SSTOs! Post your pictures here~

[Rune]

Use the airbrakes. They can slow planes over 40km so re-entry is a lot easier.

Yeah, they do help, but they weren't my issue. Experimenting!

Yeah, the re-entry heating is kind of insane right now. If you find settings which make re-entry interesting without causing spaceplanes to explode on the way up, let me know. For now I'm just disabling it.

Not sure if devs never tested spaceplanes... or need to publish some guidelines for how to make them survive now :/ Oh well, interesting challenge for when I finish work - worst case, that slider's coming down to 30%

Actually, what is dangerous seems to be the clipping. You can get some weird thermal conductivity effects pulling heat to certain parts in particular, as I found out with the first serious testing SSTO I built. Got around it by replacing the NCS adapters that were blowing up with a nosecone that didn't clip into the engines quite as much, and the things stayed at a fraction of the temperature the others were pulling, cooler than the leading edge instead of pulling 50% more temperature. Gotta do a continuous flight for the pics, and I've got the K-Prize in the bag, with useful payload. However, forget about >25% payload ratios any time soon, things got much more realistic.

Other than that, reenter with airbrakes on and a decent >10º AoA, and you will slow down before you burn. And if it doesn't work, increase AoA until you arrest your vertical fall before 30kms, which apparently is were things get seriously hot at >2km/s.

Rune. The thermal debug tool is gold.

[eddiew]

Rune. The thermal debug tool is gold.

Sounds like black magic to me! But I'll investigate and find out the appropriate incantation; cheers for the tip

I have a feeling I'm never going to get a big red lifter working again Until nuFAR comes out

[CitizenAerospace]

Yeah, they do help, but they weren't my issue. Experimenting!

Actually, what is dangerous seems to be the clipping. You can get some weird thermal conductivity effects pulling heat to certain parts in particular, as I found out with the first serious testing SSTO I built. Got around it by replacing the NCS adapters that were blowing up with a nosecone that didn't clip into the engines quite as much, and the things stayed at a fraction of the temperature the others were pulling, cooler than the leading edge instead of pulling 50% more temperature. Gotta do a continuous flight for the pics, and I've got the K-Prize in the bag, with useful payload. However, forget about >25% payload ratios any time soon, things got much more realistic.

Other than that, reenter with airbrakes on and a decent >10º AoA, and you will slow down before you burn. And if it doesn't work, increase AoA until you arrest your vertical fall before 30kms, which apparently is were things get seriously hot at >2km/s.

Rune. The thermal debug tool is gold.

I've had some problems with the clipping bug and a few other bugs with the heating recently... A probe core stack on top of my rocket with a parachute kept exploding every time I hit 1500m/s or so.... and I was 55km up!!! The rest of the rocket was fine, but the friggin probe kept puffing into nothing.

Seems to be a few bugs with the heating system atm.

[Radam]

It seems the main trick is to have enough thrust to break the sound barrier and then going up as fast as possible while staying on the other side of it.

[Rune]

Sounds like black magic to me! But I'll investigate and find out the appropriate incantation; cheers for the tip

I have a feeling I'm never going to get a big red lifter working again Until nuFAR comes out

It allows you to visualize how parts get hot (or numbers on the contextual menu, which is even better), and notice any weird hotspots that shouldn't be going up quite so fast. Use it to debug designs that blow up for apparently no reason, and find the clipped part that is giving you headaches. And I don't get the FAR comment... surely this is easier than FAR? Because if not I have overestimated FAR's difficulty a lot.

It seems the main trick is to have enough thrust to break the sound barrier and then going up as fast as possible while staying on the other side of it.

Yup, the ascent profile is completely different now. So far, I just find the lower AoA that doesn't make me burn up, and ride it all the way to engine cutoff at >20kms and about 800m/s... but I think 1km/s is doable is I get the cutoff height better defined and manage vertical speed accordingly (I need KER installed, like yesterday). Probably the ultimate limit is the thermal barrier, as it should be, but piloting it will require lots of practice. But in some ways SSTOs are easier to pilot now, and the ride up to orbit is certainly MUCH faster. I have also found hints of exciting aero effect like much reduced control at high supersonic speeds.

Rune. The extra liquid fuel for ascent is an afterthought now, and rocketplanes are just that, rocketplanes. Me likes so far.

Edited April 28, 2015 by Rune

[eddiew]

It allows you to visualize how parts get hot (or numbers on the contextual menu, which is even better), and notice any weird hotspots that shouldn't be going up quite so fast. Use it to debug designs that blow up for apparently no reason, and find the clipped part that is giving you headaches. And I don't get the FAR comment... surely this is easier than FAR? Because if not I have overestimated FAR's difficulty a lot.

Turbojets now seem to conk out about 20k - with FAR and 'sensible' intakes, they could take you to 35... It's not necessarily the new aero that's making it hard, so much as the unfavourable behaviour of air-breathing engines, what with rather harsh altitude limits, and increased LF consumption. Honestly I have no reason to believe that nuFAR will bring back the old flight mechanics, it's just a would-be-nice

Meantime I'll be trying to learn how to handle the new stock aero and see if I can tame the heat beast, because I wouldn't mind the option to build things that are a little more... ornate, than FAR allows. Just another learning wall brought to us by KSP

[Van Disaster]

I climbed up to 18km & dived to go supersonic - mostly because getting up there supersonic requires quite some time or quite some TWR - & wound the jets up, and then pulled up sharp once I had them burning & rode that to orbit. Doesn't make any particular sense, but it's what it is. Drag changes with AoA are, uh... interesting.

