Merandix

I actually did NOT tweak the fuel, because you do that in the SPH... because that DOES influence what plane it is significantly. It makes it much lighter. I only tweaked stuff you can do on the runway. That seems like fair game to me. Anyway, new entry in Open Stock Aero: 4:11 with a new three engined plane! Actually flying hyperbolic to around 5 km now works highest speed measured: 419,3 m/s Again with me completely missing the touch... and yes, doing transonic or even supersonic touch-and goes IS scary... especially with that tower so close to the runway. edit: second attempt with slight modifications: booyah! 3:58, top speed 525,7 m/s Nice high speed runs, a touch and go at 300+ (camera below ground again, just after the 'go' in touch and go). Accidentally wound up at 8 km altitude and nearly lost control... I did go over half a km/s because of it. 525,7 m/s = 1892,5 km/h (1175,9 mph) edit2: Also, why is this so much fun? Edit, same plane 3:55 meh... obviously late again for the screenshot, but you don't bounce like that without hitting the runway. That bounce was most welcome... as would've plowed into that hill face first otherwise XD

Sorry to sound slightly negative, but the 'Formula One' league deserves a nippier plane to be honest... We have almost 10 times the fuel we need aboard. Note to everyone, I count editing controls and other values (for example, editing the way control surfaces work) on the ground as piloting. Do you all agree? If not, gatecrash me please Everyone has access to this on the ground, and I find this plane to be illogical. It has too much roll authoroty, 10 times the fuel we need, and a turbojet... to name just some things. It's not really a sporty plane for a class that's called 'formula one'. I also completely missed the touch and go, due to me hitting F2 at first, in stead of F1... so I'm fine with this if you guys want this disqualified. Stock Aero Formula One entry: 5:49 @Captain Sierra Put on less, or smaller control surfaces, and try to limit the control surfaces to only one direction (yaw, pitch or roll) per control surface. Also, give your craft a nice dihedral so it wants to land bottom down. I'm as much a rookie as anyone, and readily admit to being a horrible pilot. That's why I asked if I could edit some values. Most people are ok with really twitchy planes, I prefer them to fly a little smoother. I may pilot Ok-ish (landing is actually one of my better points ) but I require the planes to be easy to fly to do so

@hoioh: That's because the aircraft essentially generates too much lift. Even an airstream of a few m/s will already want to lift the featherlight craft off it's wheels. Therefore, the brakes work fine, but you sort of skip across the ground. I had to mostly break pushing the nose down. A four wheeler may actually be a more sensible aircraft. With heavier aircraft, I'd use a flare to bleed off speed before touchdown... but because there's so much lift, flaring basically would put it into orbit (I may be slightly exaggerating here ). Still, of this entire endeavour, I think the uploading of my images took the longest lol. I literally slapped this plane together in like five minutes, then ripped the wings off and put the smaller current ones in place. I suspect it'll perform even better with wingstrakes @captain Sierra: you can safely perform the touch and go at 265 m/s or however quick your craft CAN go at that altitude. Just make sure your downwards velocity is as small as possible. Your horizontal speed matters little. Mind you, you can pull this off far better with a shallow approach than with a steep one.

Lol, Hoioh, I expected as much when you added the parachute, it took me over 30 seconds to get the damned thing to stop Congratulations on improving it! That breaking chute is so simple and elegant that it's genius. I thought it wouldn't work because when you touch the ground it disappears. How do you fly it? Because it seems wasteful to climb above 2,5 km. Climbing slows you down to much. Get at cruising altitude (2 to 2,5 km), and don't spend too much time climbing. Those 10-20 m/s extra will only cost you time in the climb, which could have been spent accelerating. That's the reason most subway systems in the world accelerate like crazy, but have a low top speed. Also, you might be able to do away with one of the elevons to reduce drag. I also had a bit of dihedral on the wings to guarantee landing stability. Nice improvement though!

