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Aircraft Design Company- Matsura's Planes Are Always Fastest!

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Character Sheet
  • Informational


    • ​
    Stress
    0​
    Office Stress
    0​
    XP
    5​

    Matsura Asuka
    Head Designer for Ohara Airworks
    Age 24 (Legally 25)
    Year 12 AF (After Flight)

    Design Stats
    Aerodynamics Engineering - +2
    Structural Engineering - +2
    Chemical Engineering - +1
    Mechanical Engineering - +1
    Ballistics Engineering - +1
    Electrical Engineering - 0

    Personal/Political Stats
    Social Skills - 0
    Politics Skills - 0
    Importance - 2
    Income - 1
    Investments - Ohara

    Resources
    Power - 0
    Wealth - 2

    Designs
    Type 1 Series - Military Variation (Designated T1M1)
    Type 2 Racer (World Speed Record October 1910-April 1911, 180kph)
    Model 2 Scout (Designated T1M2)
    Navy Scout Prototype (Drowned Rat)
    Dive Bomber B1M1 "Duck"
    Machine Gun Carrier R1A "Dragonfly" (World Speed Record May-July 1911, 200kph)
    Naval Rescue Water-Landing Supply Plane NR1M0 "Dolphin" (World speed record 240kph)
    Rhino Demon Train Hunter
    The world's first airliner
    The world's first pulsejet airplane

    Assets
    Slide Rule
    Computator (1 Reroll per Routine)

    Languages
    Albian
    Gallian

    Familiar Vices
    Drinking
    Prostitutes
    Dancing

    Family Life
    - Engaged to Arita Yachi, formerly the leading Ace in the Imperial Army. Designated #1 Cutest Army Boy, he's having some serious problems with PTSD right now.
    - Taking a second try at dating Mikami Kiho, ex-dockerwork from the south.

    Upgrades
    - 3 XP to upgrade a stat.

    Ohara Airworks
    Start Up, Imperial Capital, Akitsukuni

    Owner
    - Mr. Ohara, Rich. Aircraft Enthusiast. Business guy.

    Engineers

    Kibe Koume, 26, Office Manager
    Tiny & angry, Kibe went to school in Albia, picking up the language, the religion, and a fuckload of swear words. Speaks Albian.
    Mechanical +2, Ballistics +1
    Office Manager: If Kibe is not assigned to a team, the Office Stress is reduced by 1.

    Sakane Jun, 26, Second Team Leader
    A soured patriot, Sakane is married and has a young child being raised gender-neutrally. His two brothers who fought in the war.
    Structural +2, Aerodynamics +1
    Team Leader: If there are any additional projects, Sakane will lead them.
    Joinery: Sakane has training in the traditional Akitsukuni carpentry art of joinery, creating complex self-supporting joints with no fasteners or glue. When working with non-monocoque wooden spars or ribs, +1 Structural.

    Tezuka Kenji, ???
    A stoner with occasional flashes of insight. Nobody really knows what he does, but he's probably useful?
    Aerodynamics +2, Chemical +1
    Flashes of Brilliance: Each natural 10 rolled by any team Tezuka is assigned to gives +1 forward to the next research roll.

    Hasegawa Morio, 26
    A hopeless nerd with a photography habit, mostly on account of developing his own film, Hasegawa seems to do nothing but work and stack card houses, but somehow has an incredible attractive boyfriend. Speaks Gallian.
    Chemical +2, Ballistic +1
    Silent Workhorse: Hasegawa can work on two different projects at once for no cost to Office Stress, providing they use different stats.

    Kawamura Yosai, 25.
    Serially successful womanizer and incredibly attractive, Kawamura doesn't seem to have much of a personality outside of seducing women. Well, except for that time he seduced Asuka, which nobody talks about. Speaks Dyske.
    Structural +2, Electrical +1, Social +1
    Easily Distracted: If Kawamura is working on the same team as a female or non-binary employee, the team is at -1d10.

