@kismit Well done on the success of your build. We may have talked about this before already but my offer to mount funky trees weapons to your build instead of default missiles still stands; you know where to find me.
@CACHA That highly depends on how the rest of your plane is built. You could potentially turn whatever you want to measure onto it's butt and measure the drag force when the entire belly of the plane is headed into the wing (aoa of 90 degrees) and the correlation of aoa and drag force should be roughly linear.
To answer your question better,
Funky Trees is essentially a coding language unique to SimplePlanes and essential to programming your plane to do more than the bare, default, minimum.
A Funky Trees MIssile is essentially re-inventing the wheel in terms of practicality, since the in game default missiles are a lot more easily customizable, consistent, and easy to use. However, there is joy for the small number of us to take advantage of the game's physics engine to test our engineering abilities.
@SuperSuperTheSylph Good work on the missile, however I have a couple feedback based on my own experience with FT missile
1. The symmetrical airfoil wings stall past 13 degrees of aoa, so there's usually no point in deflecting the fins past like 10 degrees; this will almost always give you the best maneuverability
2. The guidance is very rudimentary and tbh very inaccurate. I would recommend you to look into the kinematic equation in radial coordinates, aka what automatic turrets also use for lead/aim. If you want to take it one step further, I recommend you to look up proportional guidance in the context of missile guidance design.
That being said, this is a big step for you and I remember taking steps like these 2 years ago.
@Quercon and yes i have considered using coordinate transfers but those are extremely tedious to code and is simply not worth it for this type of build. Perhaps it would be worth it for future ballistic missile builds though.
@Quercon PID is a very simple and flexible tool and how to calibrate it depends on your understanding of what the I and D term does. The I term is used if you have consistent undershoot that can not be corrected with P over time, and D is used for dampening oscillations and preventing overshoots. What i used in this missile specifically is called proportional guidance, and it guides by controlling the angular acceleration of the missile , and so it oscillates a lot, thus i have a D term. Feel free to go into the code and mess with it to see what i’m talking abt.
@llDeadboyll It depends but generally, there's always a way around it. Although it is always better to take the extra time to cover all of your bases.
If it is a conventional plane then an autopilot can totally ignore angle of attack/slip values. If it is something PSM capable (intentional or not) then you definitely need to take care of AOA and make sure you don't stall yourself when you don't want to.
@llDeadboyll Assuming you are asking me if it is possible to make a missile autopilot without taking into account of Angle Of Attack and Angle Of Slip; Yes, I do it without those values all the time, especially for multi-firing or aircraft mounted missiles since a flight computer that's not set as the primary cockpit does not return values of angle of attack/slip and calculating them is a hassle and adds more variables that you have to transfer and more points for failure/inconsistency.
Looking back I also realized that the game seems to already take into account the wetted area of objects when it spits you the drag value, since in all my testing, even with different geometries, the value of 0.0010145 was consistent.
Thus the in game drag value is not the drag coefficient, rather the Drag coefficient times wetted area. The proper drag force experienced by your aircraft can still be calculated with the original equation in post.
@ThomasRoderick mk i thought abt it a little more
You are right in that the Drag is proportional to wetted area. Then the parasite drag force felt by the whole aircraft equation should be
‘D=ACd0.5rhov^2’
You are also right in the Cd is indeed dimensionless, so units on both side of the question must cancel out. The only way that would happen is if the equation is arranged as above (Force cancels Force, remember that the right side of the equation is basically dynamic pressure times area = force)
@ThomasRoderick The Coefficient of drag is indeed proportional to the wetted area of the plane. D in my equation is the drag Force felt by the airplane, which increases with airspeed
@Graingy
1. Drag coefficient is a non-dimensionalized coefficient to measure and compare drag. Aka it is independent of speed/altitude and thus u can directly compare this value between planes and designs
2. To my knowledge air density is modeled using an ideal standard day scenario and yes it decreases as u get higher in altitude
3. Yes air density affects jet engine performance heavily in simpleplanes. However I am not sure about how it affects prop engines.
