I finally got Rapiers in my career game so I'm now playing with SSTO designs flying level past Mach 5. A new problem emerged due to this: any nose with a heat tolerance less than 2300 K will fail during the speed run! This eliminates both the Adv. Nose Cones and Tail Connectors as nose pieces. A quick (and moderately good looking) workaround was to conically shield the Tail Connector with a Small Nose Cone Stack (Radially attached stack of Small Nose Cones and Mk0 tanks).
Modeling experiments off of Luch Kot's videos I compared my workaround against bot a Shock Cone Intake and a NCS adapter on mass controlled SRBs (0 mass difference). It was slightly worse (a couple rocket lengths) than the other two which were tied.
Does anyone know of a less draggy hyper-sonic nose cone (1.25 m) than the Shock Cone or NCS + Small Nose Cone? I know from a previous experiment that the Ramp Intake is higher drag. I guess a fairing might work, but I don't like the thought of abusing the fairing as a nose cone.
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ajburges 130
I finally got Rapiers in my career game so I'm now playing with SSTO designs flying level past Mach 5. A new problem emerged due to this: any nose with a heat tolerance less than 2300 K will fail during the speed run! This eliminates both the Adv. Nose Cones and Tail Connectors as nose pieces. A quick (and moderately good looking) workaround was to conically shield the Tail Connector with a Small Nose Cone Stack (Radially attached stack of Small Nose Cones and Mk0 tanks).
Modeling experiments off of Luch Kot's videos I compared my workaround against bot a Shock Cone Intake and a NCS adapter on mass controlled SRBs (0 mass difference). It was slightly worse (a couple rocket lengths) than the other two which were tied.
Does anyone know of a less draggy hyper-sonic nose cone (1.25 m) than the Shock Cone or NCS + Small Nose Cone? I know from a previous experiment that the Ramp Intake is higher drag. I guess a fairing might work, but I don't like the thought of abusing the fairing as a nose cone.
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