Before I start, Jundroo please fix T2000, is broken
I've been a part of this community now for like what, 5+ years? I've seen my own skill and that of others grow and seen players come and go. Over the years I've picked up tons of useful tricks within the game I figured I'd share, I'm fully aware others may have already covered these before but it's good to reiterate.
- USE THE TOOLS AT YOUR DISPOSAL:
While browsing through the site recently I've noticed quite a few players who have made per se, a replica lacking one of the major features of the aircraft such as the wing dihedral. There exists an in-game feature for just this sort of thing, while I still prefer the Fine Tuner mod it's purely because I've used it for 4 years. This vanilla feature has been in the game for close to a year and is powerful and should be used whenever it applies, you can do really useful thing with it as shown below:
It's super intuitive and arguably easier to use than the old Fine Tuner Mod, check your connections, rotate and move entire wings and assemblies. Make sure that if you're moving or rotating something like an entire wing, that it only connects to the body from one part, selected the option "connected parts" and rotate from that one.
With these tools, there is no excuse for having a part of a build that should be rotated but isn't. They're soo useful and I don't understand why more players aren't taking advantage of it. Use the tools at your disposal, no player should have excuses for not using this.
2.Blueprints! And how I use them:
Being a primarily replica builder, the addition of the the DesignerSuite has been a literal game changer for me, now I don't have to upload an unlisted and overlay the 3 way views with blueprint images in Photoshop like I used to do.
How I use it is I first grab decent or high quality blueprints off the internet, Line Drawings and ones with clean lines are always the better ones, as a lot of the seemingly older or blotchier looking ones don't show enough detail, have parts are incorrect angles or are just straight up wrong, never use those. Then I make a a small cross out of fuselage blocks to get the the correct dimensions, put the cockpit on that frame and load in the blueprints above said frame like so, it should look like this when done:
Keep the cockpit in the same spot for as long as you can, building the plane like this above it helps keep the blueprint aligned and prevent accidents from happening. Keep large sections like wings unrotated until your done with them or happy with how they look. Also personally I like to have the plane painted in a dark ish gray or an orange at the beginning so I can see the shape of the plane better, glossy paint tends to be distracting and hide faults in the shape. HOWEVER, blueprints are not the be all end all for replicas, use other image references, blueprints often times only show the basic outline of the vehicle and miss stuff a lot of smaller details.
3.Flight models:
For any aircraft and especially a good replica, there's always a demand for not just an accurate visual model, but a flight one as well. There's always a little disappointing when a good looking replica flies like a laser pointer or doesn't fly at all. Very few aircraft, if any should fly rock solid and stable like that, the air is a finicky fluid and no plane should really cut glide through it like its a knife thru butter or like it's on rails.
While its always different for every aircraft, when I make a replica I try and have a wing surface area of at most 50-60% more than the IRL plane. Though when you want to be accurate with this, make sure you remove any vertical wings as SP takes that into account while irl it does not.
As I said in step 2, get outside reference material if you want. For replicas try finding stat sheets or a nice pencil on paper tables made for military testing on old aircraft. Pilot retellings and video's are also excellent. Other than that, play around with the the wing sizes, control surface sizes and CoM to get flight model that feels nice. For the more technically inclined players, pull up the console by hitting the key below esc and type in "DebugExpression VerticalG" to measure your aircrafts G force, most manned aircraft shouldn't really exceed 10G's of positive force and some 1-2G's of negative force.
4.Misc. Tips!:
- Engines in SP are finicky or extremely off with their fuel burn levels, change the Power multiplier or max value in overload to get something you want. Max power will change the fuel burn rate, power output as well as how long it takes for the engine to reach max power, changing power multiplier changes just max thrust and these two are affected by eachother.
Adding on to fuel burn, another good way to get an accurate or acceptable range is to just increase the max fuel capacity. I generally prefer this over modifying min-max values for prop engine cause modifying those on props makes them sound and spin
weirdly. From personal experience, due to Sp's scuffed Fuel burn rates, one of my replicas was burning fuel 9 times faster than it should've, decreasing my endurance from 3-4 hours to less than 30 minutes. To combat this, I increased the 360 liter fuel tank 9 fold to 3240 liters and set the fuel tanks mass to 1/9th of normal. This basically just simulates 360 liters cause the T2000 Radial is a scuffed engine in every regard and I hate it.Increase mass on parts like wheels, shocks and pistons to make them stronger, and less susceptible to stuff like bending or warping.
Above all of these though, the most important tip, accept and use community feedback, feedback and critique from other players is by far the most important way to improve your own building and I would have never gotten to where I am today without learning off of peoples feedback. sometimes feedback isn't always positive, heck it sometimes can be all negative. But if it's genuine feedback you need to have a thick skin and use it cause everybody communicates differently. Most of the community is just here to help other players grow and it's frustrating when you want to help someone but they won't let you do that.
K that's probably wayy to long of a forum post. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask me. I'm kind of a bad teacher even though I have a ton of experience so a lot of stuff might have slipped by me. Hope you found this helpful! :)
@DeezDucks thank you DeezNuts :)
Jk
@JuanNotAnAlt you have to make sure the entire wing is connected to the body thru that part alone, else it won't do it.
@DeezDucks how do you rotate the whole wing part by just clicking and rotating one part? I dunno how to do it, can you tell me the way plz? :/
@Lanc soon :)
Well that sucks lol@DeezDucks
@Hedero After Prime Minister Diefen-dumbdumb cancelled the program, he had almost all the documents on the Arrow destroyed.