4. Yes u would multiply the drag scale of the wing.
5. I don’t know what kind of scale would be realistic for the wing just yet cause i haven’t tested that. In addition drag produced by the wing IRL is heavily dependent on it’s shape and may differ wildly even at the same surface area.
6. Yes u can search it up in reference to an existing aircraft. You would want to search up Parasite drag coefficient and the symbol you should be looking for is Cd0. Then use the formula/relations above to find the in game drag value u should be shooting for.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very aware of the difficulties of using the targeting computer on mobile, specifically that the knobs are really hard to grab hold of. I do not have a solution for this other than to recommend you to play it on PC. This will be accounted for for my next project. I apologize for the inconvenience.
I sincerely appreciate all of your support despite the technical difficulties.
@llDeadboyll I suppose it was from a lack of understanding of how Ballistic missiles work and my general bias against anything to do with space at the time. I’ve since read some technical books and grew an interest in Ballistic Missiles, so I started to learn how they work and I started to tinker… and here we are 3 months later
Hi @kismit, I love the funky trees implementations on this build and I think we may have a great collaboration opportunity with my funky trees weapon skills. I'd be happy to provide you with my weapons or build them for you to use on future versions of this plane. Let me know what you think!
@llDeadboyll mayhapes. There will certainly be tweaks that needs to be made but i see no reason why it should not work if u implement it properly. If u want me to help u further message me on discord.
@Ashdenpaw1 Not to my knowledge. The RIM-116 had to use rolling motion because of it's 1D passive radio wave seeker, used alongside it's IR seeker to better negate the effect of the sea deflecting IR signals. That said, this type of seeker probably does not provide too much benefits in an Air-To-Air use and thus rolling the missile is not required.
@localf15enjoyer yes but does it roll and track by FT?
Rolling-Airframe Missile isn’t an exclusive name to the RIM-116, but a type of missile flight control and that is what i am claiming to have achieved first.
@CorporalWojak Yes, but it's a little more complicated than drag and drop...
go inside the missile and find the flight computer, detach it and save it as sub-assembly
take the missile with the pylon and save it as sub-assembly
go to your new plane and attach the missile where u want
attach the corresponding flight computer to the missile, preferably inside and aligned with the center of the missile.
Copy in all of the variables from this plane
If you did these steps your missile should in theory work. It's a little bit of a process and kinda hard to explain without going into why you need to do each steps
@llDeadboyll try flying the missile manually with pitch roll yaw and etc. If you can’t even fly the missile straight by urself the funky trees code is gonna have a hard time doing it
If that isn’t the problem then ur code is 100% the problem
@Ku or more specifically
the missile tracks the elevation of the target by aligning the pitch angle of the missile to a calculated pitch angle that will enable the missile to hit the target
if the missile is too low to the ground, the calculated pitch angle will simple become 0 and make the missile fly level, thus avoiding going into the water
Hi @Monarchii , do you think I can take over this project and see if I can make it work? I will credit you again for the missile design when it comes out
@kismit Well done on the success of your build. We may have talked about this before already but my offer to mount funky trees weapons to your build instead of default missiles still stands; you know where to find me.
@CACHA That highly depends on how the rest of your plane is built. You could potentially turn whatever you want to measure onto it's butt and measure the drag force when the entire belly of the plane is headed into the wing (aoa of 90 degrees) and the correlation of aoa and drag force should be roughly linear.
To answer your question better,
Funky Trees is essentially a coding language unique to SimplePlanes and essential to programming your plane to do more than the bare, default, minimum.
A Funky Trees MIssile is essentially re-inventing the wheel in terms of practicality, since the in game default missiles are a lot more easily customizable, consistent, and easy to use. However, there is joy for the small number of us to take advantage of the game's physics engine to test our engineering abilities.
@RicardoACE you have a discord?
