[Tutorial] Advanced SSTO Design

[buzz66boy]

I've been working on Cargo SSTOs that kind of fulfill that Pecan. The pic shows an SSTO I've made that can drop off ~36 ton spacecraft in orbit, kind of like a "launch stage". You are absolutely right though, an SSTO only needs to get to orbit as the name implies.

[Pecan]

Your videos and work on spaceplanes in general is great. I'm aproaching the same sort of things from the other (rocket) side and have only recently started looking at reusability, for the obvious 0.24 reason.

40t-payload SSTO, a lot quicker and easier to get into orbit, obviously burns a lot of fuel doing it (the 4 radial towers - centre one is the payload) but otherwise 100% recoverable.

[buzz66boy]

Quick and dirty build, not cheap ($700k) but 164 tons to orbit SSTO.

[Pecan]

FTW! You 'da man :-)

I can't see myself wanting to get more than that into orbit for a while! (Or ever, to be honest, but it's still impressive).

Your comments on the differences between building and flying rocket vs spaceplane SSTOs would also be interesting.

[buzz66boy]

So I got to thinking, and if one of those can lift 164 tons, why can't I just add more fuel and engines? The result: a 492 ton payload capable craft to LKO.

I used mechjeb to launch cause it was lagging and I didn't have 20 minutes for a 5 min flight

Also I didn't rework some of the fuel lines, so that accounts for the odd fuel levels in 2nd pic.

EDIT: Made a thread for downloading it

Edited July 23, 2014 by buzz66boy

[Pecan]

Woot! You're starting to push Whackjob now, aren't you?

Can you land that thing again?

ETA for below: pah! missed that bit of text, sorry.

Edited July 24, 2014 by Pecan

[buzz66boy]

Yes, you can land it. Check out the thread linked at the bottom of the post.