@#%@# the biggest challenge here? Taking a screenshot of the moment I touch and go, it's more bounce and go in my case. Sorry if I missed it, but the touch lasts for a tiny moment. Toughest part next to that was the final landing... this little bugger just DOES NOT want to stop. Plane consists of a basic jet engine, some small elevons, winglets for tail and rudder, a Mk1 inline cockpit, Type A wings, ram inlet and some gears, a Mk1 fuselage with 45 fuel, and an structural fuselage... All in stock. No mods. edit, and no, Bill is not suicidal, just wants to prove he can be as much a badass as Jeb... by performing a touch and go at 950 kph!!! Final time from start to full stop at KSC: Stock Open Class, 4:53

After having taken a lot of time (and helpful tips from the forum) I finally have completed my proof of concept that you can indeed build Mk3 aircraft with a 'low' Thrust to Weight Ratio. So, huge wings, and only 8 engines to propel the Meridian Aerospace HSP-1 Svadilvari into a low Kerbin orbit with 27,2 tonnes of payload. Considering her nearly week long development time, I thought I should enter her for my first ever K-prize entry! Went up, dropped payload off into a roughly 75*80 km orbit and returned to land at KSC's runway. Didn't touch a single drop of my payload's fuel and oxidiser. Ok, time for some numbers: 8,6 meters high 26,1 meters long 53(!) meters wide 34,9 tonnes dry weight without payload 71,9 tonnes fully fuelled 67,8 tonnes fuelled for this flight, minus payload 95,1 tonnes take-off weight for this flight, with 27,2 tonnes of payload. 99,2 tonnes maximum take-off weight (as far as I've tested). 4 turbojets and 4 RAPIERS for about 800 kN of take-off thrust, and 1660 kN max thrust (which is quite modest for a spaceplane this size I believe). And yes, she takes off with a TWR of only 0,84:1 . Max TWR at 1000 m/s is probably somewhere between 1,8:1 and 2:1. An approximate Lift to Weight Ratio of around 0,66:1. Note, I ran a little low on oxidiser due to me being stingy and thinking I had enough aboard. I therefore ran a little short on my deorbit burn and had to turn around and land from the other side. Other than that, no incidents. The extra 4 tonnes of she could take off with is pretty much all room for oxidiser. She's slow, but she'll get the job done! Note, Svadilvari was an absurdly strong giant horse from Norse mythology. He's Sleipnir's daddy (Sleipnir being Odin's horse, and for those unfamiliar, Odin being the chief Deity of Norse Mythology). edit: note that the entire build is stock. I use only two mods to make construction a bit less time consuming, and they're both informative: RCS build aid and Intake build aid.

What would you call a 'mothership'? Do you mean a large interplanetary capable craft that 'tows' several smaller ships? Not that I'm qualified to show anything, with being addicted to (space)-planes and having properly leaving Kerbin's SOI still on my to-do-list

I guess you just told me an option for a next project. Though that should be a bit less involved, as designing for more engines from the ground up shouldn't be too hard Just to be curious, how quick does your craft get up there? Mine takes, depending on how stupid I'm piloting it (Yeah, worthless pilot) 18-25 minutes to get up there.

Just use hardpoints. The white fixed ones. Six wheels are carrying my 92-95 tonne mk3 craft excellently. No strutting needed. @JebKerboom, keep in mind that most mods base TTW calculations on the engines' max thrust. If you keep the brakes on till they spool up to sea level takeoff thrust, you won't squeeze out much more than about half of max thrust. And the lower your ttw, the more lift you will need. It's definitely possible though! Keep trying and eventually you get there.

Installed that third ASAS again and that seems to have solved the problem. It's still weird because the craft is inherently stable, and the port and starboard tanks are draining symmetrically. Oh well. It flies now. Now to do final tweaking on the oxidizer, and she should work as intended. Also accidentally setting trim did not occur to me! Thanks for pointing that out. Though it wasn't the cause, it's good troubleshooting advice. Thanks everyone for your advice! At least now I can say that while hard, it actually IS possible to build a low relatively low ttw, functional large Mk3 space plane!