    Koide Hatsu, 24.
    One of the few female graduates of an Akitsukuni engineering school, Koide is brilliant and incredibly driven, but her first job at Akibara was both humiliating and exposed her to an abusive coworker. Her father is a rich businessman with factories in Joseon, and she's engaged to Ken from Castles of Steel. Speaks Joseon.
    Mechanical +2, Structural +1
    No Sleep: If you let her, Koide will work herself to death. She can work a second project for no Office Stress, but all her stats will be reduced to 1 for the routine.

    Kobayashi Ayao, ???
    Disowned heiress of the Kobayashi family, all Kobayashi wanted was a career and to be a modern woman. For her trouble, a cousin threw acid on her, scarring her face, neck, much of her torso, and her left arm. Despite appearing serene and above it all, she's actually an avowed communist activist and baseball player.
    Aerodynamics +2, Social +2

    Adachi Ren, 24
    Adachi learned chemistry from her father, one of the most famous chemical engineers in the country, rather than through formal schooling. She's married, has a kid, and takes spirituality very seriously. Yes, you did the math right, she had Yuki when she was 17. It's 1912, folks.
    Chemical +2, Electrical +1
    Young Mother: Adachi will cause double Office Stress if she has to work multiple tasks.

    Uyeno Sei, Ballistics Engineer, 31.
    The oldest member of the crew, this is Uyeno's second career. Her first was as an officer in the Imperial Navy with specialized technical training: her very promising career was cut short by her transition. Her work in a naval arsenal on machine-guns landed her the job here. Briefly dated Satomi (the age range is a bit creepy but again, 1912), she's missing a piece of her ear and is deaf on that side, from an exploding cannon. Recently returned from Varnmark from experimental surgery, she's known for her skill navigating gendered bureaucracy.
    Ballistic +3

    Mi Kyung-Jae, 23
    A recent graduate of the Imperial College of Heijo, Mi is from the recently annexed territory of Joseon. For those keeping track at home, that means he's a Korean national living in Imperial Japan in 1912. We haven't seen much of his personality because he's rightfully terrified of everything around him. He has a specialty in endurance engine design and modification. Speaks Joseon.
    Mechanical +1, Chemical +1
    Endurance Engines: Mi has an excellent understanding of metallurgy and tolerances. Any engine he works on gains +1 Reliability if a 16+ is rolled.
    Pulsejet Wizard: Mi is now one of the world's leading experts on the pulsejet engine. He can be given his own project to custom-craft pulsejet engines, and he gives +1 to any pulsejet-related project.
    Joseon National: Mi does not have security clearance to work on any top-secret projects.

    Miyoshi Shigeri, 23.
    A non-binary person and admirer of Asuka's work, they were in an support role in the Army before joining the company.
    Structural +1, Mechanical +1, Aerodynamic +1
    Mechanic: Miyoshi has some experience repairing and refurbishing aircraft. They get +1 if assigned on the clean-up phase.


    Other Employees
    - Ohara Satomi, 22, Mr. Ohara's niece and the company test pilot, Ohara is a general lesbian disaster. She's good at flying planes, driving cars, and kissing girls. She's bad at being patient, being respectable, and sticking to literally anyones conceptions of gender roles. Deeply in lesbians with Coralie D'Amboise.
    - Fujkikawa Sotatsu, old, modelmaker. He's an old man and toymaker and we don't see much of him because he locks himself in his workshop a lot. He's friends with Kawamura?

    Assets
    - Engine Test Rig (Allows engine tweaking and optimization.
    - Wind Tunnel (+1 Aerodynamics)
    - Rapid Prototype Lab (+1 Clean Up)
    Expanded Cast

    Akitsukuni Industry
    - Homura Mohoko: Head Engine Designer for Kobayashi. First female engineer in the country. A lot of sex appeal.
    - Okumura: Head of Akibara aircraft design.
    - Yamanaka Hajime: Kobayashi engineer. Young and eager.
    - Igarashi Masazumi: Kobayashi engineer. Reserved and experienced.
    - Admiral Akibara Toru: Imperial Navy Admiral. Maximum nepotism. Maximum douchebag.
    - Lt.Cmnd Akibara Shinzo: The above's son. A hottie but very forward.



