OHM F-224 'Firehawk' v1.03

[OrbitHangar]

Author: bluedragon


F-224 'Firehawk'  UPDATE v1.03
 
Futuristic short-range spacecraft, capable of reaching LEO without boosters or external tanks. Features active VC, a flight assistance system and a basic warning and damage system. 

To install unzip to orbiter directory. Please read the manual.
 
Tested against a clean orbiter 2010 P1 installation /w sound,UMMU and D3D9 client.
 
It's my first addon. Feedback, ideas and suggestions are welcome.
Thank you and have fun!


Version history:

Second Update v1.01
10.07.2013
...

third update v1.02
06.12.2013
...

fourth update v1.03
04.03.2016

fixed:
- stall speed behaviour

added:
- liquid sodium cooling system for reactor

tweaked visuals:
- applied g-force represented by cockpit camera movement
- main exhaust colour represents ISP / reactor boost
- hover, aux and retro exhausts tweaked
- much less smoke (for environmental reasons)


This thing is still WIP and far from finished. I lost track of lots of minor changes and bugfixes and there is a long to-do list.

 



DOWNLOAD

 

[Axel]

This is a very cool bird, nice work with the working VC too! Nice idea with the temperature-viewer and G-Meter in the HUD.
The only bug i found is a wild swinging at atmospheric flight between left and right when i use time acc.

But im sure you will fix it, keep up the very good work! :thumbup:

 

[PhantomCruiser]

This is your first add-on!?!?! Freakin' cool.
Awesome job! (I kept looking around for some Kilrathi or something)

 

[Keatah]

A fantastic first addon. I hope you continue to develop this and make refinements and improvements and upgrades. I see nothing but potential here.

 

[Kendo]

I have to say, this is very good. That lighting effect underneath when hovering on the moon, wow, its good. I don,t like the engine smoke though, just needs a tweak I think. Simply brilliant. Well done.:thumbup:

 

[N_Molson]

Looks great, a welcome change from the Deltaglider shape

 

[PeterRoss]

The vessel is great and the mesh is awesome if little too 'picturesque' for my taste. Great work. I made a test flight around the globe and found some things you should know:

- It's impossible to taxi this thing - when you try to turn it the nosewheel isn't turning and RCS tend to bank the vessel even if RCS is off
HINT: you should add

SetNosewheelSteering (true);

into source file generated by Artlav converter and recompile it - this is the common flaw of all plane-like vessels generate with it;
- Red lights should be on the left wing and green lights - on the right one, it's kinda standard;
- Temp indicator shows weird numbers - it seemed alright during ascend, but when I made it to LEO with ApA of 159 km temperature started to raise and stopped at 449 C around ApA, then it started to decrease slowly; there was no temp peaks during reentry, max was around 30 C;
- RCS is way overpowered - it's clearly designed for the vessel with its tanks full. When I finished orbit insertion my fuel tank was only 7% full and it was very difficult to control the vessel with RCS. Reentry gave me some hard time too;
- When HUD is in Orbit mode there are no velocity and radius indicators;
- G-meter shows free-fall acceleration for the current altitude and this information is quite useless. It would be much more useful showing acceleration acting on vessel/pilot;

These are just minor bugs, otherwise the vessel is just cool. :thumbup:

 

[RisingFury]

Now that's a properly developed first addon!

Beautiful mesh, impressive 3D cockpit, well done animations. It's obvious that this is still very much a beta, even the documentation admits there's still some work to be done implementing systems. Once finished, I think this addon will deserve to be on the must-have addon list. It certainly is the first well done "space fighter".

I have noticed a few issues:
- Aerodynamics needs to be improved. For one, the wing area is very small, so the wing loading is high. You can't just expect such a plane to get off the runway like it's nobody's business. Also, the plane doesn't fight you at all when it goes into a turn. If you pitch full up, you can rotate the plane backwards before the velocity vector is able to catch up. I think you need to implement stronger coefficient of moment in your airfoil coefficients functions.

- The mesh has a hole in the body, at the side where the wing starts. That's by design. However, if you look through the hole, the texture in the back might be done a bit better.

- The RCS is overpowered. It's powerful enough so that when the plane is on the ground, it can rotate it upside down. If you insist on having such powerful RCS for space, you might want to decrease the thruster's effectiveness in the atmosphere.