That it does. All intakes are tied to that action group. Also, the turbojets are toggled OFF, and the RAPIERS switch mode to closed cycle when I press it. 20-30 or so seconds after I press that button, things are starting to get strange. I've also confirmed that indeed ALL intakes are in that action group. So it's also not the case of one remaining open. Test flight was um... paused... so it's still in progress...

Nope, has to be the right way. The contracts are actually pretty lenient, but going the wrong way is well, not a small deviation . It happened to me once, I had enough delta-v to turn the craft around, but that was because it was a 'cheaty' reusable satelite designed to do several missions in one go.

I would fully agree if they were airbreathing, but this is at over 2000 m/s, in closed cycle mode... It'll go straight for about 30 seconds after hitting the rocketry, and then it'll suddenly start 'drifting' wildly. I'd have to take another testflight and try to see how the tanks in the wings are draining. That sounds the most plausible actually. Though I did (in pure bewilderment) click on the large fueltanks in the wings, and at least those were draining equally. Also, and again, this happens about 30 seconds AFTER I've (manually) switched from airbreathing to closed cycle. So intakes, intake mapping (they actually are closed, and correctly mapped to each engine) or asymmetric flame-out aren't applicable. Also, it didn't happen before. That's what puzzles me mostly. Note that the addition of an RCS system bloated her part-count a little, but she's still not lagging... which makes me think going too fast too low is actually a bigger cause for lag than part count. -edit- though I've since discovered that I can run them at near 100% thrust (just one notch shy of full power) without fear of them going boom, so I AM actually producing far more thrust than earlier... hmmm... maybe that's related. A shame this problem doesn't occur until about 15-20 minutes into the flight (low engine count means she's not much of a performer ).

Ok... I've made some tweaks... she flies pretty well now. Not much performance by a long shot, but she will take the designated mass up to a 100+ km orbit quite easily in about 20 minutes time... But now I've suddenly run into the weirdest problem... It used to be fine, but after some rudder tweaks, my shiny plane suddenly developed quite a severe yaw problem at very high altitude where none was before. Normally, I'd say this would be caused by the rudders... but since there's hardly any air left by the time it occurs that wouldn't be entirely logical. This occurs with the four wing mounted RAPIERS in rocket-mode, some time after firing them. it happened for the first time at about 53 km up... Since the engines are placed completely symmetrical, and did NOT have this problem before when they were placed exactly the same, it can't be the intakes or the engines, since they're closed when it happens. Checked the intakes: closed Engine Thrust is symmetrical Engines are mounted symmetrically RCS is off (turning it on doesn't help much other than burning fuel). Torque-wheels are torquing Everything looks like it should be al right, yet the plane starts wildly deviating off it's course a little while after closing the intakes. First yawing, then roll and pitch also become unstable (which may be in part due to me fighting it). I did remove a torquewheel earlier... but could that be it?

