Pushing aircraft engineering TO THE LIMIT in Kerbal Space Program 2! 

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I’m an Aerospace Engineering major and in my intro to AE class we had to make gliders. And my friends team made one with a circle wing to mess with the tryhard kid in their group. It was surprisingly successful.

On the Kuyusu those wheels on the stabilizers are there so the stabilizers don't rub off during take off. The rear wheels are from under the wings, and the "struty things" are the front and the back wheels.

I'm genuinely surprised the least flying-capable looking plane actually worked, the ring-wing is neat.

7:31 "hang on, there's a building coming towards me" I hate when buildings just come out of nowhere and jump right in front of you.

7:18 The thing why the biplane didn’t took of. Was that the control surfaces were not rightly balanced.

When you're making replicas of vintage craft, you should disable engine vectoring and rely on the control surfaces to generate lift. Thrust vectoring wasn't available in jets until the 1990s.

The ring wing would probably fly a lot better if the top part of the wing was further back (more sweep), giving the control surfaces more leverage. For the designs that didn’t work out, you could say they… didn’t take off (sorry)

I mean the pic clearly had landing gears in a trike formation the wheels on the ends of the vertical stabs was just there incase of a bad bounce edit: This is for the Shinden

When I was in 6th grade I made a glider that was simply a ring with a folded leading edge. It was a great glider. The extra weight and thickness on the leading edge kept it straight and created a pressure differential similar to an aircraft wing.

You may be a civil engineer, but when it comes to my field, you're definitely an architect. Still, you gave it a good bash.

Fun fact swept wings are really only useful close and above the speed of sound

Once again, in love with the design. The architect is growing in this one

you should try to make the Tail-sitter. it takes off and lands on its tail (vertically) then tilts horizontally for forward fligh

for the leduc. the cockpit was actually INSIDE the air intake. you can see the cockpit located in the air inlet in the photos.

Challenge - make the RingWing efficient! It showed so much promise - just needs some tweaking and it seems scaling up the wings would greatly help. Awesome video though!

a small tip about designing flyable planes in KSP: center of mass should be slightly in front of center of lift. too far forward and can't nose up. behind center of lift will make it naturally nose up. Wheel location depends on pitch controlling surfaces. If you use Elevator, which pushes tail down, making it squat, then placing wheels at the center of mass makes sense, but if you have Canards, then it doesn't, because they just lift the nose up.

Matt was looking at the paintings, like at 1:59, for the "strutty-thing," not the photograph. And I'm pretty sure that strutty-thing was an instrument antenna wire like for radio or something. Nearly all aircraft of that period had them. Just google "WWII aircraft antenna" and check the images to get a better understanding.

Things to note, your Kyuushu failed because the IRL plane was pitched backward to help with take-off, yours was pitched forward which is why you crashed before getting airborne.

The first one was actually made after the American XP-55 Ascender which is fairly similar in looks. So that should be a definite mention. Only three ever built. Two are gone and we have one left in a museum in my state. But yeah. That’s the OG.

omg the Belphegor picture was taken actually at my hometown! sadly its no longer there, it was removed, but im very surprised im seeing that exact pic in this channel, that plane was part of my childhood, everytime i was watching that plane when we went by it, since then i love flying and actually was flying gliders at the exact same airport, where this pic was taken!

Kuyusu had "5" landing gear. the main nose landing gear with its door (what you called a strut), the wing mounted landing gear, which made up the main gear, then 2 small wheels on the tails to act as strike gear, these were not supposed to touch the ground or even be used, but instead act as "strike plates" if the plane over rotated on takeoff. As to planes not looking like that.. they actually do... a lot of modern fighters now use the same "style" such as the eurofighter.

I’m not sure if you noticed, but on the 3rd plane, the cockpit is in the engine. You can see it in the ramjet cone, not mounted on top.

