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Eve SSTO Limbo


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  • 3 weeks later...
Hi All :)

I GOT IT !!!

SSTO from Eve highest point IS doable xD

Almost the same ship as my other attempts, but as light as possible (light landing gears, no advanced inline stabilizer, no other than pod batterie, and only one tail fin...)

I'm Happy ^^

Here is the Album:

http://imgur.com/a/GNXvb

Fly safe with Val !

... wow...

For any of you who have read the martian I just wanted to say that when you listed what all you removed from the rocket it sounded like what Watney had to do to his craft to get off of mars (No telling if he makes it or not).

Dude... Hat's off to you. That's been a dream ever since EVE was added to the game. Finally something else to be put to rest! :D

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  • 3 weeks later...
Hi Again and thank's for the new kind words :)

My son ask me: "why don't you try to takeoff from lower altidude ?"

So i tried... and here is a little video of a....6882m takeoff ! ^^

Same ship, here is the stock craft:

Eve-104-SSTO-6.craft

The Kos script (just install the Kos mod and add a Kos computer part to the ship if you want to test):

E1.ks

If you try manual piloting, aim 35degrees ascent, switch to prograde at 21km and reduce throttle to keep about 2.2twr, unlock rear front locked tank at about 44km, cut throttle when APO is at 91km, unlock last 2 front tanks at 88km, circularise at APO :)

And the video:

Fly safe with Val :)

Holy mother of Kraken. You have slain the purple beast! :0.0:First, off, mad props and hats off, and whatever else you can imagine. You deserve it!

Second... I've been short of reverse-engineering this form pics. I feel like now that you have shown a way to do it, then now it's only a matter of time before these things become "just another challenge". So... let's talk numbers! From my rebuilding before you posted the file, I'd say you have ~5,100m/s at 1.90 TWR, and basically no wings (>7 mT/[lift unit] ratio). How smaller do you think you can actually go? Because I have a couple of tentative tries using aerospikes, thinking the longer burn time due to higher vacuum Isp might be a good trade against TWR, aided by extra wings to offset gravity losses. I'm this close to installing hyperedit to do the testing on these things...

Using a chair:

e6EXUZf.png

And drone-powered, just to see how small can it be:

J2PVxTh.png

Rune. I can comfortably go over 5km/s, but the TWR is really hard to match at this smaller sizes.

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Rune - I spent a while playing with aerospikes too. From the top of the highest peak I got within 58m/s of making orbit. I'd spent days by that point and got fed up.

I think you will need to chase every m/s. Some ideas: swap the long nosecone for a shockcone, using the most fuel and drag efficient fuel tanks, ditch the landing gear and try for a vertical launch, ditch the wings, make lots and lots of flights to find the optimal angles to orbit.

I hope you make it. If not I might have to return to it and I am burned out with Eve.

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Holy mother of Kraken. You have slain the purple beast! :0.0:First, off, mad props and hats off, and whatever else you can imagine. You deserve it!...

Lol thank's a lot Rune ;) and Hi Foxster :)

I really hope someone else will reach Eve orbit with another SSTO, even if this is hard, and i hope the mammoth is not the only solution to do it...

Your ships MUST be tested !!!

Good idea to try a "chair" or drone light SSTO :)

BTW, as said Foxster, every m/s is important, and a lot of testing is needed to find a way to the "graal" ^^ (HyperEdit is the way to go)

At least, if you keep wings, add Angle of Incidence to win some m/s :)

(Thank's to the http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/117415-SSTO-to-laythe-and-beyond?p=2154005&viewfull=1#post2154005 post who helped me a lot)

Keep the ship as light as possible, and best possible aerodynamics...

And if that can help, some datas not in my pics:

The Vac d/V of my SSTO is exactly 5082m/s (from KER in the Spaceplane Hangar) with all tanks unlocked and 1.90TWR for Kerbin.

Fly safe with Valentina :)

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Rune - I spent a while playing with aerospikes too. From the top of the highest peak I got within 58m/s of making orbit. I'd spent days by that point and got fed up.

