I can't make planes

[sendmefish]

I've been trying to make jet planes and every time I do they just dart up instantly, they start going in circles in the sky, is there something wrong with my arrangement of aero elevators?

[fleatoad]

Welcome to the fun of building aeroplanes. There is so many variables in building a plane. If it starts to fly up you can reduce wing size add weight to the front or reduce thrust power. It is most likely turning because it is trying to compensate.

Building air units brings alot of headaches when you are starting out. Go watch some Youtube videos and use FTD discord, it has a lot more people to help you there.

[sendmefish]

Originally posted by fleatoad:

Welcome to the fun of building aeroplanes. There is so many variables in building a plane. If it starts to fly up you can reduce wing size add weight to the front or reduce thrust power. It is most likely turning because it is trying to compensate.

Building air units brings alot of headaches when you are starting out. Go watch some Youtube videos and use FTD discord, it has a lot more people to help you there.

okay

[Dunhill]

too much weight on the back/not rnough near the tip

real wings are a hassle. Build a jet instead

[The man, the myth, the leg]

spinning in circles usally means a mix of:
not enough pitch control(meaning add more control surfaces)
center of lift too far front (move wings back)
axis of thrust too far below center of mass(move thrusters/propellers up on the deisng)

[budisourdog]

planes in FTD are pain.
center of mass, center of lift, location of control surfaces, settings on control surfaces, AI settings, PID settings, thrust vectoring...

[Carolus Magnus]

My plane building skills have not evolved since 2014 so I still just build thrustercraft that look like planes.

[Sedrido]

Originally posted by Carolus Magnus:

My plane building skills have not evolved since 2014 so I still just build thrustercraft that look like planes.

the way god intended

[Sir Rattus]

I mostly build planes. They're the easiest to make. They're also the strongest type of craft in the game. I have like 10 currently. Had to delete the old ones, since they were much weaker than the new ones i've built. I can give you some advice.

1. Don't use wings unless your plane is made of heavy blocks.
2. Use aerodynamic shapes like 4m slopes and slope transitions as much as possible.
3. Place 2 ACB blocks. They should respond to AI pitch command and give your main propulsion + and - pitch. You won't need control surface wings to pitch anymore. Maybe for roll, but it's easily fixed with ACB's too. It's much easier to learn than breadboard, though breadboard saves you a lot of space. (you can use jets to roll and pitch too, but they're vulnerable and expensive, so i advice you learn how to use ACBs)
4. Don't use automatic control for propulsion. It's not working properly.
5. PID balance it until it wobles just enough to dodge shells, but not too much or it'll hurt your accuracy.

[Sir Rattus]

I posted 2 planes in the workshop. Take a look at them if you want.

[Sir Rattus]

Originally posted by budisourdog:

planes in FTD are pain.
center of mass, center of lift, location of control surfaces, settings on control surfaces, AI settings, PID settings, thrust vectoring...

Planes are way easier to make than ships for example. Ships are slow, so they need some armor to compensate, which makes them big and it takes a tonn of time to make heavy armor blocks float unless you put propellers bellow, but then what's the point of making a ship if you can make a thrustercraft by changing propellers into jets instead? Then you have to fit everything in the smallest possible package and balance it all, protect the turrets, add anti-missle defence and other stuff. Planes only need to dodge things and be faster than most missiles, which is comparably not hard to do at all. Ships also have center of mass/propulsion and other "planes" problems. If your propulsion is below your center of mass, ship is going to be very unstable. If it's not aero/hydro dynamic, then it's going to be even slower. Ships are just bigger, slower, heavy armored planes, that can't dodge anything. Giant expensive carpets to whipe your feet on. Don't mind me, i just hate ships =)

[LunaticMethod]

In my experience, when your plane winds up in space for no clear reason, it's usually an issue of drag, or the center of mass being too far misaligned from the center of thrust.
It's all just a balancing act, and it's not difficult once you understand what's going on.

