vsim

Nice idea! Looks cool.

Stupid peer pressure....pre-ordered!

Wow, I didn't think anyone else would say Basara other than me, lol. But I vote Basara as well!

Has anyone tried a UV inhibitor to help prevent the yellowing at all? I have this stuff for my cars, but have never tried it on my toys. http://www.zainostore.com/product/Z-CS.html

It's about time for me to re-watch Macross 7 as well. It's been a while. I just did SDFW a few months ago, so it's not quite time again yet, but enjoy!!

Yeah, the stair truck would be kinda cool!

Cool! Keep posting pictures as it progresses .

I think I did try one engine out flying with the vehicle in the simulation I did, and I seem to recall it worked, but was certainly more limited than with two engines. I never did two engines out because I never taught the control law to deal with that condition. i.e. have the mixer use the rudders, speed brake, and possibly flaps to provide pitch up/down moments and trim the aircraft closer to neutral. It's likely possibly, and with the thrusters it should be able to land safely. Now losing an engine in gerwalk....hehe... wheeeee!

BTW, sketchley, the second link you posted didn't work for me. Yes, the SR-71 moves the inlet cones fore and aft to control the shock wave to slower the air entering the engine to subsonic. The VF-1 does have a lip over the top of the engine (number 18 on sketchley's first linked image) that could slow the air entering the engine to subsonic (up to a certain speed), but does it move? Maybe a combination of this leading edge lip combined with shaping using the engine inlet doors? It's hard to guess without putting one in a wind tunnel to see where the shock waves form, etc. The engines on the VF-1 are much closer in to the body than the SR-71 and therefore there are bound to be some complex interactions going on at higher Mach numbers.

Good point . When I hear ramjet, I always tend to think of the pure ramjet instead of some of the hybrids. Wikipedia has a really nice picture on the SR-71 page showing how the engines work at different speeds. It's not as good as a true ramjet but not as inefficient as a turbofan at mid level Mach numbers (~3). So that gets us up to a maximum speed of around Mach 6 (in atmosphere) using normal propulsion systems. For comparison, orbital velocity for the Earth is up around Mach 25 (27,900 ft/s if I make some assumptions, lowish orbit). So we would still need to get all that extra velocity from the engines somehow, or of course, use the launch boosters.

I would build one of those! Nice job!

Oh, a VF-0B would be nice.

Wow, that's interesting, lol. Thanks Sketchley!

I can't say I was aware of that. A ramjet (and a scramjet for that matter) are completely different animals from a traditional turbofan/jet/prop. How do they get all of the internal mechanisms of the engine out of the way, or do they just somehow redirect all of the airflow around the compressor, etc. I could see it if they had a bigger leg to fit both engines into but there isn't a whole lot of space in that leg. Do you have a link to the Master File, it just showed up as underlined text. I would be curious to read a translation if one is available. Good point!

Actually, I've always been impressed that Macross is as realistic as it is regarding aircraft design. The designs are always fairly reasonable and make sense for the most part. Just remember that the pitch control movement of thrust vectoring is a much bigger deal than adding the yaw control at least for fighter mode. And 70 degrees sounds like exactly what I would expect . Okay, maybe I phrased it badly. The rudder (or some form of yaw control) in important, buy is typically almost completely handled by the control system automatically (turn coordination, yaw dampers, etc.). Roll surfaces are just used to roll to whatever the new bank angle you want, after that, you pull (pitch) and change directions. What did your dad fly? On some of the older aircraft the pilot had to do a lot of the rudder work himself, but modern fighters automate this part. The VF-1 (and others) had rudders, and therefore it had no need for thrust vectoring in the yaw direction (although it wouldn't hurt to have it). That isn't to say that you could do away with the rudders completely; honestly they are often over-sized to handle the case when the aircraft loses an engine and still needs to be able to land safely. Now if the engines had some lateral/yaw vectoring ability, then maybe you could get away rudderless (some current UAVs work this way). Or the B-2 probably uses spoilers and/or clamshells on the wings to control yaw in the event of an engine failure. There are numerous ways to create yawing moments on the aircraft, the most desirable being the ones that don't create extra drag or make the aircraft do other strange things. Regarding high altitude. Yes, the thrusters will be more effective, I was talking more or less about aircraft that do not have thrusters to use. That was my guess for how the VF-1 engines worked as well, but I wasn't sure if that was spelled out anywhere. Replace the combustion chamber with a different source of heat and voila. And in space, I envisioned something similar, use some form on onboard propellant, super heat and it shoot it out the back. I had always envisioned the VF-1 inlet being variable geometry like the F-14. The ramps would move to optimize the flow at different conditions. And technically the moon has an atmosphere of it's own as well, it's just so thin that it is effectively zero...but not quite . If I recall it is on the order of 1E-9 atmospheres or less. i.e. the thrusters from apollo missions probably increased the moons atmosphere by an order of magnitude, lol.

Okay, after a quick google search and I come up with a possible explanation. Fluidic thrust vectoring. Sounds interesting actually, so I'll just go with the 117 uses this and call it a day . 15 degrees is not much deflection at ALL, but that's yet another argument (even 30 would be small). I think when I did my simulations, I let it move +/- 60 degrees.

I agree with Mr March here, I had not seen the picture before. And yes, the picture shows vectoring in the pitch axis, but (to quote Red vs. Blue) "That doesn't seem physically possible". To some limited degree, sure it could, but something has to actually direct the thrust in that direction, i.e. a paddle on top and the bottom (or part of a foot shaped like a paddle). Really this debate is going down the road of reality versus animation at this point, fun but I don't think we can really conclude much of anything. Sorry for starting the topic wandering off to the 117! Here are the paddles for the X-31. This is a different configuration that allows the thrust to be manipulated in both directions, but is much clearer than any F-22 picture I can find.

