KerbalX

Description

A small single seat plane, the Duck’s single turbofan engine is mounted in a pod on top of the aft fuselage; to make room for the engine, the vertical rudders are mounted on the tips of the horizontal tail, rather than on the fuselage as in a conventional aircraft.

The high thrustline and the high-incidence wings (for enhanced lift at low speed) give it some… interesting handling characteristics, but it’s still perfectly flyable, or so Jeb claims, at least.

A stock aircraft called Duck. Built with 25 of the finest parts, its root part is Mark1Cockpit.

Based on the Heinkel He 162 very-late-World-War-II German fighter jet (from whence came the Duck’s fuselage-top engine-pod mounting and strongly-dihedralled horizontal tail), although (as should be obvious visually) the Duck has a J-33 Wheesley turbofan engine in place of the He 162’s BMW 003 turbojet (the J-20 Juno turbojet, stock KSP’s only pure turbojet, being much too small for this purpose) and (as is not immediately obvious visually) has a much greater endurance (as none of stock KSP’s jet engines are anywhere near as fuel-thirsty as real-life WWII-era jets).

The Wheesley can be reversed in flight, but extreme care should be exercised in doing so, as the nose-up pitching moment created by throwing the high-mounted engine into reverse thrust, combined with the already-considerable pitch-up tendency caused by the Duck’s considerable decalage, can easily cause the aircraft to pitch up and out of control, often completely swapping ends and going into a tailslide or a difficult-to-recover flat spin. On the plus side, the aforementioned decalage gives the Duck strong positive speed stability, making it fairly easy to fly with SAS disengaged (unfortunately, I have yet to find any means of giving an aircraft passive roll stability in KSP, so it still can’t be flown completely hands-off - or not for long, at any rate), and, if you increase its trim speed by drooping the elevators and transferring fuel forward, it’s quite respectable in the speed department, easily breaking 330 m/s in level flight at lower altitudes.

Built in the SPH in KSP version 1.10.0.

Details

• Type: SPH
• Class: aircraft
• Part Count: 25
• Pure Stock
• KSP: 1.10.0