Wanderfound

"Smallest plane that can do a touch & go on the island runway and then land at KSC" sounds like it'd work well to me. It's about teenyness rather than range or speed, but it'd still need to be a real functioning aircraft. And it's only a few minutes per attempt, which is always a plus. Maybe do size by mass or part count to negate the advantage of part clipping?

Take a look at what I did with the Constellation and Titan 8. It's all about having enough wing that you can get a <10° AoA for level flight at runway speeds, and enough tail clearance that you can hit that AoA on the ground. If you've got your rear gear just behind CoM as you should, it doesn't take a lot of control authority to lift the nose. The soon-to-arrive larger landing gear will make it easier.

More on the SRB powered reentry glider theme: Kerbodyne Trident. Flight demo at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Trident/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Trident Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/4pra9q3wl7wzppk/KerbodyneTrident.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Javelin. The newest in hybrid SSTO design. Flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Javelin/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Javelin Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/m4dt6ee4ohpxly1/Kerbodyne%20Javelin.craft?dl=0

A lot of the FAR-aversion relates to previous versions. Aero failures are massively less threatening since the introduction of tweakable wing mass, and slowing down is much faster with the new skin drag. If your taste of FAR was a few versions back, it may be worth having another look.

An all-terrain lander... Kerbodyne Spacehopper Flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Spacehopper/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Spacehopper Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/q4u8wpb75kqfjlu/Kerbodyne%20Spacehopper.craft?dl=0

Only idjit teenagers going through their "reject all authority!" phase.

...but there ain't nothing stopping you from spending the trip bouncing between 25,000 and 40,000m. Not a lot of drag up there.

Big single-stage jobbies still work in realistic aero if you build 'em right:

The stratospheric hop technique I used extends your range massively; it was the trick intended to be used by the Silbervogel in WWII to allow it to fly from Germany to America. It's related to why dolphins repeatedly launch themselves into the air while travelling long distances; the low drag at the top of the hop outweighs the energy cost of generating the hop in the first place, as much of that energy is recovered at the bottom. It's also vaguely comparable to how kangaroos work; they store energy in highly flexible tendons, so that most of the power for each hop is recovered from the landing of the previous hop.

Not an entry, but in the theme of the challenge: an itty-bitty spaceplane. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1729893&viewfull=1#post1729893

The docking port's there for a reason; give it an LKO refuel and she's Muna bound.

Kerbodyne Gunbalanya Micro Slim: just how far can I push this? Flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Gunbalanya%20Micro%20Slim/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Gunbalanya%20Micro%20Slim Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/2d36y439d9bs5kz/Kerbodyne%20Gunbalanya%20Micro%20Slim.craft?dl=0

From the "I can't believe this worked" division... Kerbodyne Gunbalanya Micro. Flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Gunbalanya%20Micro/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Gunbalanya%20Micro Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/mzeu5nsp4za1f6g/Kerbodyne%20Gunbalanya%20Micro.craft?dl=0

Most things will develop some yaw instability over 30,000m unless they're doing Mach 5 or better. This is why I'm so fond of sticking a Vernor each side of the cockpit... You may notice that a lot of my recent stuff has fairly low powered canards (either by lowering the max deflection directly, or cutting the pitch influence if I want large deflection for the AoA settings). The FAR visualisation thingie is good for tuning control surfaces; set it to highlight stalls, take it for a test flight and then detune whichever surfaces are stalling. Multiple low-powered pitch surfaces work better than a single high-powered surface; they're less prone to stalls.

Kerbodyne Gunbalanya. Express crew delivery and retrieval. Flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Gunbalanya/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Gunbalanya Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/kzvxb2ge8yetrmx/Kerbodyne%20Gunbalanya.craft?dl=0

In fairness, that shot was in response to a max altitude "challenge", rather than a presentation of the ideal way to orbit. And the enhanced skin drag of the latest version of FAR does tip the balance towards steeper profiles. The ultra-flat ascents that I used to use (crank it up to Mach 6 at 30,000m with the nose on the horizon) don't work anymore: if you shut off your engines at 30,000m these days, you'll lose all of your speed to drag long before you reach orbit. You still want the flat jet climb between 20,000 and 30,000m to maximise speed, but you also want to pull the nose up as hard as you can as soon as you light the rockets so as to be out of the drag zone when you shut them down. A bit of a zoom climb shortly pre-rocketry can make the transition easier and ensure that you get high enough to dodge the drag.

