Val

Gratz Nefrums. Well done!I guess, I'll have to start working on a new design.

Are the fuel cells producing power?

I lifted a 171 t Payload with a craft weighing 318.67 t at launch for the Stock Payload Fraction Challenge. 53.66 % Payload Fraction.

Thank you. Took me 2 whole days. One day of revising the old Payday design, and one day of improving ascent profiles. MJ only removes the worry of steering the craft, like nose dropping and countering roll and yaw forces. You still have to figure out a flight profile for yourself.I've added annotations to the video, to make it less boring, and to explain what I'm doing. Hope you like it.

That was a bit harder than I expected, but here we go. Craft: C-1 Payday Mk.7 GTOW: 318.67 t Payload: 171 t (10 full large ore canisters + 10 pairs of struts) Propulsion: 14 RAPIERs LF/O: 11040/7040 Wing: 33.16 Lift Rating Power Load: 22.76 t per RAPIER Wing Load: 9.61 t per Lift Rating Payload fraction: 53.66 % The Payday is back. WOOHOO! Full launch, unedited video (11 mins) UPDATE: The video now has annotations to explain stuff and make it less boring!

I'm getting very close to beating tewpie's latest with a new pure RAPIER C-1 Payday Mk.6 Needs a little more work.

That is all true.The point I expressed so poorly, is that landing gear right under CoM, gives much more benign ground handling and is able to carry much greater loads, because the landing gear won't buckle. Tail strikes can be mitigated by wings with angle of incidence, which means you don't need to lift the nose as high at take-off or when flaring. Angle of incidence also has the added benefit of greatly reducing body lift drag, regardless of landing gear placement. Another way to mitigate tail strikes, is to add a small landing gear on the tail that doesn't touch the ground, but will hit the ground before the tail does. I usually do that if I can't design my way around a long low tail.

That is actually a very elegant and beautifully simple simple design. It sort of reminds me of the North American X-15. I like it.And the landing gear placement gives me shivers, like the X-15 does, for the same reason. Landing gear should be right under CoM. It'll be much easier to take off and avoid buckling and veering sideways. The X-15 could get away with it, but in KSP it's not a good idea. And if you gave the wings a little incidence, it should still be able to take-off and land without tail strikes. - - - Updated - - - Forgot this link in my first post: Help with launch profiles for low TWR Spaceplanes

Assuming you mean Spaceplane SSTOs, then yes, they are definitely possible with Whiplash engines. But the payload fractions are quite marginal, in my opinion. 2 of the most important considerations with spaceplane SSTOs are drag and ascent profile. There's some info here: SSTO cookbook. "simple" rule to build spaceplanes? You can also check out some practical examples I posted in my request thread. The Jet based craft are intended for career play when Whiplash is unlocked, like Slashy's examples. There are ascent and descent instructions with each craft, and even a picture of the tech tree unlocks required.

Gratz on the improved results.I'm impressed that you can get such a high fraction with a design that has relatively high drag (struts, many stacks) and heavy cockpits. Thank you!Not having to encase the payload does save a lot of weight, but it's not very practical, even if I my design is theoretically recoverable. I suspect typical career payloads would have too much drag to achieve that kind of fraction. I have some ideas to improve the usability of the design, but it would probably cost in fraction and still suffer with draggy payloads. I've also been working on a new design with enclosed payload, but it's on hold at the moment due to a thermal bug (entry #23), so I have not tested whether it's feasible, yet. Waiting for 1.0.5 to continue work on it.

It would create proportionally more drag than lift, compared to mounted it with no incidence, because of their dual nature in regards to KSP physics. Unless you're building a subsonic craft. Below 250 m/s it would probably be feasible.Edit: Well, at 0 AoA Mk2 parts wouldn't create any lift. What I mean is, it would be more beneficial to add a little extra wing with incidence, than mounting mk2 parts with incidence, with regards to lift-to-drag ratio.

True, you can mount them with incidence, but it doesn't have the same drag reduction benefit, because they're also fuselage parts.The point of incidence is to have different AoA on wings and fuselage. Enough AoA on the wings to provide lift and as close to zero AoA as possible on the fuselage, respectively.

The pictures are not gone, http://imgur.com/a/nyZPL, but something's up with the embedding.I have to agree. Something looks off with the payload.

I have a GTX 980 and i7-4790K @ 4 GHz and I see the same things you describe.The only thing I can recommend, seeing as you also have a beefy Nvidia, is trying -force-opengl. That has improved stability a great deal for me. I play at 2560x1080 with all settings on max, except reentry effects. I settled on these settings after some trial and error. Don't really know what they mean.

I played around with Jumpo Spaceplane 4 for a bit. And it exploded for me, too, initially.But after I strutted the Ore tanks to the cargo bay walls it became a lot easier to land it. I moved the wings a little using the offset gizmo to be less nose heavy, and that made it even easier to land it. And offset the landing gear closer to CoM to make it easier to take off. I'm not a great pilot, so I'm pretty proud that I made 3 successful landings in a row. 1 in the KSC area, 1 in the hills further inland, and finally one at KSC again, before I blew up... because reasons... [TABLE=width: 640] [TR] [TD][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] [/TD][/TR] [/TABLE] Craft file

That is not true.Imagine you have a craft which consists of only a fuel tank and a engine. When fuel is drained CoM moves towards the engine. And that happens no matter if the engine is jet or rocket. What you probably meant is that, jets drain simultaneous from all* tanks, which is likely to move the CoM less, than a rocket engine, in a craft with multiple fuel tanks. *Decouplers can change how jets drain fuel. They always take from the tanks that have most decouplers between them and the crafts root.

