Shyrka

Today I managed to bring home something that didn't _quite_ fit in the cargo bay: Had to fly home at full throttle with the brakes wide open to stop myself from flipping but it was... entertaining, at the very least.

I'd been hearing about the game from various quarters beforehand but it was Macey Dean's awesome video series that got me properly interested. I watched most of his videos before I'd even played the game so I had a decent understanding of the game before I started which helped a lot.

I've gone the whole hog and created links for GameData, Screenshot, Saves, etc. in my Dropbox folder. Works nicely.

In my current career game I've not had too much trouble gaining science. It was slow going to start with but doing orbital eva reports on every biome I could find eventually got me through. Currently I'm doing rather well for science thanks to a pair of orbital stations, munstation and minstation, which have science labs and small, lightweight landers so I can visit all the biomes and process their data. As Tex_NL said, if you do go down the lab route, make sure you have enough batteries on the station to get you through the night. Finally, converting funds into science via the admin building was always a good way of progressing your tech pre-1.0. I've no idea how it performs in the current version (I got the impression it had been nerfed heavily when I looked last) but it may help to net you the science you need to progress to the next stage.

That's pretty much what I meant: they seem to be pretty much restricted to working in LKO. If that's the case, that's fine, I can still do satellite launches, etc. I had been hoping to launch orange tanks into orbit or use them as mun/minmus crew shuttles but it sounds as if that's not possible these days. I can live with that although it's a bit of a come-down from the heady days of 0.90. For now I'm converting my existing launch rockets to be partially recoverable which is helping to reduce launch costs. I'll probably look into SSTO rockets too for lifting heavy payloads onto LKO. I'm building an orbital fueling station so eventually my LKO-restricted SSTOs can refuel and head on to my mun and minmus research stations.

Thanks for the replies so far. In general, the consensus appears to be that, whilst it's possible to make SSTOs without rapiers, they're not much use for anything other than rescuing the odd kerbal from LKO. This is more or less what I expected so thanks for confirming my suspicions.

I'm in the middle of a hard-mode career game and I've unlocked turbojets, ram intakes, etc. so I've started investigating plane-based SSTOs, mostly in order to cut costs so I can unlock the next tier of KSC builds sooner. Unfortunately, all the old tricks I knew about building heavy-lift and long-distance SSTOs no longer work. Multiple intakes per engine, turbojet/nuke combos, etc are all off the table. Reading around, the vast majority of SSTOs people are showing off lifting payloads to orbit or visiting minmus, etc. feature RAPIER engines. Since RAPIERs are now at the far end of the tech tree I can't utilise them. Is it possible to build a non-RAPIER SSTO that can do useful work any more? I've managed to get one into orbit running with quad turbojets and dual reliants but with no cargo and barely enough Delta-V to de-orbit, let alone travel elsewhere.

You could double up the intakes on the front of your engine nacelles by radial attaching a pair of tail connectors and putting the intakes on the front. Like this:

Indeed, I've experimented with stacked engines myself and found them generally more stable but they tend to dictate the design of your plane a little more than I'd like.

Interesting. Reading that, it would appear to be something I've stumbled upon due to the build order. Time to experiment, I guess! As far as building with an odd number of engines, I agree. I tend to aim for this with the larger craft but most of my recent SSTO designs feature one central nuke and two turbojets.

As I've learned through many hard lessons, as you climb the thrust available from turbo jets reduces as the intake air decreases. With planes with multiple engines, I've come to accept that this will always be an asymmetric loss: one turbo jet will be starved of oxygen before the other, resulting in a yaw effect and a flat spin if left alone. At this point, you have to throttle back to reduce the air requirements of both engines until the engines' thrust is symmetrical again. Very occasionally, one of my SSTO designs won't suffer from asymmetric thrust as it climbs for no obvious reason that I can discern. The plane can fly as high as it pleases at full throttle with perfectly symmetrical - albeit gradually reducing - thrust from both engines. Only when one finally flames out does anything bad happen. I've yet to discover whether this something to do with the plane's design or simply a bug. If it's the latter, I'm loathe to exploit it as it makes the designs much more effective but given that I've not seen it called out specifically in any of the SSTO design tutorials, I'm assuming its a bug. The designs I've had this with are not-particularly-air-hogging, i.e. an intake-to-engine ratio of 4:1 or lower. The latest was a twin turbojet with two ram intakes and a radial each. Has anyone else experienced this effect? Any ideas what might be causing it?