Imagine that first plane but with the bubble cockpit and the old style round intakes. It flames out at 25,000. But maybe your patience? At this point the plane plummets, but as it goes deeper into the atmosphere, it regains pitch authority, and at 10km it's enough to regain control and turn it around for a safe landing. So that means that even if you are inside the atmosphere but still orbital (such as during aerobraking), your science will not count as "Inside the atmosphere", For example, orbiting Kerbin above 250km altitude, your science is counted as "In Space High over Kerbin." Paste as plain text instead, Or is it the same for all celestial bodies? Unfortunately I won't be able to test it today, but @SaintWacko's proposal sounds promising. Why that? 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. The maximum cruise altitude is just over 40,000 feet. 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. Your answer got me in the right direction, though I ended up with a different design (see my own answer). The SR-71 could probably fly higher, but it isn't flying any more. i dont know what kind of range youre looking for but i would make a significantly smaller plane. as a rule of thumb they all lose thrust at higher altitudes and at high velocities. You could try combining the two. It is boosted into space by a launch vehicle, then re-enters Earth's atmosphere and lands as a spaceplane. It is stable but can not maintain altitude. If it's above the cross-hairs, you need a little less. There is a very close tolerance to the two speeds. - "In Space Low" means your craft is inside the "Space Border" altitude and in an orbital path. My question is really about controllability. I don't have any exact numbers for you, but you can right-click an engine in flight and it will show both current and optimal airflow, which should hopefully let you work out the best altitude. Hello there. (the engines will use very little at high altitude anyway). Double your speed, you need twice as much fuel. The J-404 "Panther" Afterburning Turbofan is a jet engine added in version 1.0.5. No, I think it's correct, unless I've got a brain fart going, here. High altitude flight is efficient because the air is thinner, and therefore aircraft experience less parasitic drag. Have you checked out the wiki yet? at the very least, you'd need the panther, that'll get you over 16k easily, well to 25k. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com, Press J to jump to the feed. : : . For example, the RAPIER engine doesn't seem as the first choice as the "best" high altitude air-breathing engine but in long-distance and high-altitude challenges it is. But you'll need to unlock: Which cost 300 science. What you should be concerned about is atmospheric drag, and that's minimized by high-altitude flight. The Rapier, for example, works great as a high-altitude engine, precisely because it can go so fast. To get higher with the low tech jet engines, you need rocket assist. If you upgrade to the panther (or get one on a contract) that engine can get you much higher. More air is better. I have enough patience to do the slow flying, but is it horribly inefficient? Air Intake) and how fast your aircraft ultimately flies (air resistance/altitude)! It seems to be based on the General Electric F-404 Afterburning Turbofan, which shares the same name and maximum thrust (85 kN dry). Air temperatures vary with latitude and time of day. Which makes this engine ideal for those missions which require doing many science activities above particular altitudes. Or about the same speed but 1000 m higher. As you found out, it basically konks out at 15km. When I say ", You know you've nailed it correctly if, when you're in level flight, your. Content titles and body; Content titles only It's Kerbal Space Program v.22! This means it is better to have excessive amounts of oxygen than not to. So if you replace the turbos with basic jets, you will have more thrust from the ground up, and your vessel will weigh slightly less. Why is there a voltage on my HDMI and coaxial cables? 20 votes, 21 comments. 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. This is particularly useful for pairs of engines, since this makes it possible to keep the thrust equal when activating the afterburners. But since when do Kerbals wait for ideal conditions? Simply changing the intakes made it fly completely out of control and impossible to land. Your engine burns the same amount of jetfuel per second regardless of how high or fast you are! ksp high altitude planebad bunny tour 2022 tickets ksp high altitude plane. Minimising the environmental effects of my dyson brain, Theoretically Correct vs Practical Notation. 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. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. You are simply running out of atmosphere (i.e. Upload or insert images from URL. How to make a loop for linear actuator in Kerbal Space Program, Breaking Ground. Incidentally, for these speeds and altitudes, ordinary jets are the better choice. What are the units of measure used in Kerbal Space Program? There's basically three ways to do that: lifting surfaces, thrust, and orbiting. KSP also tends to have very harsh induced drag if angle of attack gets too high. Note that keeping the plane weight low is critical, only carry a very small amount of fuel. The Panther engine can hold 19,000 steady and oscillates around 20,000. At the equator, sea level temperatures vary between a nighttime low of 9 C and a daytime high of 15 C. and our That's because wings need to have some AoA to the airstream in order to generate much lift. I would like to know which altitude I have to maintain for my experiments. 