PanzerAce

Seems like pretty bad advice to me personally. I can dock just fine, but I use nodes on the timing and to fine-tune my burns. I had to learn how to eye-ball orbital maneuvers first, I would have put a 9mm through my screen by now.

I'm building a sort of 'Grand Tour' ship. Running the Atomic age and Near future mods, the idea is to build a giant ship to go to every planet, with the ability to refine ore on the ship, parasite ships to mine the moons it vists, landers for Kerbals to visit surfaces, etc. The current design I'm running for the thruster section alone is ~400 tons when fully fueled. Still trying to decide if I'm going to run LH2 VASIMR engines or an LF nuclear lightbulb for primary thrust.... Since I'm also changing my mind a ton on the design, I went ahead and named the ship "Theseus"...

You, sir, get all of the reputation.

Man, now that we have nuclear turbojets, the sooner you get around to doing a full on Pluto style ramjet, the better. It's the one part that I need the exploration ship I'm building, so that I can get off EVE in a SSTO manner...

I'm an idiot. It's an interstage separator, not a rocket mount in the center

You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.

So I'm planning on building a sort of grand-tour ship, and one of the things I'd like to be able to do is re-fuel at various airless moons. However, one thing I can't seem to find is delta V charts for getting into circular orbits from the surface of planets/moons, does anyone have a link to a chart or calculator for it?

I've got an issue with the 8x 1.25m and 1x 2.5 plate has the 2.5m engine mount point noticeably below the level of the plate itself (like....5m or so below)

It depends on how deep you get into the atmo as well I've noticed. I've dropped spaceplanes into Kerbin, and as long as I let them "skip" across that atmo at ~30k, I can go all day without blowing anything. Drop below 20 at 1500m/s though and you're starting to ask for trouble if you can't drop speed fast enough.

How do you pronounce Eeloo? Ee-lew. How do you pronounce Jool? Joo-L. How do you prononce Laythe? Lay-th. How do you pronounce Vall? Val (like pal). How do you pronounce Tylo? Tie-low. How do you pronounce Bop? Bop. How do you pronounce Pol? Poll. how do you pronounce Dres? Drez. How do you pronounce Duna? Doo-nah. How do you pronounce Ike? Ike. How do you pronounce Kerbin? Ker-bin. How do you pronounce Mun? Mun, as in done. How do you pronounce Minmus? Min-mus. How do you pronounce Eve? Eve (Biblical). How do you pronounce Gilly? Gill-ee. How do you pronounce Moho? Moe-hoe. How do you pronounce Kerbol? Ker-bole.

Parachutes. If I don't forget them outright, I put drouge chutes on instead on accident.

What's the mod you guys are using to control altitude and the like?

Ok, learned two things today in my speed attempt: 1) Plant a flag at KSC so that you can find it easily on the way back 2) My piloting skills leave much to be desired. I got ~2/3-3/4 of the way around Kerbin before I discovered I was robbing myself of ~300m/s of ground speed due to my poor piloting. Attempt 2 will happen later tonight with 33% more thrust, a flag to mark my spot, and....airbrakes. Hard to slow down from 1700m/s without them.

Need more delta V

I tend to build rockets with too much delta, and then try to use stages for stuff that they're clearly not meant for. My LKO crew rescue vehicle? I tend to drag along the boost stage for awhile since it's always got just a little bit (well, ok, 700+ LF/O) of extra fuel left over.

Bolded the relevant part. My understanding (mostly from Atomic Rockets and wiki-walking, along with a bit of stuff from my 6 year old senior thesis) is that the solution to the overheating problem with Pluto was essentially to push it even faster through the air for the increased coolant/intake air flow through the engine.

I use the largest SRBs as my "light" launch platform. I can get a satellite anywhere within Kerbin's SOI with a triple pack of them, and can get a single kerbal retrieval craft into LKO and back to earth with the same launch pack.

CL: Crew Launch CR: Crew Return PL: Payload launch PR: Payload return (mostly a lander for resource operations) Mk1, Mk2, etc designations for basic (sucessful) designs. Variations within a basic design get the Mod 'N' designations. Mix and match as appropriate. For instance, my current SSTO Spaceplane for getting Kerbals into space is the "Mk.2 Mod.2 CLCR". Larger numbers are also usually larger/heavier craft. My Mk1 CLCR was a two rapier, single intake SSTO. the Mk2 is a four rapier three intake with more delta V in orbit. Mk3 is a Mk3 sized SSTO with stupid amounts of delta once in orbit. Once something is launched and in orbit I usually change the name to reflect why it's there. If it was testing my launch profile I'll put something like "Mk2 Mod2 20 degree". Same SSTOSP as above, on a 20 degree climb and full throttle launch. Satellites get named after missions, usually with (COMP) at the end to denote that I'm done with it and can kill it at any time to reduce clutter.

I'm not even trying to get an LF only SSTO working right now with how low powered the nukes are these days. Using only stock parts I got a Mk2 sized SSTO into orbit and can do so regularly now. Taking that to the Mk3 I got into orbit on the first try with tons of fuel to spare. I've found that full throttle, point the nose 20 degrees above the horizon and let that sucker fly is the most efficient way to get into orbit. You *will* almost blow some parts once you're at ~Mach 3 below 10km, but you should just make it. I ride Rapiers in Airbreathing till the velocity levels out, then kick over to closed cycle mode. Works with a Mk2 passenger and Mk2 cargo setup, as well as a Mk3 passenger setup. I haven't tried a Mk3 Cargo SSTO yet.

Got this one into a 84kmx86km, with fuel/oxidizer to spare It's ugly, but the front mount intakes let me get up to ~1400m/s at 15-20km altitude....which lets me run on air-breating mode to almost 35km....which is that much less delta I need to make up in orbit.