Ah, Matt, that strut on the J7W.... it's not actually a strut at all. It's a piece of wire anchored at the 2 masts. It acts as the antenna for the HF (long range) radio.

not to nitpick, but u missed wheels on the first plane. there are more weels under the back wings

0:18 the beluga looks (and probably is) like someone saw a normal cargo plane and went “MORE!”, and someone else just chopped off the top of an airbus and slapped a giant pipe the size of a railway tunnel on top.

The struts and wire underneath the plane are the antenna for the long range radio, it's one of the only near universal features of WW2 era aircraft

About PZL M-15 here is a fun fact. "...In reference to both its strange looks and relatively loud jet engine, the aircraft was nicknamed Belphegor, after the noisy demon..." Source: Wikipedia.

Is there any chance RCE will ever learn how control surfaces work?

the first one, those small wheel were just stabilizer wheel, its got the standard trike landing gear config

4:34 indicates the problem with the Kyushu. You have the elevators on the main wings, so it's just pushing the back down. It should use the canards (front stubby wings) as the elevators. That would pull the front up. As for "...planes don't look like this..." Look up "Eurofighter Typhoon". 7:30 Your main wings have elevators again. You're not creating rotation around the CofG. It should be just ailerons on the wings, with the elevator on the tail. 9:27 Leduc - Again, elevators in the wrong place...

7:11 your elevator are on your main wing so the force of the horizontal stabilizer is being canceled out by the wings having the elevator control so essentially the back wants to go down to pull up but the front won’t let it

The J7W Shinden did have a Jet powered variant and actually could have been an incredible aircraft had it been built sooner. Testing wasn't done and the prototypes were still not ironed out very well when the war ended.

There are actually ring-winged plane ideas so well done!

did you know that the cockpit of the leduc was at the ''Ram'' Part of the ramjet and not ontop?

Your ring probably didn't want to pull up because it's CoL (center of lift) was too far behind your CoM (center of mass). If you pushed the ring forward (and possibly the engines backward), it should be a little more maneuverable. With the CoL being so high, however, it's going to desire a flatter pitch regardless

You can make propellers by angling wings. They actually work pretty well

From the image on the video i wondered if this based on a very efficient design

The biplane was failing to fly due to the ailerons being used as elevators... think of it as downforce... if your main wing ailerons are angled upwards it's trying to push the aircraft down instead of creating lift.

FYI your parts are not snapping correctly because you need to make sure the little magnet icon on the bottom is glowing yellow, that turns on the snap

Maybe you could try in the next vid the Dutch V Wing plane, where the passengers sit in the wings. I enjoy your vids.

The Shinden's neat and all... But I'd like to see something like the Horten Ho 229 or Vought V-173, both serious aircraft that serious people took seriously.

i cant imagine how hard it would be to produce main spars strong enough to support that wing surface on the ground. then support the plane once in the air. That's probably one of the main reason.

You could do an 8 style wing ether side to side or top to bottom and it might give you more stability

On the lunac the outer wheels weren't actually cantered out, just appears that way in the photo. They just go straight back but yeah cool stuff my dude.

"Now let's see why Jet-Powered Bi-Planes don't exist anymost." I wasn't expecting to find that statement to be so emotionally moving and adrenaline inducing 😅

the 1st one you missed the wheels. 1 front then 2 rear. the 2 on the flaps was prob to stop it from scraping the ground on take off :)

The Leduc locates the pilot's seat inside the nosecone of the engine. THAT's why it was so weird. Bailing out is likely to result in pilot-injestion into engine.

3:21 - I think that the thing you think is a strut is actually a radio antenna.

The ring wing would have had better control if you'd left the flaps alone; the flaps at the top of the ring were behind the center of mass, so if you want to pull up you want those to push the tail down.

So "Leduc" was the inspiration for Thunderbird 1 which beggers me the question... Do you think you could make the Thunderbird vehicles in Kerbal?? 🤔 Great video by the way!

I hope you improve on the ring wing design in the future RCE. That's quite a unique design and I feel feel a few extra wings or flaps it could perform a lot better. For the UKSE!