That's great This part I don't agree with. A perfect ascent should not have you going at 10°-15° off prograde or losing speed.I recommend starting the pitch up maneuver already from 10 km, with enough speed* and just enough pitch up that when you reach 15 km you're going 1100+ m/s and at 15° pitch and prograde. * (900-1100 m/s, depending on TWR and how heat resistant your craft is) I made this really poor video to try and show it. It's just a short clip showing these steps. Level out at 10 km Build up speed to ~900 m/s Pitch up slow-ish to let the prograde marker try to catch up. Reach 15 km at 15° pitch and prograde with speed nearly 1200 m/s Engage LV-909s at 18 km The craft used is the D-2 Scout Mk.4 which is very similar to yours. - - - Updated - - - Yes, they are more draggier because you can't have incidence on them. Mk2 parts used for lift will always have the extra drag because they are also regular parts with regular drag, which increases a lot more than the lift drag when they're not pointed prograde.Mk2 part lift is only good for high alpha maneuvers, such as re-entry, takeoff and landing, where the regular drag is low or not a problem. And if they had built in incidence they'd be hard to use in single stack rockets. Maybe if they had tweakable incidence. That'd be cool.

That is definitely also a great one.

Some really nice pictures, but especially the Jool Rise one and the last one. I really like those.

I can't get it to work. Re-rooting it doesn't make a difference. No matter how I do it, only one of the "legs" attaches to the bottom quad adapter. Which means it's structurally unsound. I did every step you pictured, then made the above test rig. Am I missing something?

If it's still the plane you pictured on the first page we're discussing, then it's 99% certain that the problem is your vertical stabilizers not being far enough back. I wouldn't change anything else.If you google delta winged craft, you'll notice pretty much all of the pure-delta's like yours, have a most of the vertical fin behind the trailing edge of the wing. I think you'll see much improvement if you do the same. Cantab is right. If you really don't want to move the fins for aesthetic reasons... Yes, but they don't have much control authority in my experience.Try using the Tail Fin or AV-R8 Winglet instead.

In my experience this happens, when you don't destroy the part(s) you pulled off.Which means you can't use it to duplicate part(s). If you pull parts off and then regret it. Destroy the part(s) before using Ctrl+Z. Then you'll have no trouble. (I have actually managed to duplicate using the Ctrl+Z. It's handy because it includes Action Groups unlike Alt+Click duplicating. But on those rare occasions where it didn't bug right away, the craft still ended up being corrupted somehow, with weird symmetry and rooting errors.)

Well, color me interested. How do you do that?Because, that would be a really great way to make pseudo 2.5 m LF tanks in stock. (If it's using docking ports, then I already know)

Stoney3k great advice about wing incidence will help pulling the prograde marker up, and reduce drag at the same time. If you hadn't considered using wing incidence, here's an explanation of why it is so great. Like most of us, you were probably taught that lift works like this. Pictures showing lift without Angle of Attack. It's not wrong, but it's also not the full picture. On top of that KSP defaults to wings mounted that way. Which means we all have a tendency to mount wings with zero Incidence. When really we shouldn't. At least 2 things are missing in relation to KSP. Camber in wing profiles only provide part of the lift, in most flight regimes. KSP does not model cambered wing profiles. Which means wings in KSP always need Angle of Attack to provide lift. If you mount wings with no Angle of Incidence, then the whole craft needs to be pointed up for the wings to lift it. When wings are mounted with Incidence, the nose can be lowered closer to the direction of movement (prograde), reducing drag from the fuselage. Drag from the wings will of course remain unchanged, but that is much less than drag from fuselage. In real life even cambered wings are mounted with incidence, for the same reason. The amount of incidence you need depends on mass and wing area. I usually go for 5° Incidence (because that's easy to do in stock) and a wing area 1/8th to 1/6th of the mass in t. (not counting wing area from Mk2 fuselage) This will result in the craft being able to fly completely level with the horizon at sea level (below 500 m), without losing or gaining altitude, at or just above Mach 1 (350 m/s) which minimizes drag at transonic speeds, where drag is very high and thrust is still low. This is more relevant for RAPIER powered planes that have less thrust than Whiplashes, until speed is above 400-something m/s. TLDR; But it also means that if you fly level at 10 km, then the prograde marker will start to pull above the nose around Mach 3 (900 m/s), and you can start following it up, to get a good angle for the transition to ballistic flight, with very little pointing away from prograde.

I don't know what's happening with the Merge function. I've never used it. But I do know that you can't have a quad adapter on both ends of 4 stacks, like you've been trying. Any part you attach, can only ever attach to one node, even if it lines up with several other. It's a limitation of tree structures, which is how the editor stores craft internally.