On my planes I am planing on fighting out a good way to layer wings to make more stable performance craft. What do you think?
On my planes I am planing on fighting out a good way to layer wings to make more stable performance craft. What do you think?
@Skua sure! Np
@Krathar yeah no bother, it's nice to be able to help and you clearly put effort in to your posts. I'll check out that one you tagged me when I take a break from studying later
@Skua wow thanks for your time! I made a new plane that is less controllable but is very stable.
@Krathar you're talking about your Volcanic Seabird, I assume? That one is unstable because your centre of lift is in front of the centre of mass - I've got to admit, I'm actually surprised it flies as well as it does. I found it to be alright so long as only extremely gentle inputs were used, which was fine since it turns so quickly anyway. I made a version with a couple of small changes to fix that, just here.
@Skua that explains why my last plane was a tad unstable.
@Krathar a downward dihedral, or anhedral, makes a plane unstable in the roll axis. It's just like having your CoL ahead of your CoM, but for roll instead of pitch. I can explain why if you want but it's not terribly exciting.
Hypnoplanes (and also Delphinus' planes) are really controllable because the have extremely low wing loadings - after all, they are pretty much nothing but wing. Low wing loadings mean that you can use larger/more control surfaces without problems. Normal planes with higher wing loadings have to be a bit unstable to get that level of manoeuverability, because they have to use smaller control surfaces or they just twitch about instead of turning
Ps I was mostly thinking hypno planes which would allow more pitch and roll stabilization. Though that's just a theory
@Skua what would a downward dihedral do?
@DeezDucks is right, layering wings won't help stability. It will give you more lift, but that's about it. Layering your vertical stabilisers might help a bit, though, and an upward dihedral is also a good suggestion
Well having a good dihedral always seems to work great with me. An upwards dihedral stabilizes the plane. You can use some 0.3 fuselage blocks that don't appear often on this site to enlarge the look. Making layered wings just adds weight and drag and makes the plane sluggish and slow in my tests.