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[nogoodnames]

I think I'm finally ready to commit to a full scale Mars mission _{(assuming 1.1 doesn't come out too soon),} but first I need to send a probe to get some information. So here it is, Medjay 1:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention to the terrain and ended up coming down on top of a mountain. The lander was only a few hundred meters off the ground when I finally noticed. I desperately jettisoned the aeroshell and heat shield and throttled the landing engines. The heatshield was shot downward by the decoupler, but then it shot back up due to its high drag, slamming into the lander and completely destroying it. The aeroshell, still connected to the drogue chutes, was the only part that made it to the surface intact. I would have liked to make the landing, but I got all the information I needed, so I'm not too disappointed.

Also, I'm getting a weird glitch where the martian terrain just disappears when I'm in the atmosphere at a certain altitude but reappears lower down. I'm not using any of the environmental mods. Anyone ideas on what's causing it?

[jhxmt]

I'm finally able to reliably get stuff up into LKO and get it into a stable orbit of my choosing!  Okay, so this is the very, very short end of the wedge, but it's an achievement that I've never managed to get down fully before.  Currently starting to get the rescue-a-kerbonaut missions, so should be able to do those without too much difficulty, hopefully (and am combining my first one with a take-a-tourist-into-orbit mission, because why not?)

My only issue now is that my heavily modded game keeps crashing on a semi-regular basis when switching back to the space centre.  Never loses any data (it obviously completes the autosave before it crashes), but it's a pain to keep having to restart KSP.  Oh well, I'll live with it.

[BFEL]

So getting off to another rocky start with my hypermodded GRAND CAMPAIGN. While this time I've avoided losing 30 pilots to lawndarting (though Jeb is dead, because Jeb is always dead) I'm now having a hell of a time trying to make a murderbot with remotetech and bdarmory. Or just trying to get a plane in the air now that I think about it.

Though mostly I'm having issues with the damn antenna's I need to use probes being ripped off if I go faster then a fucking go cart, even if they are LITERALLY INSIDE THE HULL. Hopefully the antenna's later on will be better about this because otherwise this is going to have to be a 100% manned game, as getting into the air with these fuckers intact is literally impossible.

[jhxmt]

Planes are difficult.    Even having watched Scott Manley's (excellent) YouTube videos on how to build an aerodynamic aircraft, I still can't get the damn thing to be particularly stable.  I mean, it flies and it'll do a straight line pretty well, but turning is a bit of a risk.     Also, flying anywhere in an aircraft seems to take aaaaages.  I had a mission to explore near the northern polar region of Kerbin, spent a while building an okay-ish aircraft, started to fly up there...and then gave up, built a cheap disposable rocket and just launched the thing on a suborbital trajectory so that it was 'flying' over the region it needed to be over shortly before it crashed/landed/was recovered.

Planes are difficult.  Rockets are easier and faster.  This may simply be because I'm crap with planes. 

[BFEL]

Well this isn't "planes are hard" this is "the wings literally don't seem to provide lift"

I'm not sure if this is a result of my weird modlist, or just some quirk of the latest KSP version I haven't figured out yet, but I've had plenty of planes that work amazingly in the past, so I have a good idea of how this SHOULD be working, but for unknown reasons its really REALLY not.

[TheBronzePickle]

Wings don't provide lift. They never have. Not the real-world concept of lift.

In the real world, (most) wings have an upward curve in them. This curve means that air passes more quickly over the top than under the bottom. Higher speed fluids have a lower pressure, which means that the air basically pushes wings up to compensate for the pressure differential.

In KSP, wings do not have a curve. They are flat, which means that the only way they can generate upward force is an angle of attack against the air.

This essentially means that the way to get your plane to fly straight and not fall is applying an angle of attack to construction, or just keeping an upwards angle when flying in general.

I'm not sure if there are any mods that fix this. Honestly, I'm not even sure whether or not they've changed the wings since the last time I've played, which was actually a little while ago.

[Graknorke]

They way overhauled aerodynamics a bit before 1.0
Now lifting bodies are modeled far better than they were before.

[TheBronzePickle]

The wings are still flat, though, and still act as such. I've played since 1.0, so unless they changed it within the last... 2 months, wings still behave as flat planes that require an AoA, real or artificial, to function.

[BFEL]

That's just it though, the wings I'm using don't work, angle of attack or not.

I literally had more altitude control with a rocket car.

[nogoodnames]

In the real world, (most) wings have an upward curve in them. This curve means that air passes more quickly over the top than under the bottom. Higher speed fluids have a lower pressure, which means that the air basically pushes wings up to compensate for the pressure differential.

That's not really correct. Most of the lift in such wings comes from flow turning, not pressure differentials, same as if they were angled flat wings. The Bernoulli lift explanation is a massive oversimplification if not outright wrong in most ways, and I find it frustrating just how prevalent it is.

In KSP, the flat wings are an acceptable tradeoff since they allow you to make a large wing out of several smaller wings and still have your plane (generally) behave as expected. Also, rocket fins. Curved wings would be very bad for those.

Also, I don't think most people know this, but you can adjust trim with Alt + Q/W/E/A/S/D. You can use it to get a plane neutrally balanced, among other things. It's pretty handy. Alt + x resets everything to their default positions.

That's just it though, the wings I'm using don't work, angle of attack or not.

Have you checked the aerodynamic force indicators (f12) to see if they're actually working? I remember hearing about a bug where wings would just not generate lift for whatever reason. I think blue is the indicator for lift.

[TheDarkStar]

That's just it though, the wings I'm using don't work, angle of attack or not.

I literally had more altitude control with a rocket car.

Do you have control surfaces?

[BFEL]

That's just it though, the wings I'm using don't work, angle of attack or not.

I literally had more altitude control with a rocket car.

Do you have control surfaces?

Yes

I'll have to take NGN's suggestion and look at it in debug to be sure its not working, but generally when taking the wings OFF gives more lift then leaving them on I assume things aren't working right

And before you ask yes the lift is going in the right direction. Wasn't in the first iteration, but fixed that before coming to you guys with the post

[miauw62]

Yeah, planes are really slow, you're not alone in that.
All you can do is build a super stable plane, put it on physwarp 4 and alt-tab out, it seems.

[nogoodnames]

Well this is frustrating. Preparations for my grand Mars mission have been going well, and I would be sending my first supply mission with a backup Mars Ascent Vehicle, but there's a problem with the crew return capsule that I want to fix first. Specifically, the heat shield randomly stops protecting the capsule during reentry. I've tried everything I can think of to fix it. Repositioning it, using a procedural heat shield instead, even resizing it to twice the diameter of the pod, nothing works.

[BFEL]

Well, after looking in debug the plane wings are generating blue lift upwards, and the control surfaces generate downward yellow...whatever. Not sure if that's normal, maybe the solution is that I'm using TOO MANY control surfaces. That or the thing's just too damn heavy, that's always a possibility.