@all the people suggesting many awesome mods I love your suggestions, and might check them out in the future, but my stubborn Frisian self has taken up the challenge to make this happen in stock. I'm only using RCS-aid for now. I sort of refuse to believe it is impossible, just hard. I also totally forgot to mention my sort of failed test-flight yesterday. I failed to bring up the -full- payload up into orbit. I ran out of gas on the way up and because it took it's merry time (nearly half an hour) I decided to unlock the payload's fuel. I did insert what was left of the payload into orbit after transferring the remaining fuel into my plane. So yeah, not a total failure, but enough of a failure to rethink. Surprisingly, while the design needs more air, it seems my piloting is also a major fault in this story . The extreme AoA was caused by being pretty much borderline stalling and me ignoring it. Yeah... I'm a horrible pilot I suspect with a few more intakes, and a gentler ascent path she'll do much better. I will also stick to my 27,2 tonne target a bit longer. And armagheddonsgw... I may or may not experiment with more thrust. More engines upset the balanced on an extremely well balanced plane, so that would likely entail a full redesign of the wings and tail. Considering the fuselage is under 30 parts, that's basically redesigning my plane. Which feels... unnecessary considering how far I came yesterday, and how wasteful my piloting was. I do fully agree that it needs more air. But I'm not ready yet for a full redesign Did another take-off today, slightly more aggressive than yesterday (watch that tail!), and it basically gets up at around halfway the runway. It's not the acceleration to 90-100 m/s that is taking so long, it's the actual rotation that takes up a lot of space due to me being careful of tailstrike. Also, what would you consider a good take-off speed? Because I feel like this isn't slow at all with terminal velocity being so bloody close. - - - Updated - - - Yay! Success!!! 27,2 tonnes in a 74 by 76 km orbit with over 500 fuel and even more oxidiser left (boo, need to leave even more ox at home, and that's the plane's tanks, mind you). What did I change? Mostly my piloting. It's still nothing to write home about, and it feels like clawing my way up into space. And if I were an actually good pilot, I could probably manage far more speed out of it than 1900 m/s at 34 km before kicking in the rockets. This could have easily been improved by having working action groups, gone up into space with open intakes. For some reason, my intake action groups did not work. I also need to figure something out to prevent overheating of my rapiers. Those things pack far more punch than the 80% max thrust I can run them at. That thrust would be appreciated in the early bit directly after the transitioning. Other than that I added some batteries to right in front of the RAPIERS (in the hopes of solving that overheating problem, but alas, didn't work), and each engine now has AT LEAST 4 shock cones servicing it. It's still not as smooth as I like it, but yeah. A little tweaking goes a long way. Better piloting shaved 10 degrees off the max AoA. Still quite a lot at 25 degrees, but less jarring than 35. It feels a bit airhoggy though with four shock-cones per engine. But I probably shouldn't whine. I'm still having some minor yaw-issues when climbing just after takeoff though. Anyone know how to solve that? Bigger vertical stabilisers? More dihedral on the wingtips?

@Alshain Thanks for trying to help out anyway. I'm sticking with stock for now, this challenge is just too much fun Also, 35 degrees angle of attack is past 25. 25 is optimal lift, but also already generating tons of drag. Even in the slightly underperforming KSP aero model, as I've been told by sources long since forgotten (I hate forgetting sources). IIRC, most large planes are falling out of the sky WAY earlier than 35 degrees. I think I've read 18-20 degrees AoA is pretty much a guaranteed stall for a 747 somewhere. @armhageddonsgw Maybe a good idea. Would 2 Toroidal Aerospikes and 8 turbojets be a good alternative? I shouldn't but I feel like I'm lacking rocket thrust, while in fact I should have more than enough already. And yeah, it takes off at about 3/4ths of the runway, between 90 and 100 m/s. Could probably get off the ground quicker, but I have to be VERY gentle on the keyboard (no stick here) or I'll tailstrike her. So she spends I think a good 2-3 seconds on the ground with only the maingear still touching. And yeah, that's with the full 27,2 tonne payload. That's why I'm so boggled that I'm missing thrust high up... I have over twice the thrust at 22 km compared to when I'm taking off.... At 26 km or so it's finally dropping below take-off thrust. @Capi3101, thanks for the suggestions! I think the payload fraction is probably the biggest culprit unfortunately. - I'm using 4 turbojets and 4 rapiers. so that's 14 tonnes average per engine allowed, I'm at 12,26 including 27,2 tonne payload. - 0.035 minimum intake area per engine. The RAPIERS get 0.036 (3x clipped shock cone each). The turbo's get however much 2 shock cones, a Mk1 structural intake and a REVERSED shock cone is (put it there for looks, it's lighter than a nosecone AND provides air (theoretically 0,042). If you look closely you can see the three rings making the three shock-cones on the screenshot. I like keeping them selectable for action groups. But apparently I'm JUST above minimum. So that may need some work. - 1:1 lift coefficient. I'm using slightly more than 2:3 as indicated by THIS link. It also indicates a TTW of 0,9 should be sufficient, rather than 1,5. - Ok, I'm at 36% payload fraction. That might be a bit optimistic. Ok, recalculating everything for an 18,2 tonne payload (total weight goes from 98,1 to 89,1) - TTW increased to a whopping 1,93 at optimum thrust. My lighter Mk2 planes can go vertical and still accelerate faster than terminal with a TTW like this <.< Something weird is happening here. - Assuming I'll add 8 more shock cones (*cringes at increased part count*) I should be safe. That's 4 shock cones per engine and some extra for good measure. - Lift coëfficient increases with reduced payload weight. I believe I have 72 static lift (excluding control surfaces). So that would be just over a 4:5 lift ratio. - That decrease in payload puts me at a 20,4% payload fraction. I'll call it a day for now, I'll test the 18,2 tonne payload run tomorrow, and maybe will tinker a bit with it. 18,2 tonnes is still nice May check in on the forum a few times, but enough KSP for today