I think you will need to chase every m/s. Some ideas: swap the long nosecone for a shockcone, using the most fuel and drag efficient fuel tanks, ditch the landing gear and try for a vertical launch, ditch the wings, make lots and lots of flights to find the optimal angles to orbit.

I hope you make it. If not I might have to return to it and I am burned out with Eve.

See, but I want to try a low TWR solution relying on wings. I have a feeling there is a lot to be gained from them in Eve, to offset the huge gravity losses of the slow ascent through thick air. Plus, the poorer TWR of spikes lends itself to it very nicely, they run longer for a given dV. Either that, or the tankage fraction+wings will kill me. Seeing as all of the designs I'm even half happy about end up short by a tantalizingly close amount of dV (~5050m/s) at significantly lower TWRs and lower wing loading, I might fail horribly, because this is clearly on the ragged edge of what is possible in stock KSP. But in that case, I have already a reverse-engineered, prettified version of astrobond's marvel ready, that apparently even outperforms his, ever so slightly (because I basically cheated :P).

2TBmdvt.png

Rune. It is basically a carbon copy on performance, even with the lighter "cockpit", but I wasted mass on aerodynamics.

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I suspect there is something to be gained by using shock cones... and getting exploity... inverted shock cones (which were used to good effect by foxster to win the lightest sea level ascent challenge).

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/131288-On-the-particulars-of-drag-in-1-0-4/page4?p=2190640#post2190640

I'm not sure how I feel about using this flipped nose cone exploit... if I was aware of it, I don't think I would have allowed it in the Eve sea level ascent challenge.

Foxster showed up using it before I really understood what was going on, and he put a lot of work into it... so...

A reversed shock cone on that craft with a chair in a service bay may be the ticket... if a standard shock cone doesn't work.

FYI, about my earlier post in this thread (#20 : http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/132211-Eve-SSTO-Limbo?p=2170777&viewfull=1#post2170777)

It seems I was forgetting to enable fuel flow from one of the tanks from which fuel drain was disabled (for CoM considerations, I assume)... hence barely making kerbin orbit.

Edited by KerikBalm
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  • 2 weeks later...

A SSTO from Eve is truly impressive. But we're still missing a very important step: Landing.

In order to get the mass down low enough, our best engineers stripped away all non-essentials, leaving us a craft with huge heavy fuel tanks, minimal wings, and toothpick landing gear, which must almost certainly glide down for an unpowered pinpoint landing on a mountain top of a planet with nearly twice the gravity of Kerbin.

Failing this, any landing, somewhere generally near to the mountain and with empty tanks, is also acceptable, if we assume the kerbals built the infrastructure to refuel the thing and tow it to the mountain top before launch.

Can you do it??

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Just for info: Eve's highest point is at (or very close to) HE coordinates Lat -25.000156474942, Lon -158.474595962928.

"Or very close to" ?

With that many decimal places on your coordinates, you can specify a location to the nearest...

Picometre. (Trillionth of a metre)

On Earth.

At the equator.

So yeah, it should be near-ish those coordinates, you could be off a few femtometres/proton diameters or so XD

Edited by p1t1o
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  • 3 months later...
9 hours ago, drewscriver said:

Has anyone tried this in 1.05?  I'm guessing with the vector, it might be possible to do with a smaller plane, but the changed overheating might make it worse, instead.

Hi @drewscriver:)

I tried my 1.04 Eve SSTO in 1.05... but i didn't found a way to orbit :(

The only way i found to SSTO Eve is here:

But that is not really in the spirit of this challenge, even if it is totally Kerbal stock xD

Fly safe with Valentina :)

 

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3 hours ago, SpaceplaneAddict said:

I think this challenge is worth necroing, if not, I'll support any continuation. @astrobond, can I ask how much total delta-v you started with from your landing zone, including any locked tanks?

@SpaceplaneAddict

The Vac d/V of my Eve 104 SSTO was exactly 5082m/s (from KER in the Spaceplane Hangar) with all tanks unlocked and 1.90TWR for Kerbin.

Hope this help :)

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