My little boy, budding Scientist of 8 years old said ‘DAD he is missing 2 wheels.’ 😂 I think we need to send him to the UKSA to check your work 😂 - Great job we love the Kerbal vids

Hey Civ, the Japanese pusher prop didnt have support struts underneath. That was the front landing gear and the back landing gear which had air surface covers for when the gear was retracted.

The J7W1 was actually supposed to have its propeler replaced with jet engine but due to Japan loosing WW2 it never happened. So your depiction of the plane is somewhat historically accurate.

Matt's inability to design a flying plane is probably the biggest hurdle in all of these designs, center of lift, and center of weight are so important, The Kyushu design can't take off because the wheels are too far back and it has to leaver the entire craft upwards to angle the wings upward, you want the back-wheels to be closer to the center of weight so it pivots around the wheels (which the original design has), and also designing the plane so it's nose is pointing upwards, not downwards, helps too, and that would be easily solved with shorter back legs.

7:30 "There's a building coming towards me" I don't think that's quite how that works... 😂

4:18 the wheel no-clipped out of reality

In this episode RCE becomes an architect.

8:08 this is because it is designed for slower flight then most mondern aircraft. when the aircraft gets close to the speed of sound it's wings will experience supersonic flow even before it breaks the sound barrier the supersonic flow over the wings makes it incredibly difficult to control (if possible) so modern wings sweep backwards to delay supersonic flow over the wings. I don't understand fully why this works something about the spanwise and cordwise flow also 10:45 the idea of culculer wings in general is to get rid of wing tip vortesy wich cause drag. they do this by eliminateing the wing tips. this is also why toradel propellers are a thing they don't have a tip at the end so no wing tip vortesy from. I'm assuming the reason why this plain was abandoned was the same reason a similar fighter jet desing the Coléoptère was abandoned. It was abonden for numoris reasons but the big one was the wing proved to be incredibly unstable and one of the prototypes even crashed. for camushal jets the wings usually aburtyly curve up wich reduces wing tip vortesy as the high pressure and the low pressure zones combine less. I don't know why modern fighter jets don't do this but I'm assuming it's because their wings are shorter so it may not be as much of a problem I also think it might affect the radar cross section

You'll find that high speed aircraft didn't start using swept wing designs until the US began experimenting with hypersonic speeds and rocket propelled aircraft in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The X-1 and X-15 even had a tapered but straight wing design. It wasn't until attempting to solve the issue of oscillating wing tips just at sonic speeds that they discovered that the delta (actually conical) shape of the air wake could be better utilized by sweeping the wing to match the shape of the wake. Only the F-86 used in the mid 50s by the US Army Air Force had a modified swept wing hinting that aerodynamic engineers were beginning to understand sonic air perturbance. The most stable paper airplane you can make is a strip of paper stapled into a ring with a paper clip used for ballast. As an actual aircraft it MUST use a rudder for turning as there is no angled horizontal orientation to the ring as it rotates around it's center axis.

For the ring-wing design to be able to turn you'd probably need to make the vertical sections out of a tail-wing/rudder. That way they can direct airflow appropriately and allow turning normally (by which I mean without having to make a banked turn).

This man not recognizing landing gear for the first plane is as painful as it is hilarious.

anyone else notice that the first plane has 3 wheels and not struts? is his image different quality? this was fun i wanna play this game too but i bought KSP 1 bc it was 75% off and now i can play that :D

You can recreate the prop engines with the smallest jet engine and reverse thrust it when it’s in front and normal on back

I love your silliness but "realistic" stuff like this is what got me subbed a lot ago, back when you recreated IRL bridges on poly bridge, please make more videos like this 🙏 (it's okay if you don't)

Lol this and spore and maybe some racing game I bought but can’t use my phone for yet is a real inspiration to buy a damn desktop just to geek out on this stuff for hours… Really amazing what this kerbal can create and simulate… I’m hoping I can explore the bow shock effects of our galaxy in kerbal … this was missing when I first launched into space, outside the Milky Way and then landed back on kerbal 😂 Took 3 days in fastest speed to simulate at the time and it was sun moon kerbal than black at the time. Just really loved building a hot rod in your garage and just off to space building stuff. Goofy as heck but the basics apply so you learn 😂

That was an amazing Engineering project! I'm so impressed with how creative and innovative your approach was. Well done!