    Character Families
    - Matsura(?) Mizuko: Asuka's sister. Was paralyzed in an accident in Asuka's first flight. Lives Elsewhere and is married now. Can't forgive Asuka, even though she's tried.
    - Adachi Motoki: Adachi's husband, an accountant. Legally blind.
    - Adachi Yuki: Adachi's 7 year old daughter and wannabe pilot. Very adorable.
    - Yachi's Brother: Exists.
    - Sakane's Wife: Exists. Drives him a bit crazy, but he loves her.
    - Yachi's Brother's Wife: Exists. Is statistically likely to be pregnant.
    - Lt. Coralie D'Amboise: Gallian pilot in exile. Satomi's girlfriend. 25. Accomplished bisexual duelist. She flew in the war for a single day, and for her troubles got a hole blown in her cheek and had her left arm paralyzed.

    Akisukuni Army & Ex-Army
    - Lt. Torio Tanaka: Yachi's former observer as an enlisted man. Was jumped up to fly Ducks and lost a leg on his first mission. A trained painter, married to Torio Saya.
    - Captain Amari Shiro: A Dragonfly pilot who ended up flying as Yachi's partner. Kind of delightfully twinky. They sorta slept together at one point, which wasn't great. He lost his previous boyfriend in the April Offensive and turned his plane into a shrine. He was shot in the gut and is still recovering.
    - Major Izuhara: Logistics officer, Imperial Army, this bespectled officer stood up to the Caspian Crown Prince and accidentally kicked off the Akitsikuni-Caspian War. The guilt was so much that, after almost a year of running Army procurement, he shot himself in a phone both.
    - Captain Nakai Sekien: Army scout pilot. First person to drop a bomb from an airplane, later head of the Duck Squadrons.
    - Captain Teshima: A Desk pilot that fought with Yachi. Lost an arm in the process, took over for Major Izuhara after his death. Seems cheery despite it all.
    - Captain Nashio: A real piece of shit dude and probably a rapist, he's also a war hero as the second-highest scoring ace on the Akitsukuni side. He was a young shitty kid in way over his head but it's no excuse.
    - Lt. Kinjo: Kind of a dumb lump and Nashio's friend, one of the desk pilots. Dead at 19.
    - Lt. Okazaki: Yachi's friend from before the war and pilot, he died in a spin in his dragonfly. His death probably hit Yachi the hardest.

    Westerners
    - Rose & Antoinette Sears: Pioneers of flight. Sisters. Black in 1910s not!America. Yikes.
    - Timina Guasti: Famous aircraft designer from Otrusia. Likes big planes and green.
    - Prince Protasov Vasilyevich: Crown Prince of Great Caspia. Real dick. You gotta hand it to him though, a decent flier.
    - Count von Zeppelin: Invented rigid airships. Runs a successful airline business. Damned impressive.
    - Bennhold: Aircraft Engineer. Experimenting with metal aircraft.
    - Aileen Middlemiss: Albian reporter for the Artimis Times. Well meaning and oblivious.
    Available Tech
    • Materials: Wood, Duralumin, Molded Wood, Wood & Silk Composite, etc
    • All engine mounts
    • All wing types
    • Basic reinforcement
    • Wing warping and ailerons
    • Basic water radiators
    • Flying Wings
    • Semi-Monocoque design (requires at least half the slots have frame pieces)
    • Valved pulsejets
    • Basic weapon mounts and turrets
    Tech not Yet Developed
    • Custom engines
    • Monocoque construction
    • Cantilever Wings and associated tech
    • V and T tails
    • Tailless designs
    • Aluminum and titanium
    • Cellulose surfacing
    • Any kind of radar
    • Weapon accessability mods
    • Interruptor gear
    • Geared propellers
    • And Maybe Other Stuff
    Akitsukuni
    Island Nation

    Government
    Constitutional Monarchy
    - The democratic portions of the government are dubiously legitimate.
    - The head of state is the Empress of Akitsukuni. She gives her blessing to newly formed governments.
    - The Navy and a small number of families have undue influence on politics.

