sevenperforce

Might give this a shot.

Try lowering the rear gear so you're nose-up on takeoff, and adding flaps (or more flaps, or flaps with a greater deployment range). If nothing else works, add an angle of incidence (this will lower your max speed, though).

In that case, I'm in.

What's more efficient? Launching a bevy of GTO payloads into LEO along with a couple of refuelable bipropellant tugs and an expendable propellant depot, or sending the whole terminal stage on a GTO trajectory and then using burns to change the argument of periapsis between each payload release? I daresay the former would be more efficient if the tugs could carry small heat shields and return to LEO by aerobraking.

You'd need space tugs.

The F-1 engines on the Saturn V had a pretty significant gimbal range. Were the tail fins on the first stage really necessary? Did they provide active or passive guidance?

KerbAir has announced its first entry into the small regional jet challenge, the Flying Fish. While some claim the Fish is ungainly, we at KerbAir prefer to think of it as uniquely elegant. In any case, whatever it may lack in perceived aesthetics it more than makes up for in performance and price. At just shy of $9.8 million, it is by far the cheapest available aircraft in its class and the only regional jet with a sticker price under eight figures. This cost savings is achieved by the use of a streamlined profile and minimal part count. With only 18 separate components and a single engine, any mom-and-pop airline can perform all the required service in-house. A novel V-tail eliminates the added cost of a vertical stabilizer, with KerbAir's proprietary SAS technology allowing the V-tail to control both pitch and yaw. The canards used for the V-tail are obtained via a special arrangement with the TweakScale Corporation, giving KerbAir access to secondhand, undersized parts at reduced prices. The Flying Fish obtains all its control with just four control surfaces, reducing maintenance associated with moving parts. The streamlined ailerons double as flaps for liftoff and landing. But don't let its economy-grade pricetag fool you! The Fish's powerful single engine propels it to its takeoff speed of 71 m/s in just over 500 meters, allowing it to take off and land on virtually any runway. Plus, the engine has a reversible thrust setting, permitting it to execute ultra-short landings as needed. Its low mass and powerful engine allow it to climb to cruising speed and altitude in as little as five minutes after takeoff, critical for regional jets. With a cruising speed of a little over 250 m/s at just under 10 km, it is not the fastest jet in its class, but its fuel economy is impressive with a range of 1,720 km. What's more, this range is achieved with a total fuel load of just 400 units in a single tank, making each flight's fuel cost just $320K. With a full passenger load this equates to just $7.75 per passenger-km. Pilots may notice that turns and landings can be challenging without a proper vertical stabilizer, so caution and careful control are recommended. Lowering the rear landing gear may help prevent excessive yaw on approach, at the cost of a little added drag. If your airline has an aircraft body shop on site, setting the angle of wing incidence back to zero (easy, since the wings contain no fuel tanks) allows for simple conversion to a high-speed executive express jet. The express variant (the Flying Sculpin), has a higher takeoff speed but can easily surpass Mach 1 in cruise. Craft file here. If you happen to reset the wing incidence to test the express variant, be sure to re-angle the front gear correctly to compensate. Flaps (action group 1) are recommended for takeoffs below 80 m/s. Thrust reversal is set to action group 2 so that you can spin up the engine in forward-thrust mode before releasing the brakes, enabling shorter takeoffs.

Cruising speed is the speed at which you obtain the highest range. Typically, this will be as high in the atmosphere as your craft can sustain level flight, since flying higher reduces drag and thus allows you to increase speed and decrease fuel consumption. I usually just go to full throttle and climb gently until I start having difficulty maintaining a steady ascent; at that point, I level out, set trim if applicable, and wait until my speed becomes constant. At this point, f/r*v (remaining fuel divided by fuel consumption rate times speed) gives me my remaining range in meters. If your plane has a very high L/D ratio, then you may find a greater range is achieved by throttling down to 80% or so once you reach cruising altitude. But most of my planes find their optimal cruising speed at full throttle.

Ditto on this. You should specify "on Kerbin, from LKO, engines cannot be used in the atmosphere".

I daresay building a Saturn V out of Legos IS your parenting duty.

