Very cool project man, I had a couple of thoughts about your target for high speed and some of the flight characteristics you mentioned fighting with. 1) you have a pretty large wing area, and in general a lot of drag from the intakes. It is my understanding that the best drag/performance intake for high speed jets is the shock cone intake. If you ran 4 whiplash engines, I think you would only need 2 of the shock cone intakes to feed them the air they would need to reach the hypersonic regime. I think fundamentally you are just reaching the upper limit of that sloped intake + large wing area design + the 3 double wide fuselages design. I may be mistaken but I also think just moving the delta wings inward and clipping them into the fuselages you have would reduce their drag coefficient (and lift). Though many people don't like part clipping, I've never minded it used in moderation. Just try streamlining everything a bit, trying different intake configurations, and bringing the wing area down. 2) the Rapier engines have the most thrust of the jet engines, you can just toggle off the rocket mode with an action group if you want. (There are a couple of ways of working around that to disable the oxidizer burning mode altogether.) Though rapier based jets are generally in a category of their own as they aren't comparable in performance to any other jet. It's something to look into though. They do have thrust vectoring as well. 3) You probably have the Center of lift a bit far behind the center of mass, this contributes to the pitching issue you mention where the nose wants to dive. Try experimenting with wing placement relative to the center of mass and see how it impacts the flight characteristics. You shouldn't necessarily need the thrust vectoring of the jet engines in order to maintain straight and level flight. 4) You could perhaps try using a more powerful rocket engine and placing them along the center line of the craft right under the center of mass, then using fewer RCS modules to modulate yaw and pitch when taking off vertically. Fewer engines and fewer RCS modules would both reduce drag. I personally like putting Aerospikes along the bottom. (you can even attach them with the radial connectors intended for boosters and ditch them when transitioning to forward flight to reduce weight and drag) Or you can put them in a cargo bay as well, to eliminate the drag of the engines in forward flight entirely while still getting to use them multiple times. 5) It's sort of cheating depending on how you look at it. But look into using Mechjeb. It has a pretty good autopilot for aircraft. A lot of the time I use it to more precisely determine things like what sort of AOA (angle of attack) I need for level flight at the cruising speed, and then trying to improve on that. There are in general a lot of good features in that mod that make the SSTO/Hypersonic jet learning curve and flying a lot easier to get a hang of. Altogether its a very cool looking plane and a neat video. Just figured I would throw you my 2 cents as most of what I make in KSP is space planes and high speed jets, so maybe its of use to you. Cheers!
Using FAR (Ferram Aerospace Research) makes the game's aerodynamics more realistic which in turn makes it more difficult for aircraft. I recommend it as your first mod after you do some research on it. Also mach 3 1029 meters a second.
@@ArchSQ3 The only way you will get to mach 3 in vanilla KSP is with the rapier engines and probably high in the atmosphere. You probably won't be able to sustain mach 4, mach 5 and 6 are impossible in vanilla without rockets. You would over heat but if you went high enough to stay cool you wouldn't get enough oxygen. If you go above mach 6 you will leave kerbin's atmosphere.
![[KSP] Duna cargo delivery #2](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/oXpwubflIJQ/mqdefault.jpg)
hey idk if you are new to the game, but VTOLS are not that rare. It is stil awesome that you build one tho!
I’m fairly new to the game and community! I think I have just about 80 hours into the game 😂 but that’s cool to know
Very cool project man, I had a couple of thoughts about your target for high speed and some of the flight characteristics you mentioned fighting with.
1) you have a pretty large wing area, and in general a lot of drag from the intakes. It is my understanding that the best drag/performance intake for high speed jets is the shock cone intake. If you ran 4 whiplash engines, I think you would only need 2 of the shock cone intakes to feed them the air they would need to reach the hypersonic regime. I think fundamentally you are just reaching the upper limit of that sloped intake + large wing area design + the 3 double wide fuselages design.
I may be mistaken but I also think just moving the delta wings inward and clipping them into the fuselages you have would reduce their drag coefficient (and lift). Though many people don't like part clipping, I've never minded it used in moderation. Just try streamlining everything a bit, trying different intake configurations, and bringing the wing area down.
2) the Rapier engines have the most thrust of the jet engines, you can just toggle off the rocket mode with an action group if you want. (There are a couple of ways of working around that to disable the oxidizer burning mode altogether.) Though rapier based jets are generally in a category of their own as they aren't comparable in performance to any other jet. It's something to look into though. They do have thrust vectoring as well.
3) You probably have the Center of lift a bit far behind the center of mass, this contributes to the pitching issue you mention where the nose wants to dive. Try experimenting with wing placement relative to the center of mass and see how it impacts the flight characteristics. You shouldn't necessarily need the thrust vectoring of the jet engines in order to maintain straight and level flight.
4) You could perhaps try using a more powerful rocket engine and placing them along the center line of the craft right under the center of mass, then using fewer RCS modules to modulate yaw and pitch when taking off vertically. Fewer engines and fewer RCS modules would both reduce drag. I personally like putting Aerospikes along the bottom. (you can even attach them with the radial connectors intended for boosters and ditch them when transitioning to forward flight to reduce weight and drag) Or you can put them in a cargo bay as well, to eliminate the drag of the engines in forward flight entirely while still getting to use them multiple times.
5) It's sort of cheating depending on how you look at it. But look into using Mechjeb. It has a pretty good autopilot for aircraft. A lot of the time I use it to more precisely determine things like what sort of AOA (angle of attack) I need for level flight at the cruising speed, and then trying to improve on that. There are in general a lot of good features in that mod that make the SSTO/Hypersonic jet learning curve and flying a lot easier to get a hang of.
Altogether its a very cool looking plane and a neat video. Just figured I would throw you my 2 cents as most of what I make in KSP is space planes and high speed jets, so maybe its of use to you. Cheers!
Thank you for the response! I’ll definitely try those tips out
Interesting. I made a VTOL once but I used a hinge from the robotic parts DLC and was able to use just one engine for everything.
For sure, I’m surprised nobody really has made a vtol like this
@@ArchSQ3 this is awsome do you have trailmakers???
No I don’t, but I heard that it’s another good game 👀
Using FAR (Ferram Aerospace Research) makes the game's aerodynamics more realistic which in turn makes it more difficult for aircraft. I recommend it as your first mod after you do some research on it.
Also mach 3 1029 meters a second.
Oops 😅 thanks for the clarification, I think I was remembering Mach 3.6 instead which is like 1300 ms
@@ArchSQ3 The only way you will get to mach 3 in vanilla KSP is with the rapier engines and probably high in the atmosphere. You probably won't be able to sustain mach 4, mach 5 and 6 are impossible in vanilla without rockets. You would over heat but if you went high enough to stay cool you wouldn't get enough oxygen. If you go above mach 6 you will leave kerbin's atmosphere.
Ahh okay, that makes sense. Maybe I should make some sr72 replica to reach those speeds later on 🤝
2:32I think Robbaz usually took off his VTOL's vertically when he used to play.
Never heard of him, I’ll go check him oit
Btw i think using action groups could make your engine swapping much easier
Yea that’s true, is there a way to turn the engines off though as a group? I know you can turn them on as a group
@@ArchSQ3 yeah just add "toogle engine" of all engine as one action group.
Sweettt thanks for the tip, I definitely need to learn that for more projectsb
Very nice.
Thank you!
Just use fans 👍
Will try that 🙏
@@ArchSQ3 I use them in sets of two and make sure they are spinning opposite ways to counter the torque they make.