For drag:

Anything that produces drag is going to tug your craft in whatever direction it is from the center. A single block can have a very powerful effect on smaller craft, and the solution is to either put something similar on the opposite side, or hide things behind more aerodynamic blocks so it doesn't produce drag. Use shift+P to get a visualization of frontal drag on your craft (among other things).

For mass:

The build mode indicators are very useful. If the center of mass is above your thrusters, your craft will pitch up, and vice versa. You want to get this as centered as possible. HOWEVER, there's also a band-aid you can use called thrust vectoring. You can customize your engines through the menu to fire at an angle, which helps mitigate this issue. If your craft is pitching up, you want rear thrusters to angle down, and vice versa.

[Glory]

I have two basic pieces of design advice for planes: 1) Build Small and 2) Build Fast. Don't mess around with fuel engines at first, just stick with small custom jets. Build your plane around those jets - use only combusters at first, you can go back and swap some out for compressors to get some sweet fuel-efficiency if you end up exceeding your target speed. You want to be going, at minimum, 100-125m/s - wings are mostly decorative at that point, and I usually build a large wing shape that looks pretty, then lower the lift fraction of the entire wing to .1 or less. Bigger weak-lifting wings are more resilient to being chewed on by frag missiles than smaller strong-lifting wings, as each individual wing block matters less if destroyed. Make sure you leave enough space between or around the engines to store around 8-12 single blocks - that's all you'll really need - which will be for your AI, fuel tanks, ammo storage, and internal weapons components.

For control. I like to use custom control surfaces over the built in aileron/elevator/rudder blocks, as those give me precise control and I can visually see how they respond, plus they look a lot cooler. Use Manual control settings - it's a better learning experience, and automatic controls aren't great. You'll need to cover roll, pitch, and yaw. They're fairly self explanatory, excepting your roll controls. The roll control surface on the RIGHT side of the plane should have a NEGATIVE response, e.g. "-1" and the roll control surface on the LEFT side of the plane should have a POSITIVE response, e.g. "1". Start with relatively small surfaces - maybe 3-4 blocks for roll per side, 5-6 for pitch per side, and 4-5 blocks for yaw (you only need one centerline rudder). Start with all your sensitivities set to around .25 at first - increase only if needed.

EDIT: Forgot to talk about the AI.
You should be using the Airplane 2.0 Manoeuvre. Set the pitch for altitude control to 30 or 45 degrees - you can increase it later - and the max roll for banking turns to 0. Banking turns can be difficult to tune, and can result in your aircraft losing control and either going to space or taking a bath. Go into adjustments, and set your minimum altitudes to around 50-100M and your maximum to around 600. This will prevent it from, again, going to space or taking a bath. For your combat behavior, I recommend starting with Circle at Distance for a bomber, or Attack Run 2.0 for a fighter-interceptor with a ~100M breakoff distance, ~50M breakoff altitude, and Combat Altitude of 0 relative to target. Pitch to Target can be useful for smoothing flight but will make your craft less evasive.

For detection, use whatever you want. I suggest just sticking a Radar 360 right in the nose - it only needs two processing power, and works well enough. A Camera 90 on top or underneath will also work.

To balance your craft, the most important thing is to make sure your CoM (Center of Mass) is close to your CoL (Center of Lift). Since we already set the wings to .1, balancing it is a simple matter of setting some wing blocks to a higher fraction of lift or (what I usually do) just set a few to 0. Make sure that your settings are PRECISELY the same on both wings - if you're worried about mistakes, you can always prefab the tuned wing and reinstall it with mirror mode on to ensure both sides are exactly the same. One wing lifting more than the other is trouble. Keep tweaking until the CoL is as close as possible - it doesn't need to be perfect, as your control surfaces should be able to take care of any minor imbalances if they're set up correctly. You can even get away with them being a few blocks apart. As another commentator noted, your CoM MUST be in line with your source of thrust, but an advantage of building small is that the custom jet engines often end up weighing as much as the rest of the plane put together, so the CoM location tends to take care of itself in that regard.