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. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries. Will post my results. 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 I also set it to enable the cockpit's reaction wheels to improve control at high altitude, and close air intakes to reduce drag. 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. Fighting oscillations. That's just a guess, though-- perhaps someone more familiar with FAR could weigh in.). Jets drop thrust at higher altitude and speed, but also drop . If drag were the only concern, at any given altitude the slower you go, the less fuel you need: the work done by drag over a distance grows linearly with speed (the force grows quadratically with speed, but the time falls linearly). Also, while you mentioned the TJs most efficient altitude is ~ 5km (I'm not sure, but lets assume it's true), you need to realize that the drag you're getting at that altitude is going to wreck any efficiency gains. As has been said, ISP is nothing to worry about. How can I make money in the new career mode? I also had problems with a high altitude plane until I decided to follow the K.I.S.S. Thank you, I was able to reach up to 24km altitude with this design. If too little air runs into the turbine your combustion chamber will not be able to burn up fuel effectively due to the lack of oxygen. So long as there's only one high-altitude measurement to take, you should be able to complete a whole set of 3-4 in one flight. There is no such thing as "so high radar can not detect it", since radar can detect things in outer space. Air Intake: Air Intake shows the amount of force your engine uses to suck air into the turbine. 1Altitude requirement 2Orbit 3Speed, range, and altitude 4Flight duration 5Flight profiles 5.1Ballistic missiles 5.2Tourist flights 5.3Scientific experiments 5.4Sub-orbital transportation 6Notable uncrewed sub-orbital spaceflights 7Crewed sub-orbital spaceflights 8Future of crewed sub-orbital spaceflight 9See also 10References Right now, my big, fat plane has trouble breaking 10 km altitude and 200 m/s forward speed (largely due to its payload). Redoing the align environment with a specific formatting, Trying to understand how to get this basic Fourier Series. My 'plane science' is more advanced than my 'rocket science' (career mode) because I got tired of seeing all the high-altitude missions I had on the books and wanted to finish them. But a rockets can do it. 101 kPa 1 atm Scale Height 5000 m Atmospheric Height 69 077.553 m 1.010-6 atm Minimum Temprature -40.19 C 232.96 K Maximum Temprature 20 C 293.15 K Oxygen Present Yes Contents 1 Kerbin 2 Topography 3 Kerbal Space Center 4 Atmosphere 4.1 The Troposphere 4.2 The Stratosphere 4.3 The Thermosphere 4.4 The Exosphere 5 The Kerbin System 5.1 The Mun You cannot paste images directly. That will unlock: Let me share what I know about jet engines, speed, and efficiency. 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. Really. Once you're at that regime, you should be able to cover huge distances on tiny amounts of fuel. Don't rely on the efficiency indicator! Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one. high-1 A Screenshot of Kerbal Space Program By: miklkit This is the current version. 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. It only takes a minute to sign up. The Kerbal Space Program subreddit. Any advices for building a vehicle for this task? 2022 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Display as a link instead, I don't have that cockpit in my career game yet, but maybe it will work with the other one. You can post now and register later. Even better, burn a little more, and you can pop out of the atmosphere for a bit and avoid all that nasty drag stuff. Designing a High Altitude Jet | KSP: Making Space Home Mike Aben 24.8K subscribers Join Subscribe 85 Share 3.4K views 1 year ago Ep. This works, but it's not optimal. Valve Corporation. Powered by Invision Community. Aircraft can be very temperamental to fly, especially on the keyboard. Turbojets are so ridiculously efficient that it doesn't really matter. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. Make sure you've angled your wings up slightly so that you provide enough lift for a 0 angle of attack at top speed. 3x06: I design a new, high altitude, jet to collect high atmospheric science. These designs are great for getting around Kerbin quickly, but without going orbital. Watch out for your SAS if you're running batteries without a jet for a long time. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account. 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. I got this game so I could over-engineer rockets, so I mostly ignore the airplanes. I've added more engines, more intakes to no avail. 