PanzerAce

This, we do not speak of. Also, good to see another set of launches come out. I think comrade political officer is my favorite character on this forum...

You can actually get better performance I bet. Ditch all but one of those intakes

I think the komissar live streams you. It's comrade political officer that you want more of

SRB first and second stages. Given that my program is still fairly early on in career mode, it's a great way to boost payloads without taking a massive credit hit on engines. I've also fine tuned it to the point that I can usually get a 0 relative velocity, ~5km distance for rescue missions in LKO without having to touch my orbital manuvering stage.

Try shifting your fuel around if you can't maintain the AoA that you want. In the traditional pointy dart with wings design, shift fuel backwards to increase AoA, forwards to drop it.

Yup. I'm actually kinda annoyed at this, since my 11 part SSTO can't use this to it's advantage

So if I'm understanding this, the blunter the better, so long as you've got the extra thrust to get into the high mach's anyway?

Angel, two suggestions looking at that to make it easier/more efficient. Try getting rid of wing area, (only big s wings), and swap to rapiers. That'll give you higher thrust levels at speed, as well as reducing drag.

Sounds almost like you don't have enough thrust when in the atmosphere. If I go any less than 15 degrees above the horizon I'll get a heat induced explosion before I even hit 10km in altitude. You need to JUST thread the needle of getting your airspeed up, and now blowing up.

What's your flight profile like? To give you an idea, my most successful SSTO launches consist of full throttle, and locking my AoA at ~15-20 degrees above the horizon (depends on the size of the SSTO, basically as low as possible such that I *just* avoid overheat induced kabooms). That usually gets me an Apo of ~45km when I have to switch to rockets at ~22km. At that point, you've got so little air resistance that I find it's easiest to just lock your craft pointing prograde when thrusting. Do you have pictures of your SSTO? My most recent one is this guy: but I've also built a larger Mk2 sized one recently with essentially the same flight profile, but twin Rapiers, Big-S wings, etc to give me way more delta in orbit.

In my experience, that means you're treating it too much like a rocket and leaving the atmo as soon as possible. I find that I get the most delta out of a SSTO spaceplane if I leave the atmosphere as late as possible, and build as much horizontal speed as possible before switching to closed cycle. In fact, if you ever have to thrust anywhere OTHER than straight pro-grade, you're not going fast enough.

Basically, yeah, regenerative, but rather than having a seperate LF drain, I'm thinking of using a function to decrease isp as a function of how much heat it's dumping. Since, unless I'm way off base, that's going to be the most "accurate" way of building in a trade-off

I usually have excessive in-atmo thrust, and so have to find the angle at which I leave the atmosphere before my SSTO burns up. if we had a way to dump excess heat (which I'm rough-sketching the mod for) reasonably while in atmo, then I could build even better ones....

I'm thinking if you did it on a pure LH2 setup (which, again, i was thinking more for being used in air-breathing mode, but w/e), shouldn't it be lower thrust but *higher* ISP? Since it probably wouldn't be liquid by the time it gets to the core, it'd be even less dense, and even hotter (and thus faster)?

That's....an interesting idea actually. The only problem is that there would have to be a way to dump the used 'ablator' value into fuel that's being used. If KSP tracked how hot the fuel in the tanks was, this is something that could be done fairly easily I'm imagining, but since KSP DOESN'T (As far as I know), I'm not sure that the ablator is necessarily the best way to do it....Maybe something that actively chills the cockpit, but requires that X amount of fuel per unit heat is being used, and if it isn't, it basically vents the boil-off? So if you're running your engines, you don't have to worry about it, but say you're coming in for re-entry or something similar; you're still losing LF or LH2 to boiloff to cool the airframe.... If I knew anything about mods I'd do this in a heartbeat edit: or do it the other way around, it ONLY cools the airframe when the engines are running. Probably an even easier way to do it, since you can tie the amount of heat that is being dumped out of the system to the thrust (and thus fuel usage) of the engine. It also wouldn't require any additional parts, just adding modifiers to the current engines (AFAIK)

That's something that I wish could be implemented, especially to help SSTO space planes get their velocities up while still in atmosphere and air breathing mode.