Your plane might still go out of control, however, if you didn't properly contour the leading edges. Blocky blocks on leading edges in the direction of travel means drag, and lots of it. Drag is BAD. To minimize drag. make sure EVERY leading edge is either A) A wing B) A missile rail gantry C) A wedge front block, 1M long or longer D) A slope block, 1M long or longer E) A detection system or munition/laser warner or F) An air intake for a custom jet. Longer, pointier things are better, and once your craft can fly in a straight line experiment with swapping things out while in flight to optimize your speed.

Missiles are going to be your best bet for weapons starting off, as you only really need 4 blocks "inside" the fuselage - the weapon controller, the missile controller, the missile controller transmitter, and the missile controller IFF. The gantries - use rail gantries - can be stuck under the wings. Use the provided missile strut block and leave an open block in the wing behind it for the missile receiver. Alternatively, you can just go with the small solid missile gantries and stick the missile receiver on the back of the launcher block without needing to cut holes in your wings.

You don't need to mess around with bread or ACBs to have a stable craft. I generally only use ACBs for launching flares, as they're cheaper than a CIWS controller and can be put anywhere. Bread can be useful if you want to make something fancy - like a hypermanueverable thrust-vectored fighter, or a PAC gun-carrier. A single AI Breadboard can generally do everything a larger number of ACBs can while being cheaper and more compact, so if you would need more than one ACB use bread instead. Still, bread is a fairly advanced thing, so don't mess with it if you don't need to.

Lastly, an example - I have a small fighter aircraft called the "Sparrowhawk 6.5k Light Fighter" on the workshop. Take a look at it, after removing the 100-odd decorations using the shift-e menu. That was one of my first successful aircraft, and I learned most of the above principles by building it. Good luck!

[Wilgryf]

Originally posted by Heavy:

Originally posted by budisourdog:

planes in FTD are pain.
center of mass, center of lift, location of control surfaces, settings on control surfaces, AI settings, PID settings, thrust vectoring...

Planes are way easier to make than ships for example. Ships are slow, so they need some armor to compensate, which makes them big and it takes a tonn of time to make heavy armor blocks float unless you put propellers bellow, but then what's the point of making a ship if you can make a thrustercraft by changing propellers into jets instead? Then you have to fit everything in the smallest possible package and balance it all, protect the turrets, add anti-missle defence and other stuff. Planes only need to dodge things and be faster than most missiles, which is comparably not hard to do at all. Ships also have center of mass/propulsion and other "planes" problems. If your propulsion is below your center of mass, ship is going to be very unstable. If it's not aero/hydro dynamic, then it's going to be even slower. Ships are just bigger, slower, heavy armored planes, that can't dodge anything. Giant expensive carpets to whipe your feet on. Don't mind me, i just hate ships =)

You can also make water tanks instead of proper ships :P

[Sir Rattus]

Originally posted by Wilgryf:

Originally posted by Heavy:

Planes are way easier to make than ships for example. Ships are slow, so they need some armor to compensate, which makes them big and it takes a tonn of time to make heavy armor blocks float unless you put propellers bellow, but then what's the point of making a ship if you can make a thrustercraft by changing propellers into jets instead? Then you have to fit everything in the smallest possible package and balance it all, protect the turrets, add anti-missle defence and other stuff. Planes only need to dodge things and be faster than most missiles, which is comparably not hard to do at all. Ships also have center of mass/propulsion and other "planes" problems. If your propulsion is below your center of mass, ship is going to be very unstable. If it's not aero/hydro dynamic, then it's going to be even slower. Ships are just bigger, slower, heavy armored planes, that can't dodge anything. Giant expensive carpets to whipe your feet on. Don't mind me, i just hate ships =)

You can also make water tanks instead of proper ships :P

"Water tanks" are useless. Simply adding health to your craft is not enough. You need to balance everything or you'll end up with something expensive but weak like Megalodon.

Let's take a look at Tyr for example. The reson why Tyr is so good is not because it's just sturdy, but because it has so many different defensive systems against all kinds of attacks and huge firepower. The only way to counter it is to overwhelm one of those defensive systems before you get pierced to death by railguns. Balance is everything.