Having Problem with SSTO

[AeroGav]

41 minutes ago, DarkOwl57 said:

Well... Oh boy.. SSTO's..... Me and these beasts go way, way back. I remember when I first got KSP, I spend hours on the old.. I think it was T40? The thingy with the engines mounted to drop tanks with the forward-swept wings? Yeah; that thing. Well anyways, I spent a ton of time just messing around, trying to land that thing on the grass with a 90% success rate (Stupid hill ). So, I watched Duna Attacks (Great movie by the way) and I tried to replicate the SSTO's. I spent many-a-day trying to get those RCS ports in just the right spot (You know, that move where you spend an hour flight, only to find out that an RCS port is half a centimeter too far forward? Yeah; those kinda moves), and finally, I had it. Then, the save got corrupted, so I lost it. Go me, right?

Think that's the Stearwing D45

I tried to recreate it actually, and make it work in KSP 1.2+   https://kerbalx.com/AeroGav/Stearwing-D45N-Lite

 

[Kenny Loggins]

Seriously guys, thanks so much for all the advice! Got it to orbit with some spare fuel, gonna try to dock with my station now. 

Spoiler

 

 

On a side note, definitely thinking of making a different ship for longer flights after this with nukes, after all the helpful info you guys have provided, I think I could actually make it work!

Edit: SUCCESS! I have docked with my refueling station! The next goal is to dock with my main station without refueling, for transporting kerbals to/from the station.

 

Edited September 21, 2017 by Kenny Loggins
Added pictures

[Spricigo]

12 hours ago, Kenny Loggins said:

 I always seem to have a significant excess of liquid fuel left in my craft when I run out of oxidizer. Any advice?

It may be the case you are not using your jet engines as much as would be ideal. For that case I will let the spaceplane guys offer better advice than I have.

However a different possibility its that you carry more liquid for those engines than they require. You may try to substitute you liquid fuel tanks for some LFO or just reduce liquid fuel tankage.

[AeroGav]

6 hours ago, mk1980 said:

example of a simple crew plane similar to the one OP asked for:

https://imgur.com/a/9NRZv

quickly thrown together. very simple handling - basically just throttle up, take off, set nose to ~10° and let it soar. engine cutoff after about 4 minutes, then fast forward to AP and circularize after ~10 minutes game time (maybe 5-6 minutes real time due to physics warp/normal time warp after engine cut off)

still plenty of fuel left for some rescue missions in low orbit or docking to a space station somehwere in LKO.

Didn't realise this was a race !

I built this, two rapiers, two panthers and four NERVs.  Normally I'd say that's for a 80-100T vessel but i thought i'd put that on a 60T and see if it makes for faster flight times.

On my "usual profile", which means levelling the plane off to go supersonic and for the speed run by triggering an action group , while staying prograde lock, you're looking at a flight time of 19 minutes and 1230dV.       I guess that's at least 5 action group button pressings which is of course too hard.

I tried your method with this ship, set a constant pitch angle and leave it, but due to the curvature of the planet the nose rises too much and we're fully stalled by 35km and starting to loose vertical speed.

So ,  I made another flight where i just set prograde lock and pressed the space bar twice to start all of the engines, including the nukes, as soon as the craft spawned.    Plane zooms to 30km, then nose dives to 12km at mach 4, then zooms up again to a 75km AP.      Never had to cut the engines,  the circularisation burn all got merged in with the main one.    The proper name for this technique is flying like a bellend.   However, it did get us to orbit in under 10 minutes, at the cost of 700dv

[Spricigo]

1 hour ago, AeroGav said:

Didn't realise this was a race !

It don't need to be...if it become a race I'd entry with a overpowered rocket than can reach the orbit in a couple of minutes wasting a s-load of fuel.

If being SSTO, spaceplane is a requirement, something like this: 

Spoiler

just for fun(and messing with the spaceplane crowd).

On a side note, I should take the time to develop this craft. The planes have some serious flaws and the rocket being a SSTO was just lazy design.

 

Back to the realm of sanity: several good ideas in this thread. There is a good chance that I will adopt a design similar to those of @zolotiyeruki and @mk1980. There is any chance to spare a craft file?

 

 

 

Edited September 21, 2017 by Spricigo
problem displaying picture

[zolotiyeruki]

2 hours ago, Spricigo said:

Back to the realm of sanity: several good ideas in this thread. There is a good chance that I will adopt a design similar to those of @zolotiyeruki and @mk1980. There is any chance to spare a craft file?

Let me see if I can do this....

https://kerbalx.com/zolotiyeruki/Crew-shuttle-spaceplane

It's not a finished work by any means, but it's pretty easy to get into orbit and return to KSC.  You'll need to add RCS thrusters and tweak the control surfaces to use only the axes you want, but other than that, it's very usable.