- On the right MFD, the left most letters are abstracted by the mesh. Might want to push the MFD right by a few pixels. Same thing happens with the left MFD, but with the right most letters. If you select the MFD menu, you'll see what I mean.

 

[stevcast]

Very, very cool. I love the design and the VC is great. Keep up the great work. :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: Three thumbs up!!

 

[Kyle]

This is certainly by far the best fighter I've seen on OH! Incredible work, looks amazing on D3D9 with proper reflection.

 

[Yurik]

Ship is great for LEO flights! But i have some question, docking port is active or not? If yes how to retract it?

 

[Pipcard]

A well-made craft.

 

[Pioneer]

Not bad for a first addon.
P.S. In the future, could you please make the documentation in the pdf format?

 

[Matias Saibene]

F-224 'Firehawk'

Congratulations for your first add-on. It looks great. I will download. It looks very futuristic.

Greetings, and congratulations.

 

[bluedragon]

Hi everybody,

Thank you very much for all your positive feedback! I'm very happy that you like my bird.

I have tried to iron out most of the reported bugs and issues, though was not entirely successful with all of them. But nevertheless here is the first update:


01.06.2013 - fixed issues:
- Atmospheric flight model now more stable at time acc (10x)
- Corrected strobe colors (left red, right green)
- G-meter now shows force applied to pilot/vessel
- HUD displays for G-force, temperature and pressure now blinking in case of the respective warnings
- Center Display now shows engine output in G instead of kN
- Main engine display now shows correct output (w/ AB) and turns yellow when afterburner engaged
- RCS effectiveness reduced in atmospheric conditions - but still strong in space!
- Flight manual converted to .pdf


known issues - still in progress:
x taxiing - "SetNoseWheelSteering(true);" was already implemented - no idea why this doesn't work.
help welcome!
x correct hull temperature calculation - for the moment the temperature of the surrounding plasma is calculated (ok, more kinda guessed), resulting in 'interesting' numbers in Earth's thermosphere - and of course a quite annoying temperature warning when deploying the gear for docking at ISS. For correct hull temperature I probably need advanced thermodynamics - working on it.
x more tweaking atmospheric flight model - out of my skills today - likely to change soon ;-)
x mesh/texture improvements
x docking port only works if gear is deployed, so docking is more kind of "landing" on the other vessel's dockingport. Because the size of the Firehawk does not really support a full-sized docking port - retractable or not -, I'm working on some kind of "garage" for the Firehawk, using the gear as clamps. Hope I can release it soon.


non-issues:
o overpowered RCS: strong RCS in space flight is on purpose, as a fighter-class craft needs some agility. Please try the FAS functions, they make the craft much easier to fly.

 

[PeterRoss]

Second test flight completed succesfully. Everything seems good, even that overpowered RCS isn't too bad if FAS-KILL is engaged.

Two notes:
- Afterburner is unusable when in atmosphere because aerodynamic surfaces are working together with RCS even if it's in LIN mode. So, when you engage afterburner (NUM 6 button) vessel starts to rotate. It doesn't happens when in vacuum of course.
- Manual says that UMMUs are leaving the craft wearing the same suit they had on them when entering. In reality UMMUs always have spacesuit on when leaving the craft no matter what suit was on them when entering.

Will try orbital rendezvous at the third test flight.

 

[Staiduk]

Have to add my words to the group - this is fantastic!
I was going to mention the taxiing but someone beat me to it.
Very, very, very well done!

 

[Interceptor]

This a Great ship,everything that I found wrong with her has been mentioned already,looking foward to updates.thanks

 

[PeterRoss]

Third test flight rendezvous phase finished successfully:

FAS is an absolutely fantastic flight tool, especially when you need to dock an ultralight vessel with overpowered RCS and docking port under its belly

One new bug detected:
- at some random instances HUD switches its modes or turns itself off. The mode HUD was in at the moment of this happening becomes unaccessible for some time, then I can switch to this mode again. This is the first flight when I'm using D3D9 client with this vessel, maybe it's connected with this somehow.

 

[asbjos]

I have some problems with the cockpit. With the inline D3D7 client (regular Orbiter.exe) I have the cockpit as it should be with buttons with labels and working display, but with the D3D9 R10 client (Orbiter_ng.exe), the labeled buttons and display are gone.

Here are two pictures, the first with Orbiter.exe and the second with Orbiter_ng.exe

Does anyone else have the same problem?