[Radam]

Im getting frustrated by not even getting off the runway in most tries.

SUCCES!

Got some cargo into orbit...

Needs some tweaking but I did switch cycles at 1200ms. Not sure about the turbojets tho...

Edit: With only rapiers, I only had to use a sliver of LF and had some leftover LOX. So basically this is a big red to orbit!

Edited April 28, 2015 by Radam

[diegzumillo]

Ah, this looks like a good thread

How is the supersonic speeds influencing things here? I haven't made any useful observation about that so far.

Drag certainly is making a huge difference. If I try putting anything at the front of the plane that isn't a nose cone, the whole thing becomes unstable and tends to flip over.

So far I'm loving the whole thing. Learning a new system is fun, and more when the new system is more realistic. My main complaint is lack of information. FAR was hard but we had a huge panel with great information, here we have nothing. There's the debug menu but it doesn't seem to update, I don't knwo what to do.

[Overfloater]

I made a SSTO spaceplane:

Still need to work on the precise landing though...

Surprisingly the whole descent went without any reentry heat

[Rune]

Im getting frustrated by not even getting off the runway in most tries.

SUCCES!

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/532891784922300336/6C6DD31C95BA92CAC654FA8BE8F17746BC606D29/

Got some cargo into orbit...

Needs some tweaking but I did switch cycles at 1200ms. Not sure about the turbojets tho...

Edit: With only rapiers, I only had to use a sliver of LF and had some leftover LOX. So basically this is a big red to orbit!

I see this is a race now to recreate the Intrepid...

Rune. Good one!

[Majorjim!]

I see the stretched texture bug still exists..

[TheBarnetts]

I've returned to my roots since 1.0 and retooled the formula for my work horse SSTO rockets. This guy can carry up 90 tons to 80km orbit (I goofed the gravity burn and orbit in the first pic; 70k periapsis & 100k apoapsis). In this case, it's a fuel depot for future, more economical air breather SSTOs (when I finally get used to the new features...). Only problem was the winglets overheated, but everything else survived to fly another day!

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[panzer1b]

While im not going to claim im the 1st to do this in 1.0, but i did get a SSTo to laythe (had i not ran outta xenon thisd return home alive!).

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Kinda cheap though, the 1.25m bay has 3 RTGs, 1 probe core, 15 ion engines, and 21 ion fuel tansk INSIDE IT to bypass drag penalties on all that hardware.

[FlipNascar]

Haven't named it yet... First spaceplane I cobbled together. The canards went bang on the way back in, but turns out they were only good for aesthetics (arguably...), other than that an easy as pie return to KSC.

Hit a 95km orbit with around 640 dV left.

[eddiew]

I know she's not very exciting but... Scimitar class light spaceplane. Made it to orbit, and survived re-entry in 1.0 with heat on. I'm chuffed!

Sadly the cargo bay is full of LF and parachutes, so need to do some creative clipping to make it useful - but it's been a good lesson getting this far

Notes; struggles to keep the nose up on re-entry. Tried canards, but they explode during ascent. Airbrakes on top side only take over the work here, and if anything, tend to pitch her upwards. Airbrakes are observed to be OP, got less heating on descent than ascent...

[Overfloater]

Ssto space plane:

[eddiew]

Ssto space plane:

Lol! A point well made Can't help but notice it was an "only just" on the delta-v front though

And parachutes working that well at high altitude is upsetting, but I appreciate the present need to abuse either chutes or airbrakes, since doing neither is basically a guaranteed burn up Hoping there'll be some tuning patches that'll make things act a bit more sensibly in the near future...

[Overfloater]

Eddiew, what do you mean "need for using parachutes/brakes"? I already slowed down to 700m/s before opening the parachutes, and i opened them only because i was about to miss the runway.

If you remain pitched up to 20~30 degrees during descent, you will not burn up (promise :-)).

On a related note...

More tests led me to conclude that making long range space-planes will be hard 0.0

In alpha/beta this design could at least pull off a Mun fly-by, now it can just barely do an orbit.

[Mesklin]

Unmanned cargo SSTO, 40 t to LKO. Start mass is 177.5 t (22.5% payload fraction, not bad, I am thinking)

[eddiew]

Eddiew, what do you mean "need for using parachutes/brakes"? I already slowed down to 700m/s before opening the parachutes, and i opened them only because i was about to miss the runway.

If you remain pitched up to 20~30 degrees during descent, you will not burn up (promise :-)).

...I'll give it a go... though I'm not sure my current (only) working design for 1.0 has the pitch authority to pull up that hard against a lot of air speed

Unmanned cargo SSTO, 40 t to LKO. Start mass is 177.5 t (22.5% payload fraction, not bad, I am thinking)

That's pretty good

[david50517]

Rocket SSTO 1-3

Edited April 29, 2015 by david50517

[eddiew]

Rocket SSTO 1-3

Spacegoose!

[Cinocal]

http://imgur.com/a/d53qe#0

[diegzumillo]

I'm noticing another important thing in my experimentations. The (turbo) jet engine seems to lose thrust as it gets less air, which makes gaining surface speed at high altitudes extremely challenging. On the other hand flameouts are less dangerous now.

I did a couple of SSTOs already but my goal is to get one there using jets and the nuke engine. I like the nuke engine because once you're up there with it you can go pretty far with less fuel. But this is pretty challenging now, as finding the sweet spot in the atmosphere where you won't burn to death but can still use the atmosphere to gain speed is super difficult. That is necessary because the nuke engine is very low thrust, you can only get to orbit with it if the jets put you in a high orbit with plenty of surface velocity.

I'm pretty sure it can be done, but it will take a while