Then I'll submit an unscored version. EDIT: Or you can just ask people to avoid abusing TweakScale.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/01/no-alex-jones-nasa-is-not-hiding-kidnapped-children-on-mars-nasa-says/?utm_term=.425cd60ca4b6

Okay, that's what I was trying to figure out. Tweakscale is pretty balanced; it should really be allowed. At least have a mod/no-mod leaderboard.

So is Tweakscale allowed, or no?

Very nice! I used launch clamps pointed exactly the same way. I just kept having trouble with burning up the Goliaths. Plus the hard landings.

IMHO, the critical difference is that the shuttle was dealing with a much more punishing re-entry and had localized TPS. Orbital velocity is much higher in KSP. Mk3 parts can handle re-entry from LKO at a wide range of attitudes and have pretty much equal thermal protection on all sides. If LKO was higher-velocity and Mk3 parts had TPS only on the underside, requiring a fixed high-AoA entry, then KSP spaceplanes would also have trouble with too much lift on entry. You'd have to use a ton of RCS or a bunch of reaction wheels to maintain attitude since you'd be losing speed much faster than you lost altitude. If you were flying in without reaction wheels or significant RCS authority, then you'd need to do something like the S-turns.

Beautiful!! Launch clamps are absolutely allowed!

In order to perform well in the widely-varying aerodynamic situations of ascent, entry, approach, and landing (covering literally all possible velocity envelopes), the Shuttle had a very tricky re-entry profile. It had to keep its nose between 37 degrees and 43 degrees in order to maintain both adequate TPS coverage and adequate aerodynamic control; outside that narrow window, it would either have plasma impingement on unprotected areas (leading to burnup) or stall of its control surfaces. But the Shuttle had to have a very good subsonic lift-to-drag ratio in order to make an unpowered glide-in landing. Even though its hypersonic lift-to-drag ratio was much lower, the lift at hypersonic entry was enough to reverse the descent completely while it was still bleeding off velocity. If you've ever flown a plane in KSP, you know that pitching your nose up to 40 degrees at speed will almost immediately result in a climb. Capsules don't have this problem, since they invariably have L/D ratios far lower than 1, but the Shuttle did. And therein was the problem; the Shuttle couldn't afford to stall during entry or it would lose aerodynamic control authority. Control authority is a function of lift, and lift is inversely proportional to both airspeed and air density; if the orbiter started climbing while losing velocity, lift over its control surfaces would melt away and it would stall and tumble out of control. Since banking points the lift vector away from the radial direction, controlled banking allowed the orbiter to maintain a steady descent angle (to avoid stalling) while still keeping the nose at 40 degrees. The rolling back-and-forth was used to maintain heading, though depending on initial orbital inclination it used longer curves in one direction or the other to produce changes in heading. EDIT: All that to say, because the entry and glide angle windows were so narrow, the deorbit burn had to pretty much be in the exact same place every time (for a given inclination) in order to come down at KSC.

Reminds me of this.

Well actually there are wing strakes barely visible between the body and the engines. But the body did provide the majority of the lift.

What new technologies would enable/demand runaway demand for SHLVs? Note that I'm not talking about new technologies for launch vehicles themselves, but rather new technologies which would make launching payloads into LEO (or beyond) more profitable. Like my earlier example of quantum supercomputers that only work in microgravity.

Perhaps not, but comparisons between the flight profiles of the Falcon 9 and the New Glenn seem spectacularly on-point.

@Benjamin Kerman Well, let's see here. After about a million quicksaves, I made it...barely! Gear down for the island landing. Used reversible thrust on an action group to slow down, though I spun at the end like you. Barely made the takeoff... Highest speed coming back. Making the approach...believe it or not, this is where I had to put gear down in order to slow enough. Reversible thrust, spinning out of control for a while (this is NOT stable at low speeds), but made it to the desired 0.0m/s with 12 seconds to spare.

VTOL is certainly allowed, if you can pull it off. I did 13 kerbals intentionally, to make sure that it was a substantial amount of plane to build.

Haha, good catch. Thanks! Fixed it. I have a dual-Goliath-powered bird that can make the run to the island in 1:25 (top speed of 602 m/s) but I have thus far been unable to stick the landing.