X-6C Titanium Dart

The next iteration of hypersonic aircraft!

This is an improved version of X-6B in kinda every part.
* Speeds of up to Mach 6 at 47km altitude*
* Range of more than 50000km*
* good handling in low altitudes and at low speeds*
* detailed cockpit*
* reworked wings*
* lots of vizzy stuff for cockpit and lights*
* not one of those heavy tinkered crafts. All parts are with default mass, price, drag and so on. Just nav and indicator lights where shrinked, as they were to chunky for a good look, but nothing, what changes performance.*
* a big part of high performance is the backwards inlet over the engine.*

Action Groups

AG1 - Open/Close Canopy
AG2 - Open/Close Air Breaks
AG3 - 80% Afterburner CutOff. Sets thrust to 80%. Useful for fuel efficient flight.
AG4 - Warning Sound for Overheating ON/OFF (default = ON)
AG5 = Cockpit Lights ON/OFF (default OFF)
AG6 = Nav Lights ON/OFF (default ON)
AG7 = Landing Lights (default OFF, Mach>0.7 = auto OFF)
AG8 = Landing Gear

How to fly

Start the engines and gently raise thrust... it will lift off without any interaction. You will soon notice the tendency to pitch up.
So use Trim aka Slider1. Here are some values which worked good for me:
- at low altitudes a trim of -30 to -35
- at 20km trim of around -20
- at 30km trim of around -10
- when trying to stay above 40km settings beetween +40 and +60

My high speed flight path was something like
- starting with full thrust
- after pitch gets up to 30° setting trim to -33
- when indicated pitch goes down to 20° I sligthly raised trim so the pitch keeps between 20° and 15°
- I kept an eye on apoapsis, going to 40km altitude is good and should give a speed of Mach 3.7
- if you go to high it you will take longer to get the speed, if you go to low you risk overheating.
- from that 40km/Mach 3.7 i simply locked pitch to 20° and trim to +50°
- this setting will lead to somewhere like Mach 5.5/1870m/s at 43km after 30mins flight time and thats the point where overheating comes close so you should pull back the thrust lever to 81-82%.
- you will still slowly gain altitude and speed over time. And over time does not mean 30 mins, we're talking about 6+ hours! In these 6 hours you can carefully adjust thrust and trim.
- after 8 hours this might end at Mach6/2050m/s at 47.5km and a flight distance of 54000km... or in a total failure, because you weren't careful enough. ;)

Pitch higher than 20° and trim higher than +65° seemed always to be worse. It does not produce significant more lift, but a lot more drag and overheating problems.

Going my "standard flight plan" without afterburner(80%) will take you to a more efficient flight of more than 60000km. But your top speed will be "only" around Mach 4.75 and this flight will take 12 hours. Change setting for fast forward speed from 2x to 4x might be a good choice.

When flying Mach4+ at 40km or more, you should not try to turn. The craft will not turn much, but loose lot of altitude resulting in overheating problems.

As the craft lifts off alone at 70m/s, your maximum landing speed should NOT exceed 70m/s. Use air brakes and slow down!

Cockpit Informations

From top to down - from mid to outside:

Temperature Waring

Monitors wing parts and lower nose cone. Truns yellow at 950K/677°C, Truns red and warns at 980K/707°C as the parts have a default heat resistance of 1000K/727°C. Warning Sound can be deactivated with AG4.

NavBall

Standard NavBall

Indicators

...for Engine ON/OFF, Fuel below 5% and Battery below 5%.

Trim & Thrust Lever

Flight Time

Shows the time since the craft last time touches the ground.

Trim/Flaps

Shows the trim setting(Slider1)

Vertical SPD

Shows vertical speed beetween +100m/s and -100m/s.

Stats Panel

with ASL, AGL, SPD1 = Speed over ground in m/s, SPD2 = Speed over ground in km/h, Mach number.

PFD(primary flight display)

A nice and good looking Display from Bielzinho767 As it has IAS it was a good help for me.

Default Display

Distance/Time Panel

with:
- Stage Burne Time: same as in flight info
- Traveled Ground Distance: Counts the correct ground distance. From my Odometer
- Est. Remaining Distance: Just Burn time by ground speed, asuming your flight will go, like it does at the moment.
- Est. Total Distance: Just adds Traveled Distance and Remaining Distance.

Gear&Landing Light indicators

Switch Panel

Functional switches for all action groups. Numbers matching the AG number.

Gauges

Battery & Fuel

Known Issues

• Sometimes the nav light beacons starting to overheat for no reason. Deactivating and Activating(AG6) helps. Maybe a bug?

• When switching to the Droods some of the functions does not work, as they are bound to the planes command disc.

• Setting trim to -30 and making a negativ pitch turn, leads to a steep spin, which is hard to recover. Just don't do this!

The Story

I just wanted to make the X-6B look a little cooler. At first there was a fuel tank in the engine exhaust. Pretty simple to fix. So I looked for other things. OK the Droods feet clipped through the nose cone, so i extended cockpit and nose cone. With the additional space I startet to change the look of the cockpit. Better MFDs, gauges, useful informations, levers things like that.
Ok after the cockpit was looking like this, there must be some lights and cool stuff. This led to nav lights. landing lights, new colors.
All this new stuff led to a drop in performance. Best was now Mach 4.5 at 35km ASL. So i started to play around with center of lift and center of mass. This helped but not much. So what about other wing profiles? Yep, this worked but handling was now somewhat strange. So I recreated the whole wings, still not neutral, but with trim kinda okayish.
After all that followed lots of hours of optimization, test flights, optimization again and test flights again... in the end it felt like i've optimised every single part.

So have fun flying!
... or give feedback for an X-6D? ;)