@SuperSuperTheSylph Good work on the missile, however I have a couple feedback based on my own experience with FT missile
1. The symmetrical airfoil wings stall past 13 degrees of aoa, so there's usually no point in deflecting the fins past like 10 degrees; this will almost always give you the best maneuverability
2. The guidance is very rudimentary and tbh very inaccurate. I would recommend you to look into the kinematic equation in radial coordinates, aka what automatic turrets also use for lead/aim. If you want to take it one step further, I recommend you to look up proportional guidance in the context of missile guidance design.
That being said, this is a big step for you and I remember taking steps like these 2 years ago.
@Unitedareospace21 Ok what do u need it to do
@Unitedareospace21 Alright what would u like help with on it
@Quercon and yes i have considered using coordinate transfers but those are extremely tedious to code and is simply not worth it for this type of build. Perhaps it would be worth it for future ballistic missile builds though.
@Quercon PID is a very simple and flexible tool and how to calibrate it depends on your understanding of what the I and D term does. The I term is used if you have consistent undershoot that can not be corrected with P over time, and D is used for dampening oscillations and preventing overshoots. What i used in this missile specifically is called proportional guidance, and it guides by controlling the angular acceleration of the missile , and so it oscillates a lot, thus i have a D term. Feel free to go into the code and mess with it to see what i’m talking abt.
@Monarchii Very nice flying heli. Would I have permission to turn this into another AI Heli?
@Unitedareospace21 Upload whatever you are trying to work on as unlisted and gimme the link. We can talk in the comments there.
@Unitedareospace21 Yes. Reach out to me on discord @kuatta4
@Unitedareospace21 What specifically would you like help on?
@llDeadboyll It depends but generally, there's always a way around it. Although it is always better to take the extra time to cover all of your bases.
If it is a conventional plane then an autopilot can totally ignore angle of attack/slip values. If it is something PSM capable (intentional or not) then you definitely need to take care of AOA and make sure you don't stall yourself when you don't want to.
@llDeadboyll Assuming you are asking me if it is possible to make a missile autopilot without taking into account of Angle Of Attack and Angle Of Slip; Yes, I do it without those values all the time, especially for multi-firing or aircraft mounted missiles since a flight computer that's not set as the primary cockpit does not return values of angle of attack/slip and calculating them is a hassle and adds more variables that you have to transfer and more points for failure/inconsistency.
@KmanSP Surface to Air Missile
@Monarchii Where is it?
Looking back I also realized that the game seems to already take into account the wetted area of objects when it spits you the drag value, since in all my testing, even with different geometries, the value of 0.0010145 was consistent.
Thus the in game drag value is not the drag coefficient, rather the Drag coefficient times wetted area. The proper drag force experienced by your aircraft can still be calculated with the original equation in post.
@ThomasRoderick mk i thought abt it a little more
You are right in that the Drag is proportional to wetted area. Then the parasite drag force felt by the whole aircraft equation should be
‘D=ACd0.5rhov^2’
You are also right in the Cd is indeed dimensionless, so units on both side of the question must cancel out. The only way that would happen is if the equation is arranged as above (Force cancels Force, remember that the right side of the equation is basically dynamic pressure times area = force)
@ThomasRoderick The Coefficient of drag is indeed proportional to the wetted area of the plane. D in my equation is the drag Force felt by the airplane, which increases with airspeed
@Graingy
1. Drag coefficient is a non-dimensionalized coefficient to measure and compare drag. Aka it is independent of speed/altitude and thus u can directly compare this value between planes and designs
2. To my knowledge air density is modeled using an ideal standard day scenario and yes it decreases as u get higher in altitude
3. Yes air density affects jet engine performance heavily in simpleplanes. However I am not sure about how it affects prop engines.
4. Yes u would multiply the drag scale of the wing.
5. I don’t know what kind of scale would be realistic for the wing just yet cause i haven’t tested that. In addition drag produced by the wing IRL is heavily dependent on it’s shape and may differ wildly even at the same surface area.
