Yes. 2.) General Electric F-404 Afterburning Turbofan, Stratus-V Cylindrified Monopropellant Tank, Kerbodyne KR-2L+ "Rhino" Liquid Fuel Engine, LFB KR-1x2 "Twin-Boar" Liquid Fuel Engine, T-1 Toroidal Aerospike "Dart" Liquid Fuel Engine, S1 SRB-KD25k "Kickback" Solid Fuel Booster, IX-6315 "Dawn" Electric Propulsion System, AE-FF1 Airstream Protective Shell (1.25m), AE-FF3 Airstream Protective Shell (3.75m), PB-NUK Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?title=J-404_%22Panther%22_Afterburning_Turbofan&oldid=95515. As long as the engine gets enough air it will work at proper efficiency. Have a plane that ditches its wings and rockets up to 18km once you reach the right point. It is somewhat slow but very steady in flight. Evidence. if you just go into the SPH, slap together some parts like Legos, and go-- is to attach them with zero AoA. - Insane lift to weight didn't help. "Whiplash" Turbojet. If your using NEAR/FAR, once you get high and fast, kill the engine and glide to save fuel. Note that you need to activate the afterburner ("Wet Mode") manually. I decided to look into that two intakes thing, and it turns out to make 11-12 m/s difference at 19,000m with my plane. One problem is i'm running stock on career mode and only have 30 part to spare, so large planes are out of the question. Your link has been automatically embedded. Unfortunately, there's no simple rule to tell you what the angle needs to be when you're building the plane-- it depends on lots of variables, such as your weight, drag, intended cruising altitude, intended cruising speed. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Upload or insert images from URL. - "In Space High" means your craft is inside the given Sphere of Influence and above the "Space Border" altitude listed in the Celestial Body Multiplier Matrix. Immediately starting rocket engines at full throttle turned out to make most of my aircrafts totally unstable, turning them up gradually worked way better. Slap that behind a plane you'll be able to go beyond 20km without any trouble. You can do that by right-clicking the engine and clicking "Toggle Mode." How do I install mods for Kerbal Space Program 1.1? The returns are diminishing so eventually you will hit a ceiling. At that point your engines will be running about .7-.8 efficiency and you will be out of the thicker atmo which will allow you to go faster. Minimising the environmental effects of my dyson brain, Theoretically Correct vs Practical Notation. Stack Exchange network consists of 181 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. air) that high up. My plane has turbojets and lots of fuel, but I am wondering what the optimal way to fly is. Then I increase throttle until about 2/3 or even full, climbing with a high inclination (it can also go straight up). Another problem is jet engines stealing fuel from the rockets' tanks - you may want to pump the fuel manually (requires an R&D centre upgrade) or add some pipes between them. I started by attaching two LV-909 rocket engines to a regular low-atmosphere plane: In this save, I don't have custom action groups yet, so I'm using the RCS control to toggle between jet and rocket modes. The stratospheric region, where temperature rises as altitude increases, spans the region between the altitudes of 10 km and 22 km. It was meant for low altitude flight. The ideal case for optimally efficient flight (which is what you want if you're trying to maximize cruise altitude) is when your wings are mounted to the body, pitched up just enough that when cruising in level flight, the body of the aircraft is pointing perfectly . If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account. The easiest "default" way to build a plane in KSP-- i.e. Display as a link instead, Really. You may be correct and that 3 engine plane is a lemon. (the engines will use very little at high altitude anyway). Thats my problem right now. i recently used a single whiplash plane and was able to maintain a stable 21-22k meter altitude. This can make it a good alternative for when you want something that can be controllable and doesn't need excessive heat shielding, but still need to be able to go incredibly fast if necessary, at the expense of increased fuel consumption. Something that I think has become less clear since someone updated the wiki. A destructible memorial to the old Mk. This causes the body of your plane to generate additional drag. Due to the lower air pressure at higher altitudes its thrust output decreases accordingly. Your previous content has been restored. Pretty often, the tail "wiggled" and/or the plane became totally unstable when I fired the rocket boosters. Clear editor. She has a horrible turn rate and oscillates a couple of thousand meters at cruise, but it's flyable. No, I think it's correct, unless I've got a brain fart going, here. Alternatively, you can assign the afterburner toggle (labelled "switch mode") to an action group if you wish to activate it with a hotkey. In the stock atmosphere, the benefits of moving faster outweigh almost everything else. Even better, burn a little more, and you can pop out of the atmosphere for a bit and avoid all that nasty drag stuff. Most SSTO space planes would be able to accomplish this easily. The drag differential is because your long-wing layout is using a bunch of struts, and the reason your delta-wing has a higher ceiling is because it has more wing area to provide lift. Your previous content has been restored. Note that keeping the plane weight low is critical, only carry a very small amount of fuel. Should i add a larger wing area for higher lift? Proceed with caution. Pasted as rich text. This thread is quite old. Sustained flight at over 20km requires at a minimum the Panther in Afterburning mode. Welcome to the forums, ZDW. You cannot paste images directly. 