Ether, check out the updated design. Not nearly the same worries about over-heating (1km/s? Pfah! Old news! 1400m/s is the new 1000m/s). That being said, what's your setup look like? I'm interested to see how other people get it.

a....HA! Same basic setup, four rapiers, managed to get to ~35k on a VERY badly controlled climb before all four were on rocket power (manual changeover at ~20km for two of them). Managed to end up only 655m/s short from orbit. Still running into a lack of oxidizer issue....I'll update this post as I play with it for the next half hour or so. Edit: test run #2 on the new setup: FOURTY KOD-DAMN M/S SHORT OF ORBIT! Still with an inefficient launch. With an optimized in-atmo portion of the flight, I got to a 84kmx86km orbit. 198 oxidizer left (no idea how that equates to delta v on this thing, all stock parts right now). I present to you the SSTO-DELTA-51, a SSTO using only stock parts in 1.0.2 (47 parts [including two drouge chutes and four air-brakes], 32.3 tons): The biggest change (obviously) is that I swapped the std. Mk 2 cockpit for the inline variant. Put two intakes on the front, swap the small fuel tank for a large rocket tank, put 60 fuel in each wing (not actually needed afterall), and you've got orbit. The key thing to note is that this setup, at 15-20km, can do atleast 1400m/s without anything blowing up. That's that much extra delta v that you *don't* need to use the rockets for, and can save fuel for actually bumping the apo up. I ended up switching one set of rapiers to rocket mode at ~30km, even though they were all still in air-breathing mode.

As clarification: I've got smaller control surfaces, just don't bother to put RCS on untill I get something that's actually orbit-capable. TBH, I don't *think* flight profile is the issue. Like I said, unless I can find another ~1km/s somewhere in the current design, that's the issue. I can already get the AP up to 30/35 on jet power, it's getting it from that to ~75km and then circularizing that I fall short on. I generally keep it at ~800m/s untill I hit about 17km, then floor it. By the time I flame out, I'm up to ~1300m/s Not having control authority issues anymore actually, that seems to be fine using the Big-s. one thing I'm thinking of is making a larger delta wing to get more lift at altitude. I don't want to, but it's the only option I'm thinking to get a better profile.

Oooooooooooook, worked some stuff out. Ditched the oldder designs that were giving me trouble and started from a clean slate. Built the following delta space plane. Fuselage parts, front to back, are: Mk2 cockpit, drone core, crew cabin, docking port, Mk2 liquid fuel tank (short), Mk2 rocket fuel tank (Long), Bicoupler, RAPIER engines. Side pod parts, front to back, are: Ram intake, FLT800 fuel tank, pre-cooler (do these actually do anything?), RAPIER. Using the Big-S delta wings (empty of fuel) and elevons (Big-S elevons make it WAY too twitchy though, and I've got more than enough authority now, so prob going to switch those for smaller elevons). I can get this sucker into space using either a straight up zoom climb (unable to orbit), or a more gradual, lower throttle climb to ~18k before flooring it (Also unable to orbit, but a good bit closer). The issues I'm having are: -1050m/s over the ground seems to be the upper limit before the cockpit explodes from over heating (below ~22km). -At that altitude, even if I pitch up, I don't have the lift to climb anymore, and start to "slide" -keyboard controls are SUPER twitchy, even with precision controls activated. Would it actually help to setup my X52 Pro to fly this in-atmo? As a side note, on the subject of engines/intakes: a pair of RAPIERs is a necessity at this weight (34 tons). the other two can be swapped for turbo-ramjets (again, do these actually do anything over the rapiers?), but I can't swap in a set of, say, aero-spikes, unless I'm satisfied with sub-mach-1 speeds in atmo. My thoughts right now are to try swapping the FTL800s for a series of Pre-coolers or Mk1 Fuselage intakes. I don't think I'll have the oxidizer at that point to actually reach orbit (fuel hasn't been the issue yet), but I might be able to run on jets a bit longer/higher. Still not going to solve the lift issues at high speeds.... Edits below as I test: Test 1: Swapped the FTLs to 3 precoolers (for a total of 4 behind the ram intake), and the outer rapiers to turbo-rams. Was able to get to ~24k under ramjet? power and ~1200m/s surface speed. The problem? with SAS on or off, the plane started to see-saw. Further testing on this setup shows that while I can reliably get sub-orbital at this point (~80k Apo) in a gradual climb method (Rapiers to rocket power at ~20k, turbos run till about 25k), I consistently fall about 900m/s short in terms of delta-v. At this point I need one of the following it seems: 1) A way to cram more fuel on board without losing intake air. This is....not my preferred method, since adding fuel doesn't increase my speed, and I have to start firing the rockets lower to make up the weight. 2) A way to have the Mk2 cockpit survive higher speeds than the ~1000m/s speed it currently can. If I could run it at 15-20k and 2000m/s, I'm fairly certain this would be simple (since, for one thing, I could run the jets even higher with the extra air-flow) 3) A way to run the jets higher. I'm generally finding that it's best to switch the rapiers to rocket mode at about 20k. Higher and the turbos choke faster from lack of air, and the rapiers auto switch anyways at that point, and lower I'm just wasting air. 4) RATO (rocket-asist-to-orbit) drop pod rockets. Again, I don't want to do this. This is supposed to be an SSTO for Kod's sake. This is the current "best" setup I've gotten to (yes, I'm missing a set of rear RCS. I'm not motivated enough to add them back in every time I swap something) (also, yay! 7.4 tons lighter!):

I'll get screenies of all the basic designs I've been working on when I'm back on the computer I've got KSP on. Too small of control surfaces? do the stock canards not cut it in conjunction with rear surfaces?