This is an area of active research, much of it military funded: a lot of it is aimed at nuke submarine crews.

To clarify for the crowd: FAR nerfs jets to about half their stock thrust, and adjusts the speed curve so that jets cut out around Mach 5. B9 does some other stuff, the details of which I'm not sure of. But if your jets are cutting out at Mach 3, it ain't FAR that's doing it.

Yup. Wings work better the faster you go. So do intakes. My normal flight pattern is to race to the thin, low-drag air above 20,000m, but then not worry about climbing any higher until I'm approaching Mach 4. There'll normally be a bit of a descent while I build speed; I don't actually dive, but I normally keep the nose to about a 10° pitch relative to the horizon while accelerating. As you gain speed, the AoA required for level flight decreases, and the descent will turn back into a climb. It might be educational to take one of the single-turbojet trainers up and see how high and fast you can get it. - - - Updated - - - By "Turbojet dies", do you mean "the engine produces zero thrust" or "the plane stops accelerating"? The first shouldn't be the case, but the second is to be expected, especially on heavier/draggier ships. And yeah, I tend to think of 30,000m as "edge of rocketry". Plenty of tailfin required; the air's thin up there.

The standard flight pattern on something like the Dolphin is: 1) All jets on until the air runs low at somewhere over 20,000m. 2) Turbojet off, RAPIERs stay on in jet mode, until the air supply runs low again at about 25,000m. 3) Turbojet on, RAPIERs off, keep it like this until you've maxed speed and altitude. 4) RAPIERs back on in rocket mode, keep the Turbojet running until it's producing zero thrust. 5) Close intakes and shut down the Turbo while the RAPIERs finish off alone. Turbojets (in FAR/KSP, anyway) keep producing thrust up to around Mach 5.

When I read this, I was on my way to add an addendum to my previous post, consisting of this: Get away from deltas if you can. They look cool, and they're superficially uncomplicated, but the rearwards weight bias makes a delta design much trickier to get right than a conventional airframe. The mid-wing/rear-tailplane design is common for a reason: it works. The only real difficulty with mid-wing designs is the tailstrike hazard, and that's easily dealt with via raising gear on hardpoints and adding tailstrike guards when necessary. - - - Updated - - - It might be useful to check how much of the altitude problem is design vs piloting, BTW. I had the Dolphin over 37,000m on jets alone, without a speed-killing zoom climb (it did lose a bit of speed after 30,000m, but not a lot); how high can you get it while still maintaining a reasonable amount of speed?

Basics to orbit: * Get as high and as fast as you can before lighting the rockets. Ideally, you want to be over 30,000m and Mach 4 before you touch the oxidiser supplies. * Keep your wing mass down. If you aren't doing low altitude aerobatics, you don't need full-strength wings. 0.5 on the mass tweakable is plenty unless it's a super-high wing loading design. * Keep the wing area down. With totally inadequate wings, you'll start getting red numbers all over the Longitudinal Derivatives, but until you get to that point you can afford to shave off some wing surface. * Power covers for a multitude of sins. Anything will fly if you get it fast enough. * Less is more. Often the way to fix a design is to strip it back rather than bulk it up. See De Minimus, Karnifex and Alkahest (and Skylon...) for examples. From a quick glance, the Boomerang could afford to lose some torque wheels (one is plenty) and probably has heavier wings than necessary: there's plenty of wing surface, so they aren't too heavily loaded, so they don't need to be super strong.

Update of an olde: Kerbodyne Dropbear 2015. Flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Dropbear%202015/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Dropbear%202015 Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/jgcm811uiwkxvhy/Kerbodyne%20Dropbear%202015.craft?dl=0