Thread:Owlfeathers0117/@comment-32153758-20131123184253/@comment-11135771-20131123235055

Well for one, it should be noted that working gunships are very hard to build, and ones that work well are even harder. But I do have a few tips that might help.

1. The craft that you showed me is a step in the right direction. However, the continuous, unstoppable ascent is what you need for a killsat, not a gunship. Certain blocks seem to have what amounts to an antigravity effect, essentially acting as if they have a density less than that of air, like a balloon. The CVN-99 rear bridges are the most strongly buoyant parts that I know of, though they eat your percentage. The Chinese naval sphere radars (they look kind of like upside down raindrops with a flat bottom) might be even more buoyant compared to their weight (go into test run with one of those and nothing else, it shoots into the sky like a rocket), but they don't provide a huge amount of lift overall. Still, they are good for using in places where you just need something not too heavy to act as a general purpose hull piece.

2. To make a gunship instead of a satellite, you have to make it have a just barely negative buoyancy value. That is, put enough heavier blocks on that the antigravity effect of your lifting segments is slightly weaker than the force of gravity. In test run, your ship should stay on the surface of the water, without either flying or sinking at all (though if it sort of bounces into the air a few times before settling onto the water, that's okay). I recommend using light weapons and stairs for this.

3. The only viable means of propulsion for these types of craft seems to be to take advantage of the high recoil of the Mk36 anti-missile flares. You need quite a few of them if you want to fly at a good speed, and it just so happens that they also eat through your percentage like crazy. Luckily they have a fairly wide field of fire in relation to the direction they're placed in (seems to be over 180 degrees), so just attach them strategically so that the majority of your "engines" can aim in any direction you need them to. It should also be noted that placement is very important; if you're trying to make a gunship-shaped gunship (I recommend starting with X shaped ones, they're usually much more stable), bad placement can result in a tendency to flip upon trying to fire your engines, an inability to turn, or an inability to not turn. For X shaped aircraft, you generally want a rotation ally symmetric radial distribution of flare launchers–two to three on each arm pointing outward (some facing more upward, some facing more down) seems to work well enough.

3. So, test out your design now. Your aircraft should pretty much be sitting on the very surface of the water like a strider bug, and firing downward should propel you upward at a controllable rate. However, one thing to be careful of is stability. This is probably the hardest part about making ships like this. All of my aircraft (except the Gargoyle-class, which is exceptionally stable due to me getting really lucky with the first design I tried) have this terrible habit of flipping over and crashing unless I'm really careful in flying them. Really, really careful. When you make an aircraft like this, you kind of just have to figure out how stable is good enough for you to be confident in your ability to fly it without crashing. As for how you go about stabilizing a gunship, trial and error seems to work best. Don't exit customization (doing so might change the laws of physics, I'm not even joking about that), just keep tweaking and going into test run. I typically use the Islands map to test; I consider an aircraft to be sufficiently stable to be combat effective if at least 2/3 of the time I'm able to fly it to the nearest I sand, land on it, and then bounce off, land on the island right next to it, and finally fly over to the last island and float around near the lighthouse for a bit. If you can do that with reasonable consistency and not crash, it shouldn't be too much trouble controlling it in battle.

4. Flying the gunship is a trivial task compared to building it, but still requires some practice. You should play around in test run and drills until you're comfortable with the craft, each ship built like this tends to have its own unique quirks. For example, the Cicada-class, due to its uneven weight distribution, will often flip and crash if you fire the engines too rapidly (as you saw), while the Gargoyle-class is completely stable and has never been known to flip, but appears to accelerate upward at an exponential rate when you fire downwards; trying to go up too quickly can often cause an ascent into low orbit, leaving you stuck in a spot where your weapons don't have enough range to shoot at anything.

5. If you want to make a realistic-looking gunship, that is, one that actually looks like something that might fly, be prepared for much frustration and pulling of hair. It's really difficult to make one that works well (the Cicada-class is the best I've got, and as previously mentioned it will crash and sink unless I'm very careful). Follow everything I've mentioned so far, but be much more careful about weight distribution vs antigrav part placement, as well as engine location.

6. Just in case you were wondering, killsats like the one you were using can be very effective if you add Mk36 flares for propulsion and increase the rate of ascent a bit (to make them harder to hit). The only issue is that you eventually get too high for your weapons to hit surface targets, so you have to sink your opponent fairly quickly to avoid a draw.

Hope this helps, let me know if you want me to add some pictures. I might post the blueprints for the Gargoyle-class at some point, it's a very good ship for learning to use these things, and up an be modified with relative ease. Also, editing it doesn't make the physics mess up.