Exothermos

Cool, looks great! That camo mod really emphasizes the smooth lines. We've built very similar f-14s: The parts definitely dictate the build.

The Ryan Vertijet! Cool.

I dumped a lot of craft files over on KerbalX for those who are interested. I wouldn't cross-promote normally, but the forums seem a little sleepy lately, so why not. Besides some of the older ships in this thread there is a bigger Fusilid-style design called the Fusilid Extreme It can lift heavy things to orbit. Then it pops them off... And comes back home looking kinda weird and naked. Also there are a few designs based on a concept I wanted to try using very large wings and a liquid fuel only restriction. I wanted to get going fast at air-breathing altitude then pull up abruptly transforming forward momentum into vertical climb (zoom climbing). Then the Nuclear Engines can work for a while (in near vacuum where they are more efficient) to gain orbital velocity. It works well, but isn't particularly groundbreaking. Still, they are fun. The (not so) creatively named NukeWing is the purest of them with its yuuuge flying wing design. Those wings have terrible heat resistance, but re-entry is manageable because the enormous lift and drag, coupled with the relatively tiny dry weight, slows the ship down like fluttering leaf before the wings have time to heat-soak and explode. Ideally. The NukeWing Light is a smaller version of the same concept. It re-enters much less dramatically because of the tougher delta wings. However, due to only one wimpy Nuke, it takes a little more finesse to get to orbit. The Nukewing Advanced is an attempt to make all this practical. And it is: More crew, less drama. But it does end-up looking like a more conventional Mk2 build. Which might be a good thing. My 2 ISRU Interplanetary SSTOs are essentially done. I just have to run a shake-down cruise or two to prove the concepts to myself. I've done lots of partial missions. Simple planetary transfers and the like. Grand tours should be possible: the math says yes, but I don't want to release until I've done a couple missions to completion. The only problem is that isn't really my cup of tea. I like building a lot more than fiddling endlessly with maneuver nodes. (Anyone want to "beta test"?)

Here is something a little different: "What, it's an ugly SSTO?" you say? Indeed it is! It is also an ISRU ship capable of a Grand Tour. Hauling all that "Plane" around makes for some complicated and dangerous planetary landings, not to mention inefficiencies. This design has a trick up its sleeve. The Little Plane has 4 thousand dV and full ISRU for visiting smaller bodies, while the big central lander body has a ton of fuel and decent TWR. This allows for visiting everyone's favorite ship-smasher; Tylo! This is a tylo landing where only 35 oxidizer remained. That's a smile of anxious relief. Margins have since been improved. The ship can return to kerbin in any configuration that is convenient. The forward section can be refueled and used to return home by its self. (The tail ditched in orbit to act as a com relay or discarded once its' fuel is used up. The lander can be a lonely probe on Eve, never to return.) I'm still messing around with exact payloads; optimal electrical generation & batteries, antennae, probe cores, and RCS ballance... This thing is complicated! But, it will be released (with my other ISRU ship in development) soon. I'm not going to beat around the bush here, this design involves A LOT of docking. I had to refresh my skills quite a lot. F5 is your friend!

I really like those long tracking shots of the Eloo approach and departure! Your base is cool looking too. But...What's in the box?

Yeah, I think a lot of that has to do with the assembly tools that Squad put into the game. In the bad-old-days there was no Move or Rotate tool, so to clip things you had to get creative with clipping the camera through parts and attaching cubic struts (which were "bugged" and would attach to any surface visible by the camera.) So the implication was that something was accomplished with an exploit. When squad added the Move and Rotate tools, as well as more forgiving attachment rules, that is direct 'permission' by the developer to clip parts when building. Any restrictions are self-imposed according to whatever your take is on realism and fairness. I'm all for clipping as long as it achieves a goal that is achievable another way. (aesthetics, weight and balance, packaging restrictions). I gladly use "empty" space in nosecones, structural adapters, and empty fuel tanks, but try not to clip fuel or engines into each other. But none of those considerations keep me from downloading something that is cool, even if the craft is clip-ception.

LOL! What!? That's amazing; we won't call it a bug. It's a feature. I suppose the ship is really optimized for much heavier loads, so she has...generous TWR with your lighter payload. Let me know if you make it to gilly.

So I've been trying to complete an ISRU SSTaA and I've put-off landing on Duna because it's always "had my number ". After many crashes trying fly or paraglide the aircraft in, I've decided on a 2 stage landing. Normal flight for reentry and upper atmosphere, then translating to a vertical decent to the surface. The trick with this is timing the pitch to horizontal at the last minute to land on the wheels. Something that is very easy on low gravity bodies, but pretty fraught on Duna. As you can see... things did not go perfectly. So I decided to try to land tripod style on the loading ramp and tail. Amazingly, this works pretty well; the tail is very flexible and the ramp is extremely strong and rigid. I wanted to do some drop tests to fine tune the arrangement and find the upper limits of the design. I slowly increased the height of the drop until the craft could land impact at 12m/s without any damage. Then the weight of the fuel load was increased. Until... ...the limits of the runway were found! Yeah I guess that will do then... Closing the cargo ramp flops the craft onto its wheels.