I think Dredge would be fun for Matt, it is like a fishing game but different, might be best for Halloween due to the nature 😂

I played the video and heard "Hello fellow engineers!" then I realized there was no audio coming from my computer, my brain just perfectly remembers the intro and will play it on it's own.

They didn't make the ring wing cause while having the fuselage in the wing made it more fuel efficient, that was cancelled out by the massive increase in drag.

for the biplane your wings were enabled for pitch, so it was generating negetive lift

Matt:airliners are pretty standard these days Also Matt:makes some of the most cursed plane designs ever 😂

Up next: an ICBM(Intercontinental Ballistic Missile)

7:32 I thought this was gonna be a cannon event

How does your pc not explode at 60+ fps?! What godlike specs does your pc have? Anyways I love your ksp videos and I would love to see them being made more frequently. Maybe you could design your own rockets again instead of recreating other rockets. With those rockets you could fly to other planets and just mess around in space..

I love this video concept, it will also be fun to see it in trail makers or something like

Matt maybe a bridge engineer but absolutely an architect in anything that flies

tThe ring-wing is so cool! It would take up less space at an airport because of the reduced wingspan wile filling the same amount of passengers, Sooo... Smaller plane with the same capacity of big plan = More terminals = More flights without the cost of expanding the whole airport. It must be an older design from some time ago since it says its by Lockheed and not Lockheed Martin

If there's a tail, please turn off pitch on the main wing control surfaces. It'll help.

This should be a series!

1:28 "And join star Shrek fleet command."

Hoooold on. He had a proper architect moment. Isn't the jet at the end just a fancy biplane and he clearly says jet biplanes don't exist for a reason...

I really, really, really want to sit over a pint with you ant tell you how air planes work. Seeing a Brit saying that the french where on to some thing hurts my soul. If you ever are in Germany ring me up! You can tell me how to bridge stuff and I explain how to fly over unbridged stuff:D (Actually I really adore french air plane design)

You can just turn the wheel units backwards, if you need a wheel to be closer to the nose.

3:03 it's not for strength, this single "strut" is not a structural part of a plane, it's an antena.

Matt, ya gotta ‘Bank n Yank’ with those elevon style controls!

The upside down vertical stabilizers help keep the plane strait with high aoa. U can actually see them on some fighters like the f14 and the f16 although they are much smaller

Matt, may be time to try a new plane design that's right up your alley. Have you seen NASA's new X-66A they just unvailed? It has trusses and struts to help with transonic flight. Thought you might be interested!

I don't think I've ever booshed the like button so fast, love this series!

12:08 I'm not a kerbal player nor an airplane engineer, but isn't the wing's orientation on the Ring gone wrong after the first flap? What I mean is, I think some of the wing bits create negative lift because of the upside down shape. Am I wrong?

I hope this becomes a serie, is really cool to see failed concepts being recreated~

Something tells me part of matt's enjoyment of the ring wing was that it also cut a very Strong Shaped silhouette.

1:57 John Travolta, in Japanese: Why, this plane is automatic. It's systematic. It's hyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyydromatic. Why, it's Magnificent Lightning!

Watching you make that airfoil made it all worth it

The ring wing is the most architect plane I’ve ever seen

I wish you'd given the shinden better landing gear to at least see how it flew. But really cool video!

I feel like you missed out on the whole concept of lift that planes are centered around as the wings need to be angled

Matt. I challenge you to make a realistic Bomber like the tu 95 in Simpleplanes

Ring wing reminds me a bit of those fans made by a certain vacuum manufacturer.