The only ones I use are yours and Atomic Age if it ever gets updated.

All the near future reactors are cylinders, and fairly long. That doesn't work so well with the design of the mk4 bays in terms of packaging. It also makes cooling them slightly more difficult.

You.....might want to actually read what he posted? In order: That's the ascent vehicle landing, the lander firing retro rockets to slow it down (nobody said the shield has to be first once you're slow enough), and, again, that's not the ascent stage. That's the lander.

With a few exceptions, everything for me tends to be custom built, since I tend to do different stuff every time. The exceptions are sat launches that stay within Kerbin's SOI, or rescue contracts. Those I have a standard set of launchers, all of which make HEAVY use of solid boosters.

Finally got a Mk4 sized SSTO to work, but now I've run into another problem. I'm running your Near Future stuff as well, and what I want to do is make a long range SSTO using something other than chemical engines. The problem is two fold: If I use any of the electrical engine, there's no reactor that's the right size to run them that can easily fit into a Mk4 fuselage (or my preferred method, a Mk4 reactor of the correct form factor :D). The other option is that I use NTR engines, there's no ability in the mk4 mod to have LH fuel in the tanks. For the reactor option I don't know what my options are, but for the NTR engine, is there a config that I can change to make that an option?

Sorry, I meant the ability to adjust the ratio of LF/O without any empty tank space. It just feels wasteful to me.

I keep seeing these monstrosities that people are building to loft cargo and the like into orbit, and for some reason I can never get my larger SSTO's to actually achieve the O part with any kind of remaining delta. So I went the other direction: 15 parts, 11.5 tons. And un-used LF in orbit (wish there was an easy way to adjust fuel tank ratios). Honestly, the hardest thing to deal with for me is the ~1300-1400 m/s limit due to heating while in atmosphere. If we could get a cockpit that'd survive the heating up to ~1700 or more, I bet I could make this even better. Launch procedure is absurdly simple. Full throttle, nose b/w 15-20 degrees above the horizon (very little lift, so actual flight path with be ~5 degrees shallower until high mach numbers), hit SAS. Once at altitude, close intakes and go to closed cycle mode just before velocity stops going up. Full burn till ~75km apo, then burn to circularize. I also *might* be able to go from a V tail to a single vertical stabilizer and run it pure delta-wing style, and I might be able to drop an intake and move it underneath the ship, which would lose me some weight and drag. Too tired to do that right now though, and got work today. UPDATE: Yes, I can ditch the V tail for a single stabilizer, and go to one intake. Same flight profile as before. Ends up having almost triple the delta V at the end (58.80 units of Oxidizer in almost the same orbit), along with a bit more LF (272 units vs. 202). 13 parts and 11.4 tons on the runway at that point. No pictures because I forgot to take any while doing it, and I don't feel like re-launching KSP now, since I've got to get up for work soon

Not exactly. As mentioned previously, a requirement for a usable orion drive is a nuclear shaped charge, delivering far better than 50% of the yield as energy to the pusher plate, and fairly insensitive to distance in terms of energy delivered until it's past the optimum distance, where the cone from the shaped charge is larger than the plate itself.

Built a new Mk2 sized SSTO. Wasn't able to get it to be a pure LF only like was my goal, but by using rapiers in closed cycle mode for about 15-20 seconds, I now have a 100% re-useable SSTO spaceplane that's both scaleable and has capacity to spare for lifting satellites (I essentially do a couple of runs to a 100x100 orbit, and the average fuel I have left after doing that then de-orbiting minus a couple percent is my useable lifting capability. Obviously it could get tweaked further to lift a larger sat if I don't want the plane to orbit itself.