Oh, no orbital refueling allowed, it goes straight to Minmus in any phase. Delta V depends on how you are refueling it, and where you are leaving from. Leaving from itty-bitty Minmus with a pure nuclear (liquid fuel) load, it is more than 5300 dV. Obviously if you need to use the rapiers for any reason (and therefore need oxidizer) that number decreases. Leaving from Laythe with it's atmosphere requires a pitstop at one of the smaller Joolian moons to gas up before brute-forcing a big planetary transfer. Returning from Eve is obviously not at option. Oh nice. Interesting rover / tender idea. I always forget about asteroids; now how am I going to shoehorn in a claw? Hmm...

Here is an ISRU SSTA that carries a big rover; because you haven't really been somewhere unless you've driven a car on it! The main craft kneels to engage its own drill. Why the redundancy? I can't decide which direction to take the craft. A big mining rover with the large Mk3 cockpit on the main craft, or a cockpit-free design where kerbals live aboard a Hitchhiker Can on wheels, and the ship does all the mining and processing? I like going out and finding richer deposits with the rover and not relying on fiddly piloting to land in a high-ore area, so I'm leaning that direction. Here, an old salty-dog oil rig operator who was hastily trained for space drills the surface. Here is an earlier design (one of 15+ iterations) visiting Laythe, just 'cuz the screenshot is cool And just to stick with the silhouette theme, another version of the flying wing nuclear SSTO series I've been tinkering with. EDIT: Sorry, I know dark screen shots aren't really mobile freindly.. But they're pretty.

That's a fun video!

Yeah there are definitely more efficient SSTOs (a little rapier missile is unbeatable right now), But I was surprised it works at all, and besides I just watched an old "wings" documentary on the xb-49s

Hey, I've been playing with big wings too! I really like your simple, clean designs (as usual).

I've been playing around with little personnel shuttles for Kerbin orbits. I figured I'd share. This Wingy-Thingy works really well with as a liquid fuel only shuttle. The large lift lets you build speed at medium-high altitude with the whiplashes, then zoom climb the last few kilometers before the Jets die. Very useful for getting your time-to-apoapsis as high as possible as you slow burn on the Nukes up to the apogee. Over 1500 dV in orbit. Reentry and landing is a snap too. With all that lift and drag, she slows down very well in the upper atmosphere then lazily floats down. But really, the big wing is fun, but not totally necessary. This more conventional wing design based on the one above ends up with more than 2000 dV in orbit after a similar ascent. It saves on weight and drag at the expense of lift. Parring the design down further yields this fugly little guy. It works like a charm, but the ascent has no room for error. The speed and angle of the zoom climb is critical, and the nuke is lit all the way to apoapsis. That single nuke doesn't have much oomph. Once in orbit, however, 1500 dV remains. Finally, I really like this little single-rapier runabout. It doesn't have much juice left after ascent, but can maneuver to 120 km+ orbits with ease.

This is a pretty parts-intensive build as the goal was fidelity over simplicity, but we're super happy with the result! Those overlays speak for themselves. Performance is right inline with the real thing (with some extra margin on the Mach number). This was super fun and I highly recommend creating craft with a like-minded builder. Cheers Eorin!

How about another Replicraft? This time the inescapable SR-71. The blackbird is probably one of the first jets that people build in KSP, but I wanted to use more "advanced" building techniques to get a little closer to reality. It's a tough balance to keep part count manageable, yet replicate complex shapes and subtle curves with the parts we're given, so some fidelity must be sacrificed for usability. In the end i think it looks the part, and it flies similarly to the real deal. A version carying the D-21 reconnaissance drone is also available. Launch of the drone is suitably clench-inducing. But she goes like a bat outa' hell when spooled up. Perfect for spying on those Koviets! In the end this is mostly an exercise in modeling and building, as replica craft don't really DO much. Still, it's fun to fly and imagine, which ultimately is my favoirte part of KSP. DOWNLOAD SR-71 (KerbalX) DOWNLOAD SR-71 with D-21 Drone (KerbalX) Edit: Check out Eorin's & my collaboration build for an extremely accurate, re-engineered & rebuilt version of this SR-71 HERE.