GAH. I'm so close! She handles a bit wobbly, and I acidentally let a cluster of four rapiers overheat and go boom when I was finally reaching 26 km and switching to rocket-mode. That's what I get for not paying attention. Relocated them to the wing pods, and put the turbojets on the rear. Hopefully that goes better. She flies erm... ok... ish apart from the below problems, 'only' 188 parts, and she gets off the runway quite easily with a nice 27,2 tonnes of cargo in the rear cargohold (the front one is just there to extend the fuselage). I'm having serious Angle of Attack problems that get worse between say 1,5 to 15 km... and then slowly get better again as I speed up. At worst the Angle of Attack is a toe-curling 35 degrees. I like my planes better when they fly at max 10 degrees AoA or so. But planes this big are hard, so any advice will be greatly appreciated. I'm still fairly new at this game, so a picture for the Masters of Spaceplanery to judge. I'd very much like to improve this, as this can probably get into space. Will resume trying now. 188 parts 98,1 tonnes (or 96,6 according to RCS build aid) take-off weight 70,8 (or 69,4 tonnes according to RCS build aid) without payload 32,4 tonnes dry weight according to RCS build aid (without payload) 6,5 metres high 26,1 metres long 53,1 metres wide (!)

Ok, I'm basically looking for some inspiration. I know more people are battling to build a shiny new Mk3 heavy lifter. Lifting the infamous full orange tank up seems to be some sort of community benchmark for awesomeness... But, having done that with surprising ease in a rather large 250+ part count craft (which ended up independently looking like Meslkin's Garuda though far less efficient, so I won't post it). Turns out building it long is a good answer... but part count will rapidly soar. At 250+ parts, I ran into a lag wall I'm unwilling to deal with (over 3 seconds of real time per second of game time). Maybe I'm impatient, but it has to stay fun, and lag that bad rapidly deteriorates into annoyance. Not a feeling I'm playing a game for. So this HAS to be possible using much less parts? Let's say, 150ish max? And to stay 'kind', I set my own bar to 27 tonnes to LKO. That sort of challenge is what I play games for So a limitation became a gameplay element lol. I keep running out of room to put the wings on, while still making sure the craft has proper handling both with and without payload. Anyone had a breakthrough with this? Or to put it differently: Where the bloody heck do I put all those wings? A 76 tonne craft requires around 38 static lift on each side (read that somewhere)... considering the best wings we have are 2 lift... yikes. Very curious to seeing how other people cope with this. When I get something new that 'sort of' flies, I'll try to remember to make a screenshot.

Hiya, I'm Merandix... sort of new-ish to the game, but most certainly to the forum. I guess this game has officially made me a flying dutchman. Though I prefer Flying Frisian. Loving the game so far and I can't wait for all the goodness Squad still has in store for us (aerodynamics update would make this Frisian fly a bit easier probably ). I'm coming from the Kerbal way of doing things ("Ehhh, I'll just eyeball it") to actually starting to think about what the heck I am doing. I'll always remember the Kerbal ways though: *KABOOM* ... "nope... that doesn't work". But actually seeing stuff work is fun in it's own way (though the kerbal way usually ends up having sufficient successes too). Anyway, I'll be lurking about and perhaps posting some much needed cries for advice here and there