Here at Bammsters HQ, we looked at the recently revealed images of customised EVE:Valkyrie™ ships, and discussed just how something like those would fly!

Since Valkyrie is not yet released, we turned to the 2nd best option: Simulating them in Kerbal Space Program™!
Yes, we built 2 ships (so far) in KSP v1.0.5, using mostly stock parts (and BD Armoury for weapons), and tried to get them into the air.

Admittedly, we did not spend too many hours tweaking the crafts to get them fully airworthy, but a few different tweaks were done, such as control surfaces, and additional structure to support wheels. Biggest issue remained their lift-profile against the aerodynamics model in stock KSP v1.0.5, notably because judging from the source images, the wings are angled down and this seems to cause KSP to want them to fly up-side down.
At this point it would probably have helped to have watched Scott Manley‘s supposedly excellent “Beginners Guide To Spaceplanes – Part 3“, but that would just be cheating!
 

Flight, however, was eventually achieved, with one of the designs managing to be quite controllable, ailerons allowing insane yaw-control but poor pitch-control. Extra reaction-wheels were added, and some resemblance of almost-grace was achieved!

 

Naturally, by simply inserting the craft into space (all praise to Hyperedit!), the risk of crashing into the ground is negated, and it instead becomes an issue that Newtonian physics make for horrible space-fights – yes, we all talk about wanting realistic (Newtonian) controls in our games, but there is something to be said for not flying past your target at 100m/s and then trying to turn around and match speeds to be able to hit anything. Even the Valkyrie developers looked into different flight-models, including drifting-vs-arcade flight.

Stay tuned here, as we look at showing more stuff based on the unholy merger of KSP and EVE:Valkyrie!
 
 
Update 21/11/2015 – 2nd video now available: