I know there are many many experienced players with great planes and designs, and who also have great tips that would be useful for the community, however these are a few tips I have picked up along the way that may be useful for the newer players.

Designing from the ground up: I generally follow 3 main steps in sequence;

1. Work on the shape and proportions. Its good spend a fair amount of time on this, because as you get further into the build, making any major changes to the body can affect various features and mechanics and take a long time to correct.

Features like bomb bays, missile bays, moving hatches, space/area for cockpits, etc also be added/allowed for.

1. Work on flight dynamics. Add engines if not already installed. Check that what you have designed can fly, before spending time on features. It doesn't need to be perfect at this stage, but with enough variability of where components are placed so adjustments can be made later eg. Able to shifting weight (CoM) without adding 1000s kgs to the plane.

Balancing the CoM, CoL and CoT is the focus here.

1. Add the detail, external weapons and cockpit. I add the cockpit last mainly because there are lots of small moving parts, which are easily disturbed.

Missile bays and the like - Add these in a sequence where one feature won't affect another. I generally build features from the rear to front, adding the cockpit last. The main thing to avoid is having to go back to fix something only to find by fixing it, it has affected somethings else.

If you have lots of moving parts, it is a good idea to save revisions and test frequently checking that what you have just added hasn't stopped something else from working, or worse - everything blows up when you launch!

Most important - when you post, be sure to spend time on finding good views/thumbnails to show off your design. Although I love the matt black / stealth look, it is sometimes difficult to see the plane when its posted, and people probably browse past a lot of great builds simply because they cannot seem them properly!

Other :

• For planes with a tripod landing gear set up - Place the rear landing gear just behind the CoM (red line) and this will make your plane take off very easily.
• Level flight - aim to have CoM, CoL and CoT on the same horizontal plane (sometimes its just not possible). If your plane pitches downwards, move the CoT lower (at rear), if pitching up move higher. There are other ways to do this, however this is a good starting point and will minimise having to juggle setting the airfoil parameters on multiple wings every time you make a change, also this helps if flying at different speeds.
• If you cannot nudge parts eg. IOS device, you can still rotate parts, and mirror parts into position. eg. Rotate a part 90 degrees, make the change, rotate the part back into position.
• If you have developed a super manoeuvrable plane and want to add weapons, mount them way forward under the wing - the thing to avoid is a missile hitting the plane if you fire it in an extreme inverted turn!

Hope this was useful.
SR