Oh really? I would've imagined there would be a lot of documentation of that old bird.@DeezDucks
@Hedero that's hard if you're building something like say, the CF-105 which has almost no documents left of it
That's a lot how I feel. But I would get nearly as much negative feedback about the flightmodel as how it looks if I did it very wrong. I mean, I don't want my airplane to fly like a brick or a laser pointer, but people seem to care a lot about if the plane flies exactly like the real thing or not.@DeezDucks
@Hedero Honestly I just fiddle with everything till I get something that I like and feel is accurate enough, I'm mostly for recreating the accurate look of something. I'm a little more loose with the flight model, I just want it to be fun to fly lmao
Dude that's awesome! I did hear from Edensk that one method he uses to get realistic speed on his builds is to make the thrust to weight ratio in sp accurate to the real thing. I haven't tried it yet but I am planning on seeing how it works. I'm hoping that it solves most of my rate of climb and accelleration issues.@DeezDucks
@Hedero ah yeah for flight models it kind of comes down to a mix of comparing it with specs I know as well as just the feel of it. And yes, hopefully I can get them all out sometimes, the Beaver and CF-105 are nearly done.
Very good forum post my dude! I already know of most of these tips though, but this is exactly what some people need to build great replicas. I am however still learning he whole "flight model" thing. I really stink at that part of sp. And sorry to get distracted but are those airplanes you plan on uploading? They look gorgeous that's why I'm wondering lol.@DeezDucks
@AircraftoftheRedStar theres really no comparing who's niche of building is "the hardest" because it all comes down to how willing you are to follow thru and find info and the like on it. Certainly only making paper aircraft is difficult but if you really want to go overboard with a well known aircraft, you still have to find the technical documents or flight manuals on it. Sometimes people obsess over the most minute of flight characteristics.
I'd love to see more posts like this, but I'd settle for more people taking the advice.
I think I might have one of the hardest jobs here as I only make paper projects/prototypes. Most of the time I have to go to hell and back to get a decent blueprint; not to mention if one still exists.
I find making the flight model very frustrating considering that the stuff I deal with is almost raw design with no prototypes which means probably little wind tunnel testing/design improvements to the design. I just make the wing very close to the real design (like jamesPLANESii) and suck up results. My M-31’s flight behavior frustrated me extensively as the wing shape caused lots of landing problems. But fixing that was almost hopeless cause guess wat, no flight data.
In spite of all the problems I have to face, I still think I do a good job.
@JeskoGoesVROOM Well I didn't recommend it for people who wanted to make fictional vehicles, absolutely let your creativity go wild on those ones. But even with replicas using blueprints, you can notice that some builders have distinct styles and difference between each other. Building a replica doesn't mean you have to be 100% spot on accurate, besides the basic standards your free to make some stylistic decisions imo.
Also I like to use the-blueprints.com when I look for them but yes, sometimes its hard to find a good quality blueprint or even a blueprint in general for that matter.
Some say the Fine Turner was made by God Himself.
@JeskoGoesVROOM
but yes, the built-in fine tuner is literally the most OP thing ever and i wouldn't have done ANYTHING without it
i dont use blueprints cause:
1. i like to have my own style
2. sometimes i cant find blueprints of certain things
3. the designer suite is kinda buggy for me (imo, no offense intented to the creator)
@ImaCat I never really bothered to use the in game one cause I figured they did the same thing, but rotating large sections of a build is a lot easier in the in game one so I've been using it for that
@KnightOfRen if you're talking about stretching parts and part manipulation like changing length, they do a completely different job from eachother, if you're talking about the in rotate and position adjust tool I mentioned above, it's more intuitive and easier to use but the old Fine Tuner mod can do things the other one can't, if you use the second one I mentioned here idk why you didn't use it on your corsairs wings.
in 1959, development of what would be subsequently designated as the Saab 105 was initiated by Saab. The company had decided to develop the aircraft as a private venture and intended for the type to be capable of serving in a wide variety of military and civil capacities. In a military capacity, the 105 can be operated as a jet trainer, conduct aerial reconnaissance and ground attack, and a limited interceptor capability.[4][5] Amongst the diverse roles planned for the aircraft, Saab proposed a four-to-five seat business jet cabin configuration which was intended to be used by corporate customers.[6] At the time, the 105 was one of the only small European aircraft to be equipped with turbofan, which was reported as of interest to prospective business customers.[7] The 105 was intended to launch Saab into the business jet market; however, ultimately no such customers emerged for the type and thus Saab elected to focus its interest upon military customers instead.[8]
Early on, the Swedish Air Force had formed a commitment with Saab that, contingent upon satisfactory performance of the prototype during flight testing, that an order for at least 100 aircraft would be placed.[2][9] In December 1961, the Swedish Government announced that it had authorized the Swedish Air Force to sponsor the development and manufacture of a single prototype Saab 105 in a training configuration.[10] On 29 June 1963, this first prototype conducted its maiden flight.[11] The flight test program soon revealed the type to have good handling qualities and to be capable of performing aerobatic maneuvers.[12] In March 1965, a single prototype was dispatched to Turbomeca's facilities in Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Aquitaine, France, for further flight testing of its Turbomeca Aubisque powerplant.[13]
On 6 March 1965, the Swedish Air Force received authorisation from the Swedish Government to place an order for an initial quantity of 130 Saab 105 aircraft. The Swedish aircraft were divided into three principal variants, these being the Sk 60A for training and liaison duties using a four-seat configuration, the Sk 60B for light attack missions in a twin side-by-side seating configuration, and the Sk 60C dual-role attack and reconnaissance aircraft, equipped with various cameras in the aircraft's nose for the latter role
When I make reicas, I make the wing area and shapes the same as the real life counterpart and it almost always results in realistic performance and a nice realistic flying experience.
The wing physics in SP are far better than people realise.
@DeezDucks
Also I prefer transform tool over fine tuner because it's faster