Lt_Duckweed

This reddit thread has a couple of techniques described in it:

And wing incidence helps there too. Both of the sstos in these videos use 3 degrees angle of incidence to greatly reduce body drag Let me emphasize again, if you build and fly a craft correctly, some incidence will always be better than none. The only question is how much.

This craft has 2.49 kn of body drag out of 25.815 kn of drag total. This is a body drag of 9.6% Wing area is 6 strakes with Angle of Incidence of 5 degrees, it has a mass at altitude of 30.7 tons and cruise speed of 1700m/s, and an estimated runtime and endurance of something like 20 circumnavigations in ~14 hours of flight.

Ah, I see where the disconnect is. When you use wing incidence you have to use a different design philosophy. You do NOT pick an altitude AND speed to fly at. You fly at 0 Angle of Attack, and put exactly enough wing on the craft so that it achieves 0 angle of attack at the intended altitude and airspeed. Your test craft has FAR too much wing for it's mass and is flying far too low for it's speed in the first 2 tests. A single pair of Big-S wings will happily hold up at least 50 tons of plane. At MINIMUM you should be using a wing loading of 5 tons mass per 1 wing area. My standard

A couple things: 1. It is possible to take off from the runway at 100 m/s at about 1/3 the wing loading you are using, the overwing is also cutting into your l/d ratio by requiring a non ideal AoA. Move CoL and landing gear closer to CoM and add canards to greatly ease the takeoff flare, and remove one set of big-s and replace with fuel tanks. 2. Something is generating an absolutely horrendous level of drag in those side stacks. Go into the Alt+f12 menu and go to the aero tab, turn on "aero data in part action windows" and open the action windows for all parts on the craft one by

Not angling your wings is a horrifically bad decision. Proper wing incidence + the consequent reduction in needed wing area can more than double a craft's lift to drag ratio, allowing ascent with half as many engines.

I don't have any of them uploaded, but Brad uses a very similar ratio of rapiers and nervs in this video: In terms of how it is to fly.... really damn hard. You accelerate really, really slow, and need quite a high takeoff speed, and once you get in the air, you spend a while with very little excess thrust.

I hope this isn't too much of a Necropost, but I just released my video of a single stage to Eve sea level (under 150m) and back to Kerbin: This is 1.11.2, Stock + Breaking ground. I have had the design mostly fleshed out for several months, but a couple weeks ago I finally just sat down and banged it out. It carries a full suite of science experiments (save for the science Jr.), a full suite of scanning equipment and solar powered isru, and a small selection of breaking ground deployable science experiments, along with a somewhat cramped (but much better than it coul

Today, I flew an SSTO to near sea level (under 150m) on Eve, then all the way back home.

25-30 tons is a good starting number, and as you get more skilled at building sstos you can push that higher. To understand how to build sstos around these numbers, watch this video, it is the best ssto tutorial out there: If I'm making a "sporty" ssto where I don't care that much about squeezing out every last drop of performance I use about 35-38 tons per rapier. If I'm going for maximum possible performance I will take off from the KSC flats and use anywhere from 44-52 tons per rapier, depending on the exact mission parameters.

Sadly, there is no way to use the propeller blades underwater. They simply don't produce any thrust. However, you can use regular control surfaces as propeller blades!

I think that keeping in the spirit of the challenge would require using 1x timewarp at periapsis. In 1x time warp, the closest you can get without resorting to exploits is something like 150,000-200,000 km from the surface. With exploits you can get all the way to the atmosphere:

Closing in on 1600 hours myself. Been playing since Nov 2017

Basically, two payload bays that are perfectly aligned so they occupy the exact same space will shield each other from both aero and heat calculations