KerbalX

Details

• Type: SPH
• Class: aircraft
• Part Count: 141
• Pure Stock
• KSP: 1.10.1

Right: The Keibler 16 in the Spaceplane Hangar.

Below: A test flight of the Keibler 16, starting from, and ending at, the Dessert Airfield.

Description

A plucky little rocket plane, based after the German late-WWII Messerschmitt Me 163B rocket-powered interceptor, and powered by a pair of Rockomax Thud engines (clipped into each other to look like one).

It uses a skid-and-tailwheel landing gear, with a pair of grip-padded retractable landing skids under the forward fuselage and a retractable tailwheel in the, well, tail. For takeoff, a set of large rover wheels are mounted to the landing skids, turning the plane into a three-wheeled taildragger; once airborne, the rover wheels are staged away, and the skids are unlocked and retracted and the tailwheel retracted (using, respectively, the Custom 1, Custom 2, and Gear action groups). When landing, the skids are reextended and locked down and the tailwheel extended (with Custom 3, Custom 1, and Gear, respectively). Make sure to touch down straight and wings-level (to keep from tipping over when all the landing gear is essentially right on the aircraft’s midline) and gently (in a hard touchdown, the hydraulic cylinders holding the skids extended bottom out, and the fuel tanks under the forward fuselage hit the ground and blow up; while of [relatively] little consequence in KSP, this would have been a Very Bad Thing for the real-life Me 163, as the remaining traces of the highly-volatile propellants it used had a pronounced tendency to explode violently from the shock of a hard landing).

In clean configuration, the Keibler 16 can climb to extremely high altitudes under power and in the subsequent zoom climb. Attached are the results of a three-flight test series out of Dessert Airfield:

• Flight 1: Maximum altitude 19,356 m (63,504 ft). 24.2 units of oxidiser and 19.8 of fuel were left at the end of the burn, being stored in two Dumpling tanks made inaccessible to the engines as a result of assembly errors.

• Flight 2: Maximum altitude 26,897 m (88,245 ft), the Dumpling-propellant issue having been resolved. Unfortunately, the aircraft touched down hard on landing, bottoming out the skid oleos and destroying parts of the lower forward fuselage (Jebediah was A-OK, however).

• Flight 3: Maximum altitude 38,381 m (125,922 feet!). This is over halfway to the edge of space, and high enough for stars to become visible in daytime (35 km) and for the navball to autoswitch from surface-relative to orbital reference frames (36 km).

Due to the considerable changes in airspeed and mass distribution during a flight, lots of fiddling with pitch trim (I trims the elevons in the aircraft-nose-down direction, K trims the elevons to make the plane want to pitch more up) is recommended. During powered ascent, just try to keep the pitch-input needle on the flight-control-input display (below the staging pane) to half of full deflection or less; don’t bother trying to actually center the needle until you’re in a stable unpowered glide.

The Keibler 16 glides very well, maintaining stable flight down to very low airspeeds (its 1-G stall speed in landing configuration with tanks empty is below 30 m/s - making it hard, at times, to keep it from ballooning back up into the air when flared for landing!) and retaining excellent control authority and responsiveness all the way down. For additional lift, the aircraft has a set of leading-edge flaps for takeoff and landing, deployed and retracted by pressing 0 (they also increase drag, though, so don’t use them [until just before touchdown] if you’re trying to stretch your glide).

A stock aircraft called Keibler 16. Built with 141 of the finest parts, its root part is Mark2Cockpit.

Built in the SPH in KSP version 1.10.1.