No prob. Can't wait to fly this thing! One of these days I'll pick your brain on how you made this. I've got some ideas I'd love to make in Orbiter but no developed skills to do so.
Just get yourself some 3d software - blender is free and packs all the features you might want, but i don't use it myself, or if you can afford it, max or maya are the usual game content creation tools used by games companies and do everything you might want, at a price. It's not that hard once you get the basics down, helps if you have an 'eye' for these types of things or a traditional art background but it's not essential. There's plenty of communities that will help you like at CGtalk, or Scifi-meshes.
If I come across anything else I think you could find useful I'll drop it in here. I've got about everything there is on lifting bodies, but not so much yet on waveriders or X-43 style hypersonics.
Yeah cool, there isn't really that much out there.. which is good in a way because it lets you be a little more flexible with the look of the craft.
Just a couple of thoughts (feel free to ignore them
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Not at all, i appreciate the input from someone who seems to understand the subject, thanks.
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I'd be concerned about ithe shape and location of your vertical stabs. I'm not really sure why they have a sharp tip? It just seems like an unnecessary complexity.
Why is a sharp tip more complex than any other shape...? I just thought they looked cool like that really. In all honesty theyre sections of the main wing, copied and adjusted so the sharp tip angle is the same as the main wingtip.
The other problem you might encounter in reality is that at even a relatively low angle of attack (like 5 degrees or so), you'll get a pretty large region of turbulent air behind the body (which could make it unstable in yaw and maybe roll). The X-30 design avoided this by not allowing the top of the fuselage to curve back down before the verticals. If you push the vertical as far outboard as possible on the extensions of the body you might get away with it. The other way to get around it is to give the verticals a little toe-in angle which would force even turbulent air to conform a little to the flow around the vertical (but that'll give you some drag penalty). Another solution is to shape the body to provide laminar flow but all that will do is widen the range of safe angles of attack.
Thats interesting, i hadn't considered that, so because the tail slopes down the angle of the airflow is too steep when the nose is up, causing the airflow to become detached, which i guess makes the vertical fins useless? The fins actually have a couple of degrees toe in, but thats more random accident/looks than actual design choice.