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. You can halve the drag by climbing a bit less than 3500m. Keep in mind that wheesley engine's performance decreases significantly as the altitude increases. From my experience using a panther it starts to lose speed after 15-16 kms, a more suitable cruising height is 9-13km. Ep. How to know if you've nailed it perfectly: when you're cruising in level flight, you want the marker to be precisely centered in your navball cross-hairs. Yes. Paste as plain text instead, I'm trying to build a high altitude plane and have found out that the rules are different. Thanks for the help! The easiest "default" way to build a plane in KSP-- i.e. Thrust means that slower-is-better no longer applies: now, slower means less drag but more gravity, so there's a tradeoff (which I'm not going to carefully calculate for you, because it's hard). - Insane TWR didn't help. I've since shaved that down more but that was by going even higher and even faster). Building a High Altitude Jet | Stream pt. The more successful the flights, the more successful the space program is. 3x06: I design a new, high altitude, jet to collect high. I generally don't fuss with AoI unless I'm making a long range cruiser. 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. First is thrust; the higher you get, the lower the thrust your engines deliver. The other thing to bear in mind is that tuning the AoA (angle of attack) of your wings makes a difference. Best way to get down into thicker air and land is to perform what dogfighters called a 'Split-S'. Orbiting is the most fun one: the higher the orbit, the less speed you need to maintain to stay in orbit, *and* the less air there is, so that's a double-whammy in terms of reducing fuel consumption. The most efficient way is, of course, to make a high altitude (or space) plane. Ideally, you'll want to avoid these contracts until you get the High-Altitude Flight tech node and the improved jet engine that comes with it. 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. One of my planes is small and agile, and can easily enough glide to a safe landing even if the rockets consume all the fuel. 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. rev2023.3.3.43278. Is it possible to get to an altitude of 16-20km with normal plane engines? By climbing, you reduce drag, exponentially with altitude. 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. In the stock atmosphere, the benefits of moving faster outweigh almost everything else. Maneuver node plans don't take drag into account, so you'll have to overshoot quite a bit to compensate. I did some testing and found that the turbojets get the best Isp around 5.2 km altitude, so I was thinking of flying at that altitude. Let me. You are just about at maximum speed and at the same time very close to stall speed. Even up there the plane acts squirrely. Very cool. - "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. jet engine efficiency in this game is based on built in thrust curves. Pasted as rich text. Either finish the low-altitudes and then spend all your fuel on the high-altitude boost, or do the boost first and save a little fuel or try to hit the rest through unpowered gliding. Display as a link instead, If it's above the cross-hairs, you need a little less. Download (104.45 MiB) License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Game Version: 1.8.1 Downloads: 371,115 Author: blackheart612 Mod Website: Forum Thread Support this mod: Donate Followers: 626 Outdated Mod This mod is not known to work with the latest version of Kerbal Space Program. If not, please explain why, which I know you have no problem doing! Challenges However, I've failed to build a vehicle to achieve this (without a hundred retries). Just sounds like the engines can't get enough air, in KSP high speed also generates air intake so I'm guessing what is happening is that you have the initial speed to get to altitude but the lack of air at altitude is starving the engine resulting in lower speed which further reduces air intake and it cascades until either the engine shuts down or you return to denser atmosphere at a lower altitude. Once I'm near or in the target area, I set the throttle to 0 and start the Swivel. Pretty often, the tail "wiggled" and/or the plane became totally unstable when I fired the rocket boosters. Since gravity is effectively lower, they don't need as much wing area to maintain altitude-- which, in turn, means less drag, which makes for more efficient flight. You may be correct and that 3 engine plane is a lemon. KSP Quick Guides: High Altitude Design and Flying - Stock v.23 Stoober AK 3.32K subscribers Subscribe 21K views 8 years ago This tutorial will cover designing and flying a plane that can soar. You cannot paste images directly. Thanks. 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 try using SRBs instead. 2022 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. So, to correct " is below crosshairs", what you need to do is to add a little AoA to the wings. All rights reserved. Do plugins for Kerbal Space Program work on unix? Or it can supercruise at three times the speed of an equivalent Wheesley jet (with nearly equal fuel efficiency) at 15,000 m altitude. The sweet spot for the upper atmo engines, I find, is between 10k and 12k. Another approach, which I was managing with some success before I figured out jets, is to build a rocket and catapult yourself towards the measurement point. Evidence. FAR is supposed to take aspect into account, but I'm not very experienced with it and cannot advice you as to how it works. How do you get out of a corner when plotting yourself into a corner.