I've been reading about aviation physics a bit lately, and come across a few things that don't quite jive with my experiences on here. In SimplePlanes, the game calculates the center of lift by averaging the size and location of all your wings, which more or less makes sense because each one is providing lift, right? Sure, as long as the wings are providing lift, but in real life it seems that most horizontal stabilizers are designed to do just the OPPOSITE.
Because the center of mass is in the front of the plane, pulling down on the nose, aircraft designers use a variety of methods to make the horizontal stabilizers pull down on the tail to keep the nose from drooping in flight. Try to think of the aircraft as a scale with the center of lift in the middle holding the whole thing up and the tail and center of mass at each end, trying to pull their side down but evenly matched.
Anyway, does it make sense that the game moves the center of lift BACKWARDS when adding horizontal stabilizers? The game seems to consider h-stabs to be providing lift. I've experimented with making them pull downwards by rotating them 10 degrees and that certainly helps counterbalance a nose heavy plane, trim settings help a lot too, but is there some way of "inverting" their lift and making them pull downwards without altering the angle of attack?
Does any of what I've said make any sense to anyone at all?
@ChiChiWerx Yes, it seems you and I are of one mind on this subject completely. Great insight about the canards, btw.
@Alienbeef0421 Yeah, I always figured it just inverted the surface controls, not the actual lifting effect.
@F104Deathtrap Maybe, I never tried it though, because the pitch would be inverted
You are correct, I saw the same thing awhile ago. In SP, horiz stabs shift the CoL back, as if they're adding lift (Even though the stabs are symmetric in SP). They only work that way when a plane uses canards, but in most conventional aircraft, the stab pushes down to lift the nose which naturally falls (for stall recovery purposes). This is why canards are more efficient--the horiz stab ADDS to the total lift of the aircraft. So, you are correct...but...SP's emulation makes it close enough for our purposes. What do you think?
@Alienbeef0421 @MemeKingIndustriesAndMegaCorporation And in such a case, the wing in question provides negative lift?
Check with the dihedral setting. If the arrow points down then its inverted.
Stay woke.
@F104Deathtrap in its settings
@MemeKingIndustriesAndMegaCorporation Awesome! How?
@F104Deathtrap you can invert the H-Stabs.
@MemeKingIndustriesAndMegaCorporation Pulling the center of lift backwards makes the plane more nose heavy. H-stabs don't pull the nose up, they pull the tail down counterbalancing the nose-heavy center of mass. If you move the center of lift rearwards, the tail exerts less torque and the COM exerts more leverage. Or at least, it should. The game handles the way COM, COF and COT pull at each other just fine for me, but the way it handles H-Stabs is a bit confusing for me, it seems to treat them as if the pull upwards.
What you suggest is probably not very far from how the game really works, and I don't have a problem with that because it is a game after all. I was just curious if someone could teach me more about how the game works (and hopefully a bit more about physics) so I can design better planes.
Didn't you just say that H-Stabs are for pulling the nose up whenever the front is heavy? And if COM and COL Get affected by this (ie; push to the back of the plane) doesn't that make total sense?