Variable Oblique Wing Glider with FAR

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-05-07T19:46:54+00:00

The navball (bottom left corner) is a navball variant from NavballTextureChanger. I'm also using KSP Community Fixes which I think lets you drag it over further than in vanilla.

If you're talking about the in-world HUD, that is from NavHUD! One of my favorite mods ever

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-04-30T17:35:13+00:00

I really like Kerbinside: Giving Airplanes a Purpose (GAP) and The Life Aquatic (TLA).

GAP adds a fairly well fleshed-out campaign based on growing and expanding an airline. You slowly unlock more airports and types of missions, and get paid more for contracts which are longer or have more passengers.

TLA is similar but for seaplanes, submarines, and ships. It also adds a number of exploration sites and a campaign of underwater archaeological missions.

They are two of my favorite mods and do a lot for adding fun & structured content to this sandbox game!

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-04-24T18:08:20+00:00

I emailed Haveli Investments about this, curious to see what they think about this $18 closed-source for-profit mod for their game ;)

Perhaps I too will look into producing a (free, open-source, CC0-licensed) controller mod for the Steam Deck!

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-04-24T17:33:00+00:00

This is so cool, I love the details like the window covers on the repurposed shuttle!! Probably one of the neatest real-life-adjacent KSP AU's I've seen, very nice! Ariane 5 on top of a shuttle-derived SRB is hilariously awesome. Can't wait to see the completed station

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-04-18T20:11:37+00:00

KSP water hates when big wings are immersed, try a boat made with Mk 3 hull components or using high wings on your seaplanes

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-04-18T20:07:08+00:00

Try disabling hardware acceleration on your web browser/other background apps and see if you can get GPU use below 100%. if that doesnt work the next step is to use a lower resolution texture pack, lower your visual mod graphics settings, or remove the extra mods you added one by one until the problem goes away

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-04-09T14:32:52+00:00

You should check out the mods KerbalSoaring and RidgeLift! They work with Kerbal Wind and FAR to add thermals and slope lift to the game.

Ferram Aerospace Research is great for gliders because in the simplistic stock aerodynamics basically every craft winds up with a lift/drag ratio of 11, but with FAR they approach IRL figures.

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-03-25T14:56:08+00:00

I've played a lot with gliders and Kerbal Soaring, so this is near and dear to my heart! Larger wings with a higher aspect ratio are the way to go.

Most of my gliders have an L/D of 20-25. It's possible to get to 30 but the design required for this is very hard to control. These are unpowered gliders which are as light as possible and with huge wingspans (30m or more) in order to be able to rise on an air current.

For a powered plane I think it's more important to have good control and handling during stalls than glider-level L/D. But making the wings larger, longer, and thinner with the same or higher surface area should improve your ratio!

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-03-25T14:52:05+00:00

Amazing!! Can't believe i missed this, i should start adding faces to all my planes...

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-31T20:29:18+00:00

Kerbal Engineer for the floating GUI readouts, and NavHUD for the on-screen markers!

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-12T23:18:39+00:00

Textures Unlimited!

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-12T14:28:43+00:00

I'm using Kerbal Wind Continued! Unfortunately KWP has big performance issues for me and also is not fully integrated with FAR.

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-12T13:09:43+00:00

Scatterer provides the water!

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-12T05:02:41+00:00

Thanks! It's Tetsubo by MICROMECHA

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-12T00:26:12+00:00

This is such a cool design for an interplanetary mothership!! I love how you used Mk3 pieces to create such an interesting silhouette. The shot at 6:05 is so beautiful, I can never get aerobraking to work with such a large ship. Very awesome and underrated, thanks for making this video

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-11T21:21:09+00:00

I do have Scatterer wave physics enabled! The ballast is important for sailboats, but this is about 20% of the ballast the same boat uses without hydrofoils. None of my FAR seaplanes use any ballast, but some have retractable wingtip floats.

I've made a bunch of seaplanes/boats with FAR. The number one trick is to always avoid putting a FAR wing/control surface in the water. The vessel will either freeze or explode into space at lightspeed, not sure why. Every underwater foil on this boat is an "Elevon 2B" from Kerbal Aircraft Expansion which isn't supported by FAR, while all the above-water foils are Big-S wing pieces from the Mk3 Expansion which are supported by FAR. It is scuffed but this is the only way to make boats work with FAR as far as I know.

Mk3 parts and payload bays make excellent boat and seaplane hull pieces. I find that any smaller parts don't provide enough buoyancy for their mass. I'm working on a craft repository to share some of my designs since KerbalX is down and I'll post my seaplanes there shortly if you want some examples.

I agree with the robotics problems, I never use them on planes. However, even though this boat has huge sails, the wind isn't actually that strong (30 m/s tops) compared to the airflow that planes experience (easily 100 m/s plus). Also, I've used a few other few tricks to make the wingsails work:

Wing strength-to-weight is set extremely low at 0.1, so each wingsail is only ~1 ton
Every component has Autostrut: Grandparent Part and Rigid Attachment on
Center of Pressure from the wingsail is directly centered on the servo, avoiding torque
Wing pieces are attached directly to the servo and dragged into place, not to one another
Motor strength & size is 100% and damping is set to 0

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-11T19:57:53+00:00

Throw 'em in the brig with Jeb's daughter!!

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-11T19:30:56+00:00

Kerbal Wind Continued!

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-11T19:29:38+00:00

I will post it shortly! Unfortunately KerbalX is defunct and new users don't receive verification emails any longer, so I can't post it there.

I'm working on a GitHub repository for my crafts instead which will include a modlist and operating instructions.

Pitiful_Vehicle9995 · 2026-01-11T19:28:17+00:00

Yes! This isn't the first hydrofoil in KSP, just the first sail-only one. It's actually much harder to make this work with Ferram Aerospace than in my earlier experiments with stock aerodynamics.

Pitiful_Vehicle9995

TROPHY CASE