Stuigie

Pre-coolers are your friend. Pre-coolers air intakes are the simplist way to prevent a space plane form burning up. They seems to be resistant to re entry heat and will protect anything behind it (engines for example). The big disadvantage is that you cannot place wings behind it (clipping control surfaces until they barely stick out is ok) thanks to the new wing occlusion. I'm amazed that people have built SSTOs without this! (congrats!)

Success! Space "plane" successfully in orbit! I found that pre-coolers do not have a temperature limit (as they cool the air going in). So I exploited this. You can't use wings though as they need to be placed behind the pre-cooler and thus are occluded (i.e. don't function). Taking advantage of the Rapier engines massive boost in high Mach regions, I catapulted a single seater into a 1600m/s sub orbital trajectory at 72Km. Had enough fuel to complete the orbit and de-orbit. So yeah, 4 Rapiers, VTOL setup and all is needed is to keep the craft flying at 500m/s at 45 degrees. after 10Km, full pelt until the engines switch over. http://postimg.org/image/4f2dba15f/ I'm quite a good KSP player, but I still can't built an SSTO that looks normal :/ in ksp 1.0.