FyunchClick

Ah I get it now. It's about optimizing your fuel consumption even as your thrust dwindles. With the rate of climb you get at that point (several hundreds of m/s vertical I guess), do they last long enough before flaming out to be worth it? I tend to design with a comfortable (wasteful?) margin of oxidizer as I usually include some rocket powered VTOL configuration for airless world landings, so that's an optimization that's never really been on my radar.

Interesting notion, taking the mach 1 hump is always the hardest I feel, so anything to alleviate that is helpful. I'll give that a go with my next one.

Hence my suggestion to add additional rear gear. As my ship became heavier, at one point it started skidding and the additional gear fixed that.

I think you're thinking pre 1.x release. Nowadays, I find intakes don't matter much, except at takeoff, where I found that having few intakes at little to no speed makes my engines flame out as they're ramping up thrust after ignitoin. Just a few will do nicely until just over 20 km, at which point even rapiers will rapidly run out of power regardless. The reason for a shallow climb (pitch for me usually <20 degrees, and with wings set at a 5 degree incidence) is to run up enough speed before you get to 20 km, where jets dramatically start to lose thrust (rapiers can hold out the longest, but are quite atrocious until you can ramp them up to mach 1.3/1.4 or so). Specifically, the window between 7 km and 20 km is where rapiers run best for me, and the TWR is terrific until it is very suddenly not. Running this bit shallow makes you come out of it at higher speeds, but of course running it too shallow just keeps you in the atmosphere that much longer which is draggy and comes with a serious overheating risk). So, tips I took away from the pro's: * Wings at incidence so you can climb pointing prograde (dramatic drag reduction). * With this version of KSP aero, go for steady shallow climb. I'm sure there's better examples and tutorialsout there, but this shows me running a quite heavy, very inefficient and relatively low TWR into orbit. For one, if you want an efficient ascent, mix rapiers with other types of jets to make the run up to mach 1.4-ish more efficient; they'll sputter out before the rapiers do but the rapiers will have enough thrust left to compensate and then some when they do. Oh, and set the rapiers to switch mode manually, then bind the mode switching to a hotkey that also toggles the intakes.

Wow, those are seriously small wings for a thing that massive. Here's my MK3 SSTO spaceplane: That's 12 Big-S delta's, and 10 smaller wing parts, plus control surfaces and a set of canards, for a quite similar weight (230-240t). It takes off around 110 m/s, which is good because it'll start to skate around 150 m/s (which may have something to do with the wings which are set at a 5 degree incidence and may be staring to generate lift to the extend that it's causing the rear gear to lose traction which makes KSP think the CoD is now with the front gear?). Also, what you don't see is the rear gear, which includes a second set of the one-but-largest landing gears placed exactly inline with the largest gear. Without it, it'll start skating around at much lower speeds, presumably because the rear gear is being overloaded which also does weird things for control at speed. The trick for this takeoff is to pull back hard on the stick at around 90m/s to keep pressure and traction on the rear gear, and then it'll usually take off without incidence.

LOL because it's true. Which if fine of course if your usual audience wouldn't know one way or the other, but running into another trivia buff who does could lead to a very painful public dethroning.

Thank @Val (or else @GoSlash27, I don't remember exactly) who was kind enough to bring it up in one of the many excellent posts both write on the subject. I actually find it's a lot easier not only to fly and land, but also to take off as you're generating lift just barreling down the runway, and it definitely makes the difference between a SSTO plane that only just doesn't make it to orbit, and one that does (or one that needs to dip around 6-7km to break the sound barrier vs one that can climb at a steady pace).

I think I first heard of it from one of the Honor Harrington books, but in my defense I eventually did get around to Heinlein, and Starship Troopers, following that somewhat awful and somewhat wonderful movie. Heinlein can of course kerbalized into Keinlein, which must look very weird in German. To my shame I still haven't read the Mun is a hard mistress, which I'm told is one of Keinleins best. As someone who's often asked "how the heck do you come by that particular fact?", I always wondered if I was the only one who secretly picked up a lot of such trivia from the most unlikely sources (like scifi novels), but I guess I am not.

Definitely agree with the steady climb, usually at < 20 degrees. Setting wings to a 5 degree incidence as the pros advised was a revelation for me and makes it much easier to steadily climb at a minimal body drag/off-prograde engine burn.

Well, there's this.

Get USI life support (or one of the other similar mods); with usi pods start consuming power when crewed. I recently started with it and I find it adds a lot of immersion (and challenge) to have to consider life support needs when designing crewed missions.

^ This, and then hyperedit yourself to a 400km kerbin orbit and repeat. I had a ship where I spent hours tweaking ladders and mobility enhancers to be able putter around inside a cargo bay zero g without jetpack, until it worked fine on the ground and in LKO, only to discover on my mission propper that my kerbal would be flung violently from the hatch and into some equipment getting stuck in ragdoll, because if some mobility enhancer just slightly too close to the hatch, which only happened above a certain orbital altitude. I heard somewhere that there's a bit of a difference in some calculations from a certain altitude up, which was probably to blame.

