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[0.24] Spaceplane Plus 1.3


Porkjet

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Porkjet:

Not that I expect you to be able to speak to this (given whatever the terms of your agreement with Squad are) but I loved that your manned parts had lighted windows. Will that feature survive "stockification"? And if so, does that mean we'll have lighted windows with stock parts??? (That would be awesome, btw.)

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Porkjet:

Not that I expect you to be able to speak to this (given whatever the terms of your agreement with Squad are) but I loved that your manned parts had lighted windows. Will that feature survive "stockification"? And if so, does that mean we'll have lighted windows with stock parts??? (That would be awesome, btw.)

I was also thinking about this. I hope it doesn't disappear.

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How do you guys get these things into orbit!?!?! I built similar ones, starting with one that looked like the one in the op, and *if* I get to orbit its barely and I can't get back down... 98% of the time I get a suborbital trajectory without enough Dv to circularize at 80 km.

Are you clipping fuel tanks or what O_o?

The only one I got to orbit had 2 rapier and 2 lv-n engines, and it took almost all the fuel just to get to orbit. I have enough to deorbit, but I won't have enough to do a powered landing I fear.

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How do you guys get these things into orbit!?!?! I built similar ones, starting with one that looked like the one in the op, and *if* I get to orbit its barely and I can't get back down... 98% of the time I get a suborbital trajectory without enough Dv to circularize at 80 km.

Are you clipping fuel tanks or what O_o?

The only one I got to orbit had 2 rapier and 2 lv-n engines, and it took almost all the fuel just to get to orbit. I have enough to deorbit, but I won't have enough to do a powered landing I fear.

What kind of trajectory are you following?

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How do you guys get these things into orbit!?!?! I built similar ones, starting with one that looked like the one in the op, and *if* I get to orbit its barely and I can't get back down... 98% of the time I get a suborbital trajectory without enough Dv to circularize at 80 km.

Are you clipping fuel tanks or what O_o?

The only one I got to orbit had 2 rapier and 2 lv-n engines, and it took almost all the fuel just to get to orbit. I have enough to deorbit, but I won't have enough to do a powered landing I fear.

Perhaps N.E.A.R. / F.A.R.? I don't know, you have to be careful while flying in atmosphere, get up to 20k and start very carefully go slightly higher but more important get bucket loads of speed so when you run out of air you can use your rockets to give you altitude and convert the speed into orbit velocity....

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How do you guys get these things into orbit!?!?! I built similar ones, starting with one that looked like the one in the op, and *if* I get to orbit its barely and I can't get back down... 98% of the time I get a suborbital trajectory without enough Dv to circularize at 80 km.

Are you clipping fuel tanks or what O_o?

The only one I got to orbit had 2 rapier and 2 lv-n engines, and it took almost all the fuel just to get to orbit. I have enough to deorbit, but I won't have enough to do a powered landing I fear.

Stock aero, FAR or NEAR?

The following guide was written with FAR in mind, but the technique is basically the same in stock.

How to fly a spaceplane to orbit

1) Get to 20,000m however you like. Around a 45 degree climb is probably most fuel efficient, but jet engines use so little fuel that it doesn't matter much. If the plane has enough power, I usually climb at 75 degrees or so just to get it done quickly.

2) When you get to 20,000m, level off and build some speed. You want to pile on as much horizontal velocity as possible while you make a slow ascent to 30,000m. Keep your angle of attack (the angle between where your nose is pointing and the direction in which the plane is actually moving, shown by the prograde marker when in surface mode) and climb rate low; by the time you hit 30,000m, they should both be around 10 or so. A low angle of attack reduces drag and helps your intakes work better. The low angle makes you climb slower, but that's okay; you need that time to get up to speed. As you go faster, the angle of attack required to maintain a given climb rate reduces, but as you go higher, the thinner air means that the angle of attack required to maintain a given climb rate increases. If you do it right, these two factors will roughly balance each other out and you should gain the necessary speed and altitude in a single smooth climb. However, a plane with some aerodynamic or piloting flaws may need to bounce up and down between 20,000 and 30,000m a couple of times while building speed before the final push.

3) Somewhere between 20,000m and 35,000m (exactly when depends on both plane and piloting), you'll start to run short of air. Don't switch to rockets immediately. If you've got multiple engines going, shut some down to concentrate the available oxygen into the ones you keep running. If you've already shut down as many as you can, throttle back a bit. You can dramatically increase your jet-only altitude by doing this, and once you get up to serious height the thin atmosphere means that you only need a tiny amount of thrust to accelerate.

4) Keep this going for as long as your plane and your patience can tolerate. A well-built and -flown plane should be able to get over Mach 4.5 and 30,000m in a single attempt on jets alone. Once you've wrung as much speed and altitude out of the jets as possible (you want at least Mach 4 and 30,000m), force the nose up to 45 degrees and light the rockets. If you have both jets and rockets, don't shut down the jets immediately; the thrust of the rockets will drive a ram-air effect that kicks the jets back into life for a while. Keep the rockets burning until your apoapsis exceeds 70,000m, then shut off and coast until it's time to circularise. Point prograde and close your intakes while coasting to minimise drag.

A good plane and pilot should be able to get the apoapsis to 70,000m with less than a minute of rocket power. Done properly, it requires very little fuel. But if you try to brute-force it from lower speeds and altitudes, the atmospheric drag is going to drain your oxidiser tanks before you get anywhere near orbit. You don't need part-clipping and you don't need air-hogging; these are just ways of compensating for poor piloting and design.

If you're having trouble with design rather than piloting, give http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1357777&viewfull=1#post1357777 a try.

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How do you guys get these things into orbit!?!?! I built similar ones, starting with one that looked like the one in the op, and *if* I get to orbit its barely and I can't get back down... 98% of the time I get a suborbital trajectory without enough Dv to circularize at 80 km.

Are you clipping fuel tanks or what O_o?

The only one I got to orbit had 2 rapier and 2 lv-n engines, and it took almost all the fuel just to get to orbit. I have enough to deorbit, but I won't have enough to do a powered landing I fear.

I used to build spaceplanes in 0.23/0.23.5 all the time. Now I'm playing with Real Solar System since the stock game is a joke - you can put a brick into space with a fuel tank and engine strapped to it, as one esteemed person put it eloquently on these forums. :3 If you aren't playing with essential mods like FAR, DRE, and so on - it's just ridiculous. You can safely land on Kerbin without parachutes on a command seat strapped to a tank, engine, and some optional legs. But I digress!

There are three main reasons why spaceplanes don't work for people, in the following (descending order):

- Wrong engine,

- Too heavy,

- Poor airframe design.

If you're playing with FAR/NEAR, "poor airframe design" is probably the number one reason. I think those mods should be made official and put into the game by default, personally... Also, no, no clipping fuel tanks at all! Less is more! I had a really beautiful spaceplane once built with B9 and Taverio's parts, it had three fuel-containing parts: two long Mk2/Mk1 adapters, and one short Mk2 LFO tank. The thing had four surfaces (looked almost exactly like a Predator drone) and one engine - a small SABRE. I could get the thing into orbit in probably less than two minutes with about four-point-something km of deltaV left over. Like I said - stock-sized Kerbin. :)

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How do you guys get these things into orbit!?!?! I built similar ones, starting with one that looked like the one in the op, and *if* I get to orbit its barely and I can't get back down... 98% of the time I get a suborbital trajectory without enough Dv to circularize at 80 km.

Are you clipping fuel tanks or what O_o?

The only one I got to orbit had 2 rapier and 2 lv-n engines, and it took almost all the fuel just to get to orbit. I have enough to deorbit, but I won't have enough to do a powered landing I fear.

Well... you have to be very careful of your craft's mass, for one. And really you should be using turbojets instead of rapiers if you also have LVNs. And extra intakes to squeeze out a bit more altitude before switching to L/Ox engines.

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Well... you have to be very careful of your craft's mass, for one. And really you should be using turbojets instead of rapiers if you also have LVNs. And extra intakes to squeeze out a bit more altitude before switching to L/Ox engines.

And really: ditch the LVN's.

They're high-efficiency space engines, but they're very heavy and have lousy thrust. Turbojets, RAPIERs and aerospikes.

You can do it without using any of those, but it's more difficult. Save the advanced tricks for after you've got the basics down. Have a go with the plane I linked above, then take it into the SPH to tear it apart and see how it's built. Pay particular attention to the relationship between CoL and CoM.

I'd also recommend getting the RCS Build Aid mod. As well as helping with RCS placement, it also allows you to view CoM and dCoM (dry centre of mass, i.e. after the fuel is gone) at the same time. If the distance between the two is more than 1m, you want to rearrange your fuel tanks. The CoL should be overlapping but not in front of the rearmost of the two CoM's.

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And really: ditch the LVN's.

They're high-efficiency space engines, but they're very heavy and have lousy thrust. Turbojets, RAPIERs and aerospikes.

I run 2 turbojets and 2 aerospikes myself. LVNs really aren't worth the extra mass on a small or medium sized spaceplane. Maybe on an interplanetary one, but that's crazy talk.

8B68854C160A982BBE43C55468A4E7C3608ED867

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How do you guys get these things into orbit!?!?! I built similar ones, starting with one that looked like the one in the op, and *if* I get to orbit its barely and I can't get back down... 98% of the time I get a suborbital trajectory without enough Dv to circularize at 80 km.

Are you clipping fuel tanks or what O_o?

The only one I got to orbit had 2 rapier and 2 lv-n engines, and it took almost all the fuel just to get to orbit. I have enough to deorbit, but I won't have enough to do a powered landing I fear.

the mentions of other people also, accelerate horizentally as much as possilbe using jet engines, becouse they are very efficient, also it should be very easy to build sstos with this mod.

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I used to build spaceplanes in 0.23/0.23.5 all the time. Now I'm playing with Real Solar System since the stock game is a joke - you can put a brick into space with a fuel tank and engine strapped to it, as one esteemed person put it eloquently on these forums. :3 If you aren't playing with essential mods like FAR, DRE, and so on - it's just ridiculous. You can safely land on Kerbin without parachutes on a command seat strapped to a tank, engine, and some optional legs. But I digress!

this part is really a hate post on people who play for fun with the game as it is and not the forced realism simulator you are trying make

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Not enough fuel to do anything once in orbit.. but whatevaaa.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0jic1wl4g3wr3fi/AABaThSxxWoQcxrCebPUT5KSa

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90337-Economic-Fuel-to-Oribit/page5?p=1361984#post1361984

Wet cost: √149322

Recovered: √143321.7

LF delivered: 3727.9

O delivered: 4186.4

Cost: √6000.3

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this part is really a hate post on people who play for fun with the game as it is and not the forced realism simulator you are trying make

The thing I mentioned about landing on a seat strapped to an engine and some fuel without parachutes is a fact. Take a look at the last screenshot in this post: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/27763-center-of-mass-moves-outside-of-ship?p=983570&viewfull=1#post983570 I provided the craft file in that thread, too. That lander has something like 5.6km of dV. Once, a bug caused my orbital module to blow up, so I had a kerbal stuck on that lander with some fuel remaining in Munar orbit. I flew the thing back to Kerbin, used aerobraking over the course of several orbits, then let the thing fall through the atmosphere, and used the remnants of my fuel to do a soft splashdown landing. The craft survived, and so did the kerbal. Try it for yourself if you like. It was pretty fun.

That said, before KSP, I used to play Orbiter. I really got into KSP because it was possible to build modular spacecraft, something that Orbiter dearly lacked. I know it's possible to have a lot of fun with the stock game, and I did have a lot of fun with it - at first. But beyond a certain point, playing in a proverbial sandbox - building ridiculous contraptions (like so many KSP channels on Youtube exhibit), launching kerbals off of decoupler cannons into Duna, and flying to Jool on one Jumbo-64 tank of fuel becomes tiresome, not fun. If there was a hard-realism alternative to KSP with the same modular spacecraft construction features, I would most likely play that. But so far that hasn't been the case. That said, I do apologize for sounding so snide. I've re-read my comment and it does look rather condescending.

Edited by DracovaXIV
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this part is really a hate post on people who play for fun with the game as it is and not the forced realism simulator you are trying make

It's wrong that people can't share their opinions without being accused of a 'hate post'.

Really? Hate?

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