Higher altitude is going to have a less dense atmosphere and that is going to cause everything to work less efficiently. Control surfaces are also not as effective. But don't forget that that also means the aircraft has less drag at the same time. In short, the aircraft will just respond to a lot of things slower at higher altitudes, unless you can get your airspeed up, in which case thrust will go up again and everything goes back to normal (more or less). Top speed limits on aircraft are typically due to heating (the cockpit glass in particular), not because the engines can't put out more thrust. I'm not sure what to say about the VF-1 engines. They are "magic" . My guess was always that they used intake air mostly for cooling and not so much for "combustion" like a normal turbofan engine would. I haven't seen much written up on the theoretical inner workings of the engine but would love to see something. And I would also love to hear the clarification on why it needs a booster to get to space. I can explain it away for a turbofan engine, but not the VF-1 engines. Unless the argument is just that the VF-1 would take way too damn long to get there, then I'm good . I don't think the leading edge extensions move or change shape. But yes, in theory if they did do something it could be used for pitch control. Okay, well in Fighter mode, I can say that lateral thrust vectoring is not very useful. In theory you could use it and get rid of the rudders on the aircraft, which is nothing to sneeze at, but the rudders are really only used a little bit unless you are trying to land in a cross wind. Fighters maneuver in pitch the most because that puts the load on the pilot vertically, which is easier for the human body to endure. Slamming the pilot around sideways would not go over very well. So for the fighter mode, very little lateral vectoring would be needed really, so I'm actually good with that. As for Gerwalk, I had always just envisioned that for small side movements, the ankles could twist to provide fast, small thrust changes, but for larger ones, the whole leg would start to turn in or out to get larger angle movements. So I don't find Macross too bad for feet/nozzle non-sense for the most part (except the 117! ).

Yes, those can help, although typically they are discrete inputs. They either put out full thrust or none. But in general they would be a last resort because you don't want to burn through all of your fuel firing them all the time. I'm not sure how much fuel the VF-1 carries for the thrusters, but most spacecraft don't have a lot of firing time for them. It only needs to last for one sortie, but still.. The control system would most certainly use whatever controls are at it's disposal to drive the aircraft to do whatever the pilot is calling for. You can do all types of weird things, like deflecting both rudders symmetrically to help slow down quickly. The control system mixer would be responsible for that. And regarding learning systems, that is entirely possible and actually a very cool area of study . The control system can learn by monitoring the performance of the system and if it does not perform as is expected, it can start to deploy additional surfaces to maintain control. They also can monitor control surfaces to see if one is frozen in position or not responding to commands correctly (i.e. damaged and flapping in the breeze so to speak). I'm not aware of any aircraft in production that do this, but I know there is research out there. The power of the thrust vectoring comes from the paddles that redirect the thrust in the other directions. On the VF-1 and VF-117 (and all the others except the 21/22) the paddles are the bottoms of the feet. For the 171, these move in the lateral direction, giving large yawing moments, not pitch. The 21/22 has actual paddles that look more like a real-world aircraft with thrust vectoring (ref F-18 HARV, F-22, X-31). The 21/22 thrust vectoring is a full 2-D 3 paddle system and can vector for both pitch and yaw.

Yeah, I didn't think the VF-1 had the glove vanes. And for a vehicle with a horizontal stab, I can definitely see that they would not be as necessary, but on the VF-1 some type of control of the aerodynamic center would certainly help. The other thing that helps the VF-1 some in this regard is the fact that the wings don't carry any type of fuel, so the movement of the center of mass and aerodynamic center can be tuned and not dependent on how much fuel is left. Thrust vectoring for pitch control is sort of like balancing a broomstick on your hand, it can get away from you very quickly if you can't react fast enough to keep up. On a side note, why in the hell is the thrust vectoring for the VF-117 mostly work in the lateral direction (sideways)?! This always has kind of bugged me. It's entirely physically possible, but ....weird, I can't think of many good arguments for it, especially in atmospheric flight.

Awesome, nice to read how you did it!

Painfully Awesome! I don't remember it either.

Wow, that looks amazing! Thanks for posting!

First order comparison. It's bigger, heavier, less thrust, etc. and therefore slower/more sluggish than a VF-1. I agree, it always bugged me a little that VF-0 looks more advanced than the VF-1. Maybe it could be argued that the VF-0 was designed as more of an experimental version, and the VF-1 is the mass produced version produced later. I just don't worry about it and I'm happy . The VF-0 could still be made viable I'm sure, but there would have to be some of the same trickery as the VF-1 would benefit from. Same problems, just larger scale. Which reminds me, the F-14 has glove vanes that pop out in high speed flight to shift the aerodynamic center forward when the wings are swept back. I'm fairly certain the VF-1 (? VF-0 as well?) does not have these, can anyone verify that? I can't remember whether it did or not, lol. F-14 Glove Vanes:

Haha, good points. The F-22 was originally designed without a horizontal stabilizer, but they ended up adding one later in the design. I suspect it was because they didn't want to rely on the thrust vectoring for 90+% of their pitch authority when the actuators aren't as fast as they'd like, although I don't know this for certain. I just base this on my own results using thrust vectoring. And yes, thrusters could be used to augment the controls, but chances are they would only be used if the aircraft were not responding to the commands from the pilot "adequately", they still use some form of consumable and you wouldn't want to use them unnecessarily. Unless we just say "overtechnology" a few more times and then, hell just use the thrusters/verniers all the time! M'Kyuun, I'm not trying to say the VF-1 is unstable in a bad way. For fighters, it is often desirable to be on the edge of stability as it will usually mean they can respond more quickly to pilot inputs, but it also means it very much relies on the control system of the aircraft to keep it from flying off when not commanded.