aircraft keeps tipping downwards slightly when in flight

[woeful galleon]

Its been an issue i've had for a while but I dont know why this happens

[sturdy moon]

i think this is because wings in ksp2 have 0 lift at 0AoA @woeful galleon

angle your wings very very slightly in VAB to fix, i think

[raw frigate]

Could you show the position of the COM and COL?

[woeful galleon]

Sorry im kinda new to the game what does COM and COL mean

[raw frigate]

Center of Mass and Center of Lift. They’re physics terms to indicate the points where the force of gravity and force of lift apply on a craft. You can toggle them on in the VAB with the little buttons in the bottom right next to the part selector, they’re the yellow and blue spheres

[woeful galleon]

oh I see

let me take a picture of it real quick

[raw frigate]

The COL (blue sphere) being behind the COM (yellow sphere) is good, thats what you want for a plane design. If its tipping down too much tho, you may want to move them a bit closer together if you can. Alternatively you can try increasing the size of the control surfaces, that might give the SAS a better shot at counteracting the forces that cause it to pitch forward

[woeful galleon]

do you think thats close enough or do I need to move it closer?

[raw frigate]

that looks good, give it a test flight and see if it helped

[woeful galleon]

that actually made it worse but I think I have an fix for it

Im going to try to make them more further apart

[raw frigate]

hm, thats weird. the further appart they are the more leverage the lift has to flip the craft. a good way to visualize this is to imagine the yellow sphere as a pivot, and the blue arrow as the direction someone is pushing on the craft. the farther it is away from the pivot, the less force that person will need to make the craft rotate around the pivot

cant hurt to try tho, i guess

[woeful galleon]

making them more further apart kind of fixed the issue

but only in high speeds (600 m/s+)

I think the issue is probably the front of the plane

its kinda a big anchor that goes through the air strapped on a plane

[raw frigate]

that actually makes some sense. the COM and COL play a role in stability at high speeds too: you always want the COL to be behind the COM, kinda like a dart, so it stays stable. if it were the other wa around the craft would want to go backwards (this applies to rockets too). at higher speeds that effect is much more significant than the lift force.

you esentially made a very good supersonic aircraft

[woeful galleon]

now that I think about it goes 1500 m/s so you are probably right

holy crap I just realised thats like mach 4.4

[raw frigate]

if you go much faster you might start overheating haha

[woeful galleon]

thank you for the info though, it helped me quite a bit