Please do! The penalty for removing the fairing would be temperature resistance. The normal Nosecone is 2400 degrees, the fairings 2600 degrees. A shielded docking port might be a good replacement because they are 2600 degrees as well. They are tough as nails, if a little blunt looking. That 200 extra degrees is pretty critical to get 1500m/s + before the closed cycle kicks in, but lower speeds won't be a big deal if you are carrying lighter payloads.

Yeah, it looks like our good friends at the totally-not-evil-corporation Google mandate that you make a simple account. If you don't want to, I get it. Here's a KerbalX link. I'll start uploading there as well. Of course, you will have to make a KerbalX account too, but it is non-intrusive.

Here is a simplistic take on a Mk 3 SSTO that emphasizes aerodynamics and minimalism. The Fusilid is as close to bare-bones as I can muster, while still achieving the minimum requirements of 1) Jumbo 64 "Orange Can" to low orbit 2) Full rendezvous & docking capabilities 3) Easy and responsive flight characteristics & operation. To achieve all those, very close attention was paid to the game's aeromodel and the craft's weight and balance. The ship is super slippery, quickly achieving well over 1000m/s near sealevel, even with only 4 rapiers and 36tons of cargo. During the climb to orbit, 1550 m/s is the usual speed before airbreathing cut-out at 24k meters. This makes the closed cycle climb much more efficient. High temperatures on the fairing nosecone are experienced at these speeds, and it can be disconcerting, but the many test flights done have never resulted in an over-temperature failure. Properly configured or refueled, the Fusilid can easily visit kerbin's moons. Here, I am servicing a small Minmus staging station with refueling / crew change (Jeb was stuck in there, and needed to rejoin the flight test program.) When empty the Fusilid's center of mass does not migrate far from it's fully fueled state. This allows easy, responsive reentry as well as light controls. The wide track landing gear make landing in the field very easy, as well as providing a stable takeoff roll. I'm pretty delighted with this craft's performance, even if it is rather plain. But simple can be beautiful! DOWNLOAD Fusilid KerbalX Link

I've been having a lot of fun playing with Fairings as fuselage sections. They make some very clean looking replicas. These are mostly just rough "first-passes" as a sort of proof of concept (except for the xb-70 which is done.) Fairings have some finicky building properties. Things need to be done in a certain order to enable these designs.

I've got a real bad habit of overbuilding, so I challenged myself to K.I.S.S. and create a MK-3 lifter that can haul a Jumbo 64 orange tank to orbit on 4 rapiers. This is something that many of you have already cracked, but it took me quite a while to unlearn old habits that were holding my designs back. Anyway, the craft below, the Fusilid, is approaching that simplistic minimum that can still achieve the mission, I think. It is a tapered tube with engines stuck on the wing. The aero model loves it. When one has pared-down the craft to the minimums, these designs start looking very similar to each other. I tried to steer away from things I've seen in other's crafts, but some things are just the right way to do it. Low orbits are achieved without any drama. Reentry is a snap, even steep ones. Low speed approaches are easy enough to land in the field. I'm pretty happy with it, even if it doesn't ooze character. Edit: Here is the ship that the fusilid is designed from. Yes, It mostly works fine.

I reworked my old Valkyrie model into something more friendly with the 1.2 aerodynamics. The new model uses fairings for the fuselage, eliminating the troublesome lift and drag that the mk-2 parts produced. I'm quite pleased with the effect! The new landing gear seem tailor-made to this model. The ground stance is close to perfect. Performance is quite good. That's a lot of wing area! Mach 3 and 70k feet are achieved. the Engines really spool up above 12k meters. High mach numbers will be achieved above this altitude. The stand-off "Nuclear" Missile is released. Those Kerbal Scum on the other continent never saw it coming! DOWNLOAD XB-70 Valkyrie Edit: Improvement to missile launching system. Now uses docking ports instead of decouplers to avoid root-part control bugs.

That's the kind of shape you don't see anymore with the new aero. Very cool!

Haha wow, what a noob mistake, how'd I do that? They're fixed. That's like trying to share a picture and posting C:/Windows/Users/DonandDebbie/Desktop/MomDontDeleteThisFolder/MikeysCoolPix/NeatPlane.jpg Yeah, frankly the ridiculous number of engines was a bandaid for not understanding the aeromodel (MOAR BOOSTERS!). I just couldn't figure out how it was done in this version (even though many people had shared the low altitude speed run, It went in one ear and out the other.) I tested your assertion that mk3 parts are just as slippery as 2 meter parts with this sleek beauty: And you are right! I saw no noticeable difference in drag when flying perfectly prograde. There is a tiny difference when any AoA is introduced (mk3 spiking with slightly more drag sooner), but it is totally negligible in normal flight. Either way, I definitely didn't need the extra mass of the 3.5 meter parts once i no longer was trying to achieve clean lines on the "fancy" intake arrangement.

Here ya go