600+ m/s) and low altitudes (e.g. Trying to do something without the right part is long and difficult path. Air Intake) and how fast your aircraft ultimately flies (air resistance/altitude)! For comparison, the second most maneuverable engine is the CR-7 R.A.P.I.E.R. EDIT: Essentially, make like an SR-71, if an SR-71 didn't have cooling problems limiting it to Mach 3.4. I have enough patience to do the slow flying, but is it horribly inefficient? What's the difference between a power rail and a signal line? (Actually, four ways: but balloons aren't in the stock game) Lifting surfaces are great but they lose effectiveness just as fast with altitude as drag falls. 1 Pod outside the level 3 VAB. And it's stock, unfortunately. Since turbos are almost always enough to get you off the ground and up to altitude, I usually just do straight turbojets (with some RAPIERs for SSTO spaceplanes); the minute amount of fuel saved during the ascent isn't worth lugging those superfluous engines around at the hypersonic regime. High altitude flight is efficient because the air is thinner, and therefore aircraft experience less parasitic drag. Powered by Invision Community. I've been finding it difficult to build a jet that can fly over 15km alt. Is it suspicious or odd to stand by the gate of a GA airport watching the planes? Make sure you have lots of control surfaces because at very high in the atmosphere, there's not much air for the wings to control the craft with. As I understand, the OP wanted "the most efficient way to fly", and simply needed a bit of help in realizing that that is a hypersonic, high-altitude, high-performance aircraft which is a RAPIER and a little oxidizer away from being an SSTO spaceplane. To avoid running out of fuel altogether, I have a second plane with small tanks (no oxidizer) attached directly to the jet engines, and the rockets attached behind the fuselage, which is entirely oxidized tanks. The maximum cruise altitude is just over 40,000 feet. 3.) Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. If you've attached them to your fuselage with zero AoA, what that means is that when you fly, you're going to have to have the entire plane pitched slightly above in order to generate lift. If it's above the cross-hairs, you need a little less. I was generally under the impression that basic jets were mostly deadweight on high-performance aircraft: while they are superior for low-speed, low-altitude operations, they become deadweight at hypersonic velocities. That's because wings need to have some AoA to the airstream in order to generate much lift. I looked into the .cfg files and there are no special properties allocated to them. Arqade is a question and answer site for passionate videogamers on all platforms. : : . As said above, the Wheesley is specifically designed as a low altitude engine. I don't have the numbers handy, but you can expect something like 400m/s at 15km. However, I've failed to build a vehicle to achieve this (without a hundred retries). It may work with stock too, I just don't know. Using Kolmogorov complexity to measure difficulty of problems? Secondly don't think of engines working better at different altitudes, think of them working better with different air intake quantities. high-1 A Screenshot of Kerbal Space Program By: miklkit This is the current version. Make sure you've angled your wings up slightly so that you provide enough lift for a 0 angle of attack at top speed. Is there a single-word adjective for "having exceptionally strong moral principles"? Stack Exchange network consists of 181 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.. Visit Stack Exchange When you are surrounded by plenty of air there will of course be no need to suck in air artificially but the higher you get the less dense the air around you becomes and in order to make sure that your engines have enough oxygen to burn the fuel it needs to suck air in forcefully. If you want to cover your aircraft with loads of intakes, I'm sure you could easily fly above 35km and reach 2000+ m/s velocity. Or you need to put a little bit of angle of incidence in your wings, which will reduce drag since you don't have to pitch the entire plane up, but will be stuck at a fixed angle meaning you'll have to pitch up or down anyway during certain phases of the flight that the plane isn't optimised for. Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, and our products. If too much air runs into the turbine, the excessive amount just flows out unused through side-vents (I think). its rather flat but its a solid surface. I checked the wiki before I wrote my question, it seems I overread this paragraph Something that I think has become less clear since someone updated the wiki. At 3500m, you have half the drag you'd have at the surface; at 7km, 1/4 the drag, at 10.5km, 1/8 the drag, etc. Once it's in the air, it's stable and easy to fly and manages to fly at altitudes between 11k 12k without problems. Right now, my big, fat plane has trouble breaking 10 km altitude and 200 m/s forward speed (largely due to its payload). With only panthers unlocked I might add. It only takes a minute to sign up. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one. The Panther engine can hold 19,000 steady and oscillates around 20,000. With some fins to keep you stable and careful aim, you can hit your desired location and altitude and will have 5-10 seconds to collect data before you hurtle past it and pull your chute. . To reach the initial low Earth orbit of the International Space Stationof 300 km (now 400 km), the delta-v is over six times higher, about 9.4 km/s. Is it possible to get to an altitude of 16-20km with normal plane engines? Don't rely on the efficiency indicator! If not, please explain why, which I know you have no problem doing! @SaintWacko's advice is probably the most practical. How do I align things in the following tabular environment? You get tons of thrust if you put it into "wet" mode, but you lose fuel efficiency. It is usually best for initial designs to be based on logic and real-world physics and then be prepared to experiment with non-logical alternatives for optimisation. Espaol - Latinoamrica (Spanish - Latin America), https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1933948095, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1933948668, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1934517923, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1335577943, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1640213502, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1640214586, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1937826505, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1937931692. Note that KSP planes get one substantial speed benefit that's much more pronounced than IRL aircraft, due to the freakishly small planet sizes: they're actually flying at a large fraction of orbital velocity. Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible. Thankyou all, I now reckon I have a much better understanding of the engines, hopefully that'll translate to better aircraft. I start with the normal jet engines (which takes almost the complete runway). All the information you could want to know about science, including the altitudes for each celestial body, and what altitudes a given experiment works on are available at: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Science. The longest flight got them down to a little more than half full. The other one I stay around 6000 meters. Building a rocket to fly vertical seems to be nearly impossible, in the atmosphere they tend to become unstable (or maybe I missed a trick?). ksp high altitude planebad bunny tour 2022 tickets ksp high altitude plane. It is stable but can not maintain altitude. Clear editor. Can't remember where I saw/read about it - Scott Manley maybe? Why do small African island nations perform better than African continental nations, considering democracy and human development? Using very light "engine rich" planes and "reverse swooping" (building velocity at 10km then gently curving up) you can temporarily get above 20km with Wheesely and Juno. Challenges The U-2 is probably the highest altitude aircraft still flying. Is it even possible? However, it seems as if your delta wing has has more area, might that be it? The most efficient way is, of course, to make a high altitude (or space) plane. Or it can supercruise at three times the speed of an equivalent Wheesley jet (with nearly equal fuel efficiency) at 15,000 m altitude. If you nudge your wing's angle up slightly with rotate tool then it'll move your prograde closer to your direction of flight and significantly reduce drag. below 5,000 m), since the engine's extreme maneuverability may allow the aircraft to perform turns sharply enough to break up in flight. Display as a link instead, 2/3 (KSP 1.11.2) - YouTube I break out the Mk2 parts and Panther engines to build a better jet that can go higher and faster. Subscribe -. Powered by Invision Community, Thanks, I'll go try to stuff a few extra turbojets and intakes on my plane, I was generally under the impression that basic jets were mostly deadweight on high-performance aircraft: [] at hypersonic velocities. How can I make money in the new career mode? A well-designed jet with this engine and with the afterburner lit, flown properly, can momentarily climb to 30,000 m altitude. even stranger is that the surface is textured. By clicking Accept all cookies, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy. You need to do it with what you've got. Air temperatures vary with latitude and time of day. When added to a plane it allows tuning of the controls vs speed/altitude/G load/other factors. More air is better. Paste as plain text instead, To get there, you're going to want to climb at the fastest rate you can manage to 18-20 km, at which point you should mostly level off and start accelerating horizontally.