the plane pointing upwards. So yesterday I was playing some KSP2, and resumed the game from a save where I had landed in Duna. Heavy transport seaplane inspired to the Soviet Beriev A-40 Albatros which also appears in Evangelion 2.0! While having the same stock parts as in the VAB, spaceplane design is obviously quite different from pure rocket design. * Gear not mounted to parts that will flex (e.g. Mods needed for this aircraft to work: Procedural wings, Adjustable Landing Gear, FAR. This is most likely the standard jitterbugging problem. When you are near the end of the runway, quickly activate then detach them to get the nose pointing up. Increasing the number of intakes will not allow you to continue using your jet engines at higher altitudes. symmetry building makes them face slightly towards (or away from) each other, with wobbly results. Here are a few pictures of it: Take a picture with center of mass and center of lift turned on. Sometimes taking things off and re-attaching them does it, or you may have to go so far as to scrap the design and rebuild. 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. When flying straight the plane is pretty stable but pitching up causes a sharp roll and I cant figure out why. This tutorial was created primarily based on a Reddit post by the incredibly helpful u/AnArgonianSpellsword. I just thought my planes were too heavy or not enough control surfaces. They sometimes coincide with ailerons on some, more space-economical, aircraft. Thanks for the help guys. Landing can be trickier for spaceplanes since they are designed for higher speeds than other aircraft and may not be able to fly level at speeds low enough for an easy landing (<50 m/s). They could go up to 120 m/s on the runway and still not lift up. 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. S5 moon rocket by lightbreaker_64. The FedEx plane pulled back up in time to avoid a collision. . 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. I was wrong. All I have are the parts from the Aerodynamics tech and the gear bay (wheels). Canards and horizontal tail fins should be placed as far towards the front and back of your aircraft as possible, respectively. 1. Powered by Invision Community. Thermal turbulence, caused by convection, happens below clouds and typically only impacts planes during takeoff and landing. To takeoff and land at low speed, it's helpful to rotate the wings so the leading edge is slightly above the trailing edge. I have created planes that have landing gears place right under the wing tips but they still won't work. Rapiers generally provide less thrust than a Whiplash at speeds below mach 2, but provide more thrust at higher speeds. As such, you will need various control surfaces. If you've been able to successfully re-enter on previous low orbit test runs, you should be able to use this method to achieve similar rates of success once you've slowed down sufficiently. KSP v.22 Takeoff Troubleshooting Guide/Tutorial Lots of info to help get your plane off the runway! Notice how the landing gears are placed out on the wings. 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. Just like with rockets, get some courageous Kerbal in the cockpit and let's get started! I thought after buying this I would have all the parts I need to build a small plane that can at least get off the ground, but I'm having trouble. It is also common to add an Inline Clamp-O-Tron, which, unlike all the other docking ports, can be placed in the middle of the spacecraft (a handy solution, since there is not much space at either end of the craft) to allow your plane to dock with space stations or other spacecrafts. 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. It helps to have a center of gravity which is close to your engines so that the landing gears can be close to both. If you have trouble pitching up enough to land at a reasonable speed, you can increase your maneuverability by toggling your flaps, canards and ailerons to greater than 100% control authority. First thing you're going to want to do in the SPH is turn on your centre of mass indicator (this is the point that the plane will rotate around when rolling, pitching, or yawing) and your centre of lift indicator (the Aerodynamic Overlay). if mounted on not struted part) 2. put your main gear slightly behind center of mass. - Make sure the landing gear is as close to the center of gravity as possible, just slightly behind it (for nosewheel aircraft). However, they are extremely heavy for their power, weighing as much as a conventional rocket nearly 11 times more powerful. 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). They all had to use the runway drop to take off. All of them had one thing in common though. Then this tutorial is for you. When your nose is stable at about 10 degrees above the horizon, pull up hard and keep it pulled. Keep at around 15 degrees to allow the plane to accelerate past 1000m/s. Wow, if you need 200 m\s to take off, you should think about adding more lift. KSP handling death investigation High Winds Cause Widespread Power Outages Ohio . 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). 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. Temperature tolerance is the primary consideration for fuselage choice. Espaol - Latinoamrica (Spanish - Latin America), http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/65638-Basic-Airplane-Space-Plane-Aero-Tutorial. LV-N engines also have the advantage of using the same liquid for propellant that jet engines use for fuel. As lift increases you remove some strain on the gear, however you've just increased the amount of sag. Another trick is to move the rear landing gear forward, closer to the center of gravity. You can even try refueling it before recovering your spaceplane further increasing your recovering value. And at the extreme, producing down force, which I'm sure would cause more gear issues. I have no problems using Mechjeb to launch rockets into orbit, rendezvousing and docking with other craft. 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. For myself, it always was the position of landing gear in terms of pitch. Landing is hard. https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?title=Tutorial:_Your_First_Plane&oldid=103052. 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. While I am not a great plane builder there is a part in the structural (I think it is a pylon?) 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. 4. Your very own tutorial.). Note: This is ONLY to be used to report spam, advertising, and problematic (harassment, fighting, or rude) posts. 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. I have built lots of spaceplanes. So you want to make a plane but all your contraptions explode on the runway, crash into the runway a few seconds after taking off, crash into the side of the runway, crash into the ocean after doing a tight turn or otherwise fail to do what you intended? Your previous content has been restored. When your altitude reaches 35km, start pulling up gently. 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. This is an important distinction; a plane with great lift rating but without any control surfaces will fly easily but will be almost uncontrollable. [KSP 2] I'm trying really hard to make a Mun capable ship but this rocket . When landing, you can achieve the highest lift for a given speed by raising the total angle of attack of your wings to 30 degrees (although this induces a great deal of drag). And, of course, try to take off and land as slow as possible. Note that no wings will tolerate more than 2400K, so the difference in temperature tolerance between Mk2 and Mk3 fuselages isn't terribly significant. A control surface with 100% control surface portion will weigh twice as much as a wing with the same lift would weigh.