An Ariane 44LP wanna-be full stock launcher

[XB-70A]

Hi everyone,

I past some hours of the last night attempting to create a medium SSTO but after a countless number of failures and crash-to-desk my nerves cracked and so I went back to old-school rocket with this attempt to make an Ariane 44LP inspirated launcher, so here comes Ariadne 4. Why such an unpronouceable ancient Greek name ? Well, it is the original way of writing Ariane, even if it is admitted by a large number of people inside the E.S.A. that the launcher name never was based on this famous character from the Greek mythology but much more on the daughter's name of one high ranked member from the agency...

 The LP version was chosen to gives anybody the possibility to reconfigurate her in a full-liquid or full-solid assisted rocket.

The main stage and liquid boosters are powered by six "Reliant", trying to simulate the "Viking 5C" but their lack of gimballing made that I had to place moving Standard Canards at the engines bases, unlike the Ariane 4 version with boosters... P.A.P. (Propulseur d'Appoint a Poudre or Solid Rocket Booster) are simulated by a pair of "Thumper" and provide enough thrust to help the launcher to pass the cloud level, at this time they will run out of propellant and the six "Reliant" can take care of the climbing. Same thing for the two "Reliant" booster, at the time of their separation the launcher is light enough to keep on limbing with the four remaining engines.

The third stage used a "Swivel" to simulate the "Viking 4B" and the fourth a "Terrier" in place of the "HM-7B".

The cost of the launcher is no more than 50 000 without the payload, and each boosters are recoverable with the Stage Recovery mod.

The craft is available on KerbalX : https://kerbalx.com/XB-70A/Ariadne-4-Test-Vehicle

And an album of the inaugural flight too : http://imgur.com/a/MEnJL

 

 

Hope you'll enjoy.

[Rath]

It seems very cool, but the 1.25m section looks kinda wonky.  If you want aesthetics, I would recommend a compound core.  But it might mess with the thrust and mass ratios between the stages.

[XB-70A]

5 hours ago, Rath said:

It seems very cool, but the 1.25m section looks kinda wonky.  If you want aesthetics, I would recommend a compound core.  But it might mess with the thrust and mass ratios between the stages.

Thanks Rath,

 

Aesthetic is my main goal, based on the fact that if it's looks good it will run well, this also makes me being disguted by most of the asparagus and "more than 200 parts" bigga boostas or cubic space battle-cruiser concepts (but we all know what we say about this, colors and tastes are personnals).

For this launcher there was a lot of problems and you diagnose two of them, first being the size (and so their appearance) of the parts, second the total mass of each stages and the third but really important for me... the number of them. I am running with Lenovo T530... a laptop made for working and, at most, conceive animated graphics. No really, this horrible thing and its pitiful graphic card were not even able to run Il-2 Sturmovik 1946 properly, when the class-working Vista laptop I got before was perfectly capable.

To summarize its story : CTD, CTD and more CTD.

 

Result was to use FL-T800 for 2nd and 3rd stages.

One day I'll be able to do it.