Is there any way how to track your distance to airfield?

[Helios]

Landing planes is such huge pain in ass, becouse you fly like at early 20. century, no navigation to your airfield at all. Is there any way/mod how to get some info...

[Helios]

170 m/s horizontal speed, -0.5m/s vertical speed, slope 0°, plane lands with big boom. I cant make it any better with zero navigation. I suppose landing Airbus in RL would be much more simple.

[Helios]

Almost fixed by landing on water....but game wont leave me enter any building at base after... :/

[Azunai]

170 m/s is pretty fast. that's like ~610km/h (or ~380 mph).

i think RL airliners land at about half of that speed. no surprise your plane goes boom. don't think that has anything to do with lack of navigation tools.

[Helios]

Originally posted by Azunai:

170 m/s is pretty fast. that's like ~610km/h (or ~380 mph).

i think RL airliners land at about half of that speed. no surprise your plane goes boom. don't think that has anything to do with lack of navigation tools.

With lack of navigation tools you cant adjust your speed propperly on approach.

Btw when i make very nice soft touch, i should be able to land even at 1000km/h. I wont just have long enough ruinway to brake it...well tires shoudl break appart immedietally i supose, but not whole plane.

[edorward]

Try planting flags just beyond the runway biome at either end. That should give you more info. Just make sure your navball isn't set to target mode or your airspeed will be really wrong.

Also, you really do need to lower that airspeed. The flags might help a bit but a lot is still eyeballing it.

[Chibbity]

As a flight simulator KSP is decidedly on the easy and simple side.

No offense, but this is simply a "learn2fly" issue.

Practice makes perfect.

[Helios]

doesnt matter anyway, im stucked at cant enter any building after performing half hour boring flight mission, which reward i need desperately.
I watched this game since beginning, but decided to give it some years to not encounter such bugs. Still not enough years obviously. That landing is probably related to bug also. I had to lower spring force in order to stop my plane dancing at runaway before takeoff. Now i miss that force to survive landing.

EDIT: ok, got working space center after fifth restart, thanks :).

[Greg]

A perfect landing speed is right above stall speed. Learn what that is for your aircraft since all aircraft made are different. There is a mod with runway lights (visual glidescope indicators-the PAPI kind). The mod is called PAPIPlugin Continued.

[RoofCat]

Toastie Buns once created a "lifehack" for plane takeoff where you use targets and flying in Target mode. Unfortunately I don't have the link for visuals. And then you have to use level 3 pilot or advanced probe core to perform that maneuver.

Skipping the cinematics - you can make your plane perform clean approach maneuver using 2..3 sequential towers like that to align with runway and switching from one to the next (to not hit the towers themselves) reaching certain altitude and just adjusting the speed as needed for a particular design.

The things you can target include bodies and all other "craft". Flags, pods, debris... I would stick to flags and pods/probes so you can rename them. The "construction" doesn't matter much, just make it easily avoidable. You can plant them on mountains approaching from the usual west side for example. The tower before runway must be low (landing altitude is as important as direction and speed) and the final tower must be behind runway slightly above it so you point nose up during landing.

Or just practice until you can land without all that or land on the plains next to KSC. Plane landing is hardest thing to learn in flying. Taking off is changing your state from a single point to the whole sky. Anywhere is fine. Landing is the opposite. It must be learned and practiced a lot for that reason.

Design planes so they land with less than 100m/s (360km/h). It's roughly what real life planes do. For a reason. Have wheels in the proper size so you can brake too.

[Helios]

Ok guys, thanks for nice tips. Ill definitely look into placing Flags and other stuff later.

Originally posted by RoofCat:

Design planes so they land with less than 100m/s (360km/h). It's roughly what real life planes do. For a reason. Have wheels in the proper size so you can brake too.

Yep thats also my problem i guess. I feel like i loose my plane bellow 150m/s. Thats why im landing in such speed. Ill play with design and make some proper tests later as well.
But im pretty sure my last plane i landed above 150 m/s several times. Guess i got lucky and it was light enough. My current plane has extra fuel tank, that adds some weight..

[Greg]

Some landing gear have speed limits. The "wheels on a stick" is 125 m/s

[RoofCat]

also many don't know, but there is actually a very accurate GPS in KSP
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1461669357
KerbNet access from probes has GPS too, but it is much less accurate and you have to click refresh all the time, so basically worthless for our needs here. That small ore scanner also doubles as radar altimeter, because it starts to show ore percentage below 1000m above actual ground (not sea level). While being higher it shows just "too high". The only problem with that precious multitool ore scanner - it is no early tech either.

Runway coordinates are
Latitude: 0.047..0.053 S (wide)
Longitude: 74.730..74.489 W (length)

Kerbin radius is 600km. Which means it has circumference of 3769.911km. Now since it is also 360° (actually 180°E+180°W), one full degree (the distance between 73W and 74W for example) is 10.472 km at sea level. Which means runway is ~60m wide between the lines and ~2.5km long.

Runway is slightly elevated above the sea level which means the actual size is few "mm" more (because of "larger" radius at that altitude), but we can ignore that accuracy for our needs here.


TL;DR just have your latitude at 0.050 S approaching runway and check your speed and altitude after. Flags can help with distance targeting and two flags can help with alignment, just keep in mind you are flying in 3D above ground so the distance to the target is not the distance on the ground.