Actually, I'd loved to have an even bigger wing option. My last creation was 240 tons, using 12 of 'em and smaller wing parts to fill the gaps. :D It'd snap the wings off when pulling up on takeoff, or when pulling out of the shallow dive it needed to go supersonic, if I didn't strut everything down. I started out with some airliner wings incorporated but those would blow up due to the heat on ascension. I realize it is horribly inefficient as SSTO go with all rapiers and lots of modules I don't need, but I wanted TWR in vacuum to see if I could somehow make a Tylo takeoff work with it (A: no).

To some extend, you can't really escape it I think. If you're going from a MK1 to a MK3 fuselage for a spaceplane, you're scaling the dimensions of a uniform shape, in this case a tube. Take the comparison of the MK1 to the MK3 fuselage, which just about triples its diameter and length (eyeballing it from the screenshot there for the length, the MK3 seems a little bit shorter than x3 the MK1 but that could be an off ratio on the image), but according to the wiki it weighs between 12 and 15 times as much (wet or dry), not 9 times. So it's more like 3x3x1.5 than 3x3x3, but still substantial. Also, looking at this, I now realize there's some inefficiencies at upscaling. First of all, I noticed the MK1 fuselage is about 14% more efficient in storing fuel for it's weight when compared to the MK3 (storing 1400 units of fuel per ton of dry mass compared to 1600 for the MK1 according to those wiki pages). Also, wings theoretically scale linearly with lift in KPS as you construct them from parts that are equally thick on small and large planes (not considering the FatS and airliner wings), but then again you need to strut a lot of them together, adding drag that has to be compensated for with thrust and fuel, so in practical terms it's also not a pure linear upscale there either (although I'm not sure if struts are still as horribly draggy as they were once so it may be trivial). Finally, if you have to add adapter parts to place additional engines like you said in another post, that also adds dead mass, so there again engines don't scale up truly linearly in practice either. All of this was besides my original point though, which was purely about looking at it from a dimensions point of view. I think you are absolutely right that mass fractions will scale up and down linearly, and if you work the problem from that angle, you should arrive at a workable solution, taking into consideration that there is some additional inefficiencies to account for when upscaling beyond a certain point.

Reading this topic, I wonder if there's not some very hard limit, specifically with SSTO planes, which is that when you make your plane twice as big, your lift surface is squared, but your volume (and therefore mass) is cubed (is that a valid expression? if not: wing surface goes up by a power of two, but volume goes up by a power of three). If I'm right, that means that you have to add a disproportionate amount of wing to lift your additional mass, and at some point adding more wing may even add more mass than the additional lifting surface accounts for.

^ This, and the only slightly less annoying version which is "finicky maneuver nearly done, aaaaaand cut engines (press key directly left of X)".

Hey, I only just now discovered parka has another excellent comic going. The fun I've had catching up just barely outweighs the feeling that you guys were having a party in the kitchen all this time while I'm waiting around in the living room wondering where everyone went.

Yeah they do, also on the way up, but keep in mind the fixed radiators only cool parts that are up to two connections away. I need them for the way up too because apparently standard procedure is to inflate rovemax M1s with lighter fluid and they keep exploding in the bay. At worst it'll give you a little more margin during reentrance Thebest advice I've read in this thread is to get into thicker parts of the atmosphere as soon as you and going in pancake (close to or at 90 degrees for as long as you can hold that pitch).

And landing helmet first.

@GoSlash27 sorry for the off-topic but I've been looking at your avatar for over a year now and only just realized it's Lister from Red Dwarf. I feel so stupid as I absolutely loved that show.

And the other 10% is a tie between rapid explosive decomposition following a minor fall from a ladder, and being forgotten in orbit?

Try googleing 'kerbal dv map 1.1.3'. Or whatever the current version of kerbal is at the moment. Here's the current one:

I've got a couple of hyperedit ones I've set for myself under the pretext of 'delegating' mundane jobs. Don't hyperedit a craft info orbit unless you've gotten it into orbit legit in that configuration at least a couple of times. Bring and deorbit the launch stages. If you use hyperedit to refuel a craft in LKO, throw a launcher actually able to reach and refuel said craft in Booster Bay. Hypermedia rendezvous allowed during rescue roundups provided the craft has the dv and supplies left to actually make those rendezvouses (does it even have a plural?) for real. And game play wise, death is not an option, consequently accept all rescue missions that are actually doable.

<hugs Geschosskopf>

It is useful for some of those early career science missions where you just have to throw something into the ocean to test it while splashed down. Grasping straws I know. Incredible, that's my mid career go to engine for any maneuvering once in orbit due to its superior ISP and any Muni/Minmus Lander due to its stubbiness. High TWR is for first stages only (bar special occasions).