    Economy
    Developing Mixed Market
    - Most industry is controlled by a small number of wealthy, family-owned companies.
    - The state provides most contracts to industry. Consumer good market is anemic.
    - Exports are few, mostly cultural.
    - Imports are raw minerals, food, oil, and expertise.
    - Currently suffering an economic crash after the last war.

    Politics
    The Diet is currently ruled by a Constitutional Nationalist government. It has a system of nonlocal proportional representation, with representatives appointed by the party in accordance to their share of the vote.
    - Constitutional Nationalists: 50%
    - Purity Club: 9%
    - New Independents: 26%
    - Fairness Association: 11%
    - United Communist League: 2%
    - Monarchists: 1%
    - Assorted Fringe Parties: 5%

    Demographics
    Akitsukuni is mostly very ethnically homogeneous. Around 5% of the population are various minorities, most from nearby countries. Roughly .1% are westerners here for business or in advisory positions.
    - Population: 55 Million
    - Religion: Mostly Kodo. Roughly 2% of the population follows western religions.
    - Wealth: Most wealth is concentrated in the top 5% of the country. Nearly 20% of the population lives in conditions indistinguishable from peasantry.
    - Urbanization: Heavily urbanized for a small economy: 35% and rapidly growing.

    Military
    At Peace
    - Imperial Akitsukuni Navy (IAN): The 6th largest in the world, and the most experienced.
    - Imperial Akitsukuni Army (IAA): 150,000 highly experienced soldiers, and a considerable reserve.

    Aspects
    - Poor Resources: Aluminum costs +1.
    - Damn Akitsukuni Engines!: Engines have -1 Reliability.



    The Main Character Of This Quest Is Nonbinary And Uses They/Them Pronouns.

    I Am Putting This Here Because The Next Person To Misgender Them Is Getting Yeeted Into The Trash

    Also here's the Gayaverse TV Tropes page, because why not.​
     
    Last edited:
  • Informational
    • Vebyast said:
    ...Mount the whole nose of the plane on a geared ring so the observer can roll themselves and their gun independent of the rest of the plane. There's literally nothing out there except the observer and their gun! No need to run fuel lines, control lines, anything - it's functionally decoupled from the entire rest of the craft. The observer can just crank themselves around to shoot at whatever needs shooting!

    Even better, make the whole nose modular! If you for some reason need a huge camera setup instead of a gun turret, just swap in the camera nose with the glass floor and such. Or if you need to load ordnance or a small cannon, swap in the bomb nose or the gun nose.

    This is a perfect idea and cannot possibly have any downsides at all.
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    That.... Might actually work. Make a plan and I'll vote for this.
     
    Wow I made a pretty sweet little triplane with a farman tail and a pusher nacelle on a parasol wing. I kinda like it. Only problem is it's significantly overbudget (20 thaler).
     
    Last edited:
    Vebyast said:
    ...Mount the whole nose of the plane on a geared ring so the observer can roll themselves and their gun independent of the rest of the plane. There's literally nothing out there except the observer and their gun! No need to run fuel lines, control lines, anything - it's functionally decoupled from the entire rest of the craft. The observer can just crank themselves around to shoot at whatever needs shooting!
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    This is actually clever. I like it.
    Fakku said:
    What about an autogyro? Or are the rules for those not done yet?
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    Mostly?

    They aren't in the builder yet, but you need cantilever wings, which we don't have yet. (Get to it, Hugo!). And the F-series is pretty shit, so we're not going to get good lift out of a single rotor, so we either need a fixed second wing or something really crazy with twin rotors. There's not a lot we could do to make it viable. And we don't know they exist yet. (Which is part of the reason I want to see the sprint race, perhaps Theo will show up with the Dissertation, a refinement of the principals used in Thesis Statement.)
     