6. Yes u can search it up in reference to an existing aircraft. You would want to search up Parasite drag coefficient and the symbol you should be looking for is Cd0. Then use the formula/relations above to find the in game drag value u should be shooting for.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very aware of the difficulties of using the targeting computer on mobile, specifically that the knobs are really hard to grab hold of. I do not have a solution for this other than to recommend you to play it on PC. This will be accounted for for my next project. I apologize for the inconvenience.
I sincerely appreciate all of your support despite the technical difficulties.
@llDeadboyll I suppose it was from a lack of understanding of how Ballistic missiles work and my general bias against anything to do with space at the time. I’ve since read some technical books and grew an interest in Ballistic Missiles, so I started to learn how they work and I started to tinker… and here we are 3 months later
@VRCaPable no
@Freedomfans can you guys not just drag the knob left and right? That's how you do it on PC
@Petropavlovsk101 As far as I know it works anywhere
@LTHank Drag the knob left and right
@MizeaO It may be more accurate if you set the Altitude to 0, but again I promised no type of precision accuracy to strike ships.
@llDeadboyll my discord is kuatta4
@Sableric Absolutly, I'd love to help and teach what I've learned. Dm me on Discord kuatta4
Hi @kismit, I love the funky trees implementations on this build and I think we may have a great collaboration opportunity with my funky trees weapon skills. I'd be happy to provide you with my weapons or build them for you to use on future versions of this plane. Let me know what you think!
Hey @Monarchii , would you be interested in helping me finish a mech project, since you clearly know how to build a mech better than myself?
T
@llDeadboyll mayhapes. There will certainly be tweaks that needs to be made but i see no reason why it should not work if u implement it properly. If u want me to help u further message me on discord.
@Lee77100 very much so. Try it out yourself!
@Ashdenpaw1 Not to my knowledge. The RIM-116 had to use rolling motion because of it's 1D passive radio wave seeker, used alongside it's IR seeker to better negate the effect of the sea deflecting IR signals. That said, this type of seeker probably does not provide too much benefits in an Air-To-Air use and thus rolling the missile is not required.
@Ashdenpaw1 In game this thing is able to target anything that can be targeted
IRL these are more like missile interceptors or point defense weapons
@localf15enjoyer yes but does it roll and track by FT?
Rolling-Airframe Missile isn’t an exclusive name to the RIM-116, but a type of missile flight control and that is what i am claiming to have achieved first.
@overlord5453 @TheMouse @Marulk @Graingy @Boeing727200F
As per my last email
@CorporalWojak Yes, but it's a little more complicated than drag and drop...
go inside the missile and find the flight computer, detach it and save it as sub-assembly
take the missile with the pylon and save it as sub-assembly
go to your new plane and attach the missile where u want
attach the corresponding flight computer to the missile, preferably inside and aligned with the center of the missile.
Copy in all of the variables from this plane
If you did these steps your missile should in theory work. It's a little bit of a process and kinda hard to explain without going into why you need to do each steps
@Monarchii
@windshifter1 I would appreciate if you share the preset file with me! Find me on discord @kuatta4
@Zillyguy2 yes it does; it is displayed as a SAM ping
@liuzehao did u press the correct buttons?
And did u press the fireweapons button, even though it doesn’t light up?
@llDeadboyll try flying the missile manually with pitch roll yaw and etc. If you can’t even fly the missile straight by urself the funky trees code is gonna have a hard time doing it
If that isn’t the problem then ur code is 100% the problem
@Ku or more specifically
the missile tracks the elevation of the target by aligning the pitch angle of the missile to a calculated pitch angle that will enable the missile to hit the target
if the missile is too low to the ground, the calculated pitch angle will simple become 0 and make the missile fly level, thus avoiding going into the water
@llDeadboyll when the AltitudeAgl approaches sea level the missile levels out to avoid going in the water.
@OrangeConnor2 did the elevator completely not respond or did not respond in the way you wanted
If the elevator completely stop moving you may have a typo in the input
If it’s just not responding in the way you wanted, as I said, mess around with the number
Hi @Monarchii , do you think I can take over this project and see if I can make it work? I will credit you again for the missile design when it comes out