    Crazy Tom said:
    Wouldn't filling up the floats mean the plane rides lower in the water - not ideal for takeoff?
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    I wasn't planning on filling the hole float but instead copy something like the Ar 196 where the middle of the float is a sizable tank only instead of directly feeding the engine we make it so that it feeds to a smaller tank in the fuselage.
     
    Crasian01 said:
    Hmm, snazzy, good historiography.

    20/8 rounds up to 3 (it's actually 2.5), so if the Short Admiralty Type 81 is a biplane then we'd actually need three biplane sections to pull off what they did. I'm going to assume the rules are working and frankly IRL plane intuition only goes so far for ADQ stuff.

    Buggery. No matter how you slice it though, it's a lot of fucking drag. The Type 81 had a top speed of 78 miles per bloody hour. That's 126 kph, which is like a speed of 12 or something in our system isn't it?

    Do we actually need all that wing for cruise, or is that entirely because of takeoff constraints? Can we go "fuck it" and have wing sections fold away during flight? That'd be some next level shit though, and probably pretty heavy...

    What's the state of the art with flaps? Can we just invent better flaps?

    Actually with a canard/tandem configuration, the stabilizer surface is also a lifting surface. So if you put flaps on both, you'd get a lot better lift for takeoff...
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    I'd expect the short brothers planes are designed with very low takeoff speeds and loiter capability as their primary consideration, so if we're angling for speed we can go a different route with less room. Or maybe I'm over-optimistic and we'll need giant wings anyway. The bi-biplane uses a lot of wing area to do what it does, which is more than made up for by inline wing effect.

    The 1-2 tritandem and bi-biplane seem to be capable at wringing a bit more high speed out of a given set of stall speeds while giving good stability and visibility. My preference is with the tritandem, because it gives a less cluttered front for better visibility.
     
    If these are going to be carried on ships, I'm less worried about take-off speed since odds are they'll be catapulted off and retrieved via boom.
     
    Well as usual I will probably not vote because I have decision paralysis about what makes the most sense. Hooray for not doing any math to make your decisions?

    Rat King said:
    If these are going to be carried on ships, I'm less worried about take-off speed since odds are they'll be catapulted off and retrieved via boom.
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    Yeah, but you still need to be able to take off at a slow enough speed that the catapult can do its job. The landing also needs to not be at speeds high enough that hitting a wave weird causes everything to shatter.
     
    I hope it's not rude to have about eighteen tabs of the airplane designer open at this point in the process.

    Rat King said:
    If these are going to be carried on ships, I'm less worried about take-off speed since odds are they'll be catapulted off and retrieved via boom.
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    Those... are still a ways off. If we have to launch off of a ship, we're in deep trouble because we've got to get our stall speed close to the ship's speed, enough so that we have a takeoff roll of a chunk of decking strapped to a turret.

    It looks like this, and frankly I don't think our ships are there yet.



    Incidentally, please let us get to where I can make a tangent about the evolution of early planes on ships. It's a wild ride, featuring such delights as landing on the Furious where only the front deck is an actual deck, so you have to sideslip around the superstructure (and the turbulence made by it shoving air out of the way) (and the turbulence made by its exhausts vomiting out hot air causing convection behind them) to approach the deck laterally, while trying to keep as close as you can to the 58 kph the ship's doing so you don't overrun the deck entirely.

    Incidentally the first man to land on a ship landed on that ship. His first landing was successful, his second landing was successful and his third attempt made him the first man to die trying to land on a ship.
     
    @xthetenth So I mean, @open_sketch should correct me if I'm wrong, but a rule was instituted during the war against Caspia preventing people from going off and designing an airplane and then bringing its stats to the thread. The reason was because it basically turned the thread into "Okay so, let's just see what X, Y, and Z come up with as options" and Sketch got bored with it. Honestly, it also sort of obviates the point of a quest, so you know, reasonable decision imho.

    Point is, if you are in fact calcing out your planes, that's not entirely kosher and you're really not supposed to. Having the rules open and staring at them VERY HARD is fine though.
     
    Crasian01 said:
    @xthetenth So I mean, @open_sketch should correct me if I'm wrong, but a rule was instituted during the war against Caspia preventing people from going off and designing an airplane and then bringing its stats to the thread. The reason was because it basically turned the thread into "Okay so, let's just see what X, Y, and Z come up with as options" and Sketch got bored with it. Honestly, it also sort of obviates the point of a quest, so you know, reasonable decision imho.

    Point is, if you are in fact calcing out your planes, that's not entirely kosher and you're really not supposed to. Having the rules open and staring at them VERY HARD is fine though.
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    I was under the impression that doing some preliminary calculations was fine, and the injunction mostly blocked the "presenting a finished design to the thread" step of the process.
     
    Crazy Tom said:
    Wouldn't filling up the floats mean the plane rides lower in the water - not ideal for takeoff?
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    I'm not sure it would be. It's all just weight either way, no matter where you place it. As long as your floats are large enough relative to your weight, it should work out the same.


    In regards to the wings, we may need to break out the folding wings after all.
     
    Gnarker said:
    I'm not sure it would be. It's all just weight either way, no matter where you place it. As long as your floats are large enough relative to your weight, it should work out the same.


    In regards to the wings, we may need to break out the folding wings after all.
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    I like the fuel tanks in floats idea, but it depends on whether that lets us eliminate a hill section, or it it just leads to bigger floats that generate the same overall drag.

    Through there's a center of mass arguement to be made for placing the fuel as low as possible given its weight.
     
    Yeah, you can look at how rules fit together and build test planes to see how different configurations work, but you can't come to the thread as the conquering hero, with your plane design already set and optimised to the highest degree, and tell everyone to vote for it.

    You can actually see some of the initial design studies that real companies go through in this style, I had a really interesting presentation when I was at university about a guy who worked on the initial conceptualisation for the Airbus A380 and how to fit X many seats inside a plane shape. They had the double decker idea from the start but they also had drawings of a very long one, a very fat one, one with a 747 style deck and a half arrangement, an extremely interesting one where there are two cylindrical fuselages blended into each other horizontally...

    In short, I think you should be able to use the plane builder as much as you like but you can't show anyone your ideas or tell anyone your numbers?
     
    Okay, sounds good. I've mostly just been building all the flying circus variants and fiddling around there to get a feel for how the physics work for stuff in that.

    I mean if I could, I'd definitely recommend literally any permutation of my Universität Kobra M01 testbed because the engine isn't Akibara trash. I feel like if we ever need to power electronics we could probably rig up a heat engine for basically free with how hot that stupid thing runs.
     
    FrangibleCover said:
    an extremely interesting one where there are two cylindrical fuselages blended into each other horizontally...
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    www.nasa.gov

    The Double Bubble D8 - NASA

    The "double bubble" D8 Series future aircraft design concept comes from the research team led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    www.nasa.gov www.nasa.gov

    Honestly I don't actually super believe in the concept -- it reads too ephemeral to me. But you know, I'm not an aerodynamicist, I'm a system integrator, so I shouldn't be too skeptical.

    ---

    Gnarker said:
    In regards to the wings, we may need to break out the folding wings after all.
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    You know, how sure are we actually that when they say span of 8, they mean span of 8 stowed for storage? We're not going to get into one of those insane things where they intentionally word the requirements vaguely to fuck you later, are they? Because you know, it is the Navy, which has known biases even if circumstances technically have changed...
     
    I keep coming back to that damn engine; it's garbage and it's going to hamstring everything else we try to do. As much as the Navy has a good idea in standardizing on ONE engine; and making sure that engine is local built for supply chain reasons (and, let's be real, at least one Admiral probably owns stock in the company that makes them) I do wish they'd picked something better.

    I'll also cast my vote towards "is it even vaguely useful to try and design folding wings?" because more wingspan would be helpful.
     
    On the plus side, it's one design to debug while everyone else can work on playing catch-up with an engine that has a less agricultural power to weight ratio. Which is good, because the state of the art is fleeing as fast as it can go.

    And we'll have oodles of cooling in case they manage to wring more power out of it.
     
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