control9

Can anyone tell me, why do you need airbrakes at all? Just raising or lowering nose kills ultimate amounts of velocity even in upper atmosphere, so you can just descend with engines off at 45 degrees down, raising nose to 45 deg climb for speed kill, and evade getting red at all. My main problem with landing is that without turning engines on it's easy to kill all horizontal velocity in a hundred meters above the ground, resulting vertical fall with tens of m\s, breaking gear and possibly dividing aircraft into to pairs, not allowing me to ride it to the runway. Anyway, killing speed is easier than ever even without airbrakes.

Actually, I've manages to get the stock Aegis-4 to LKO with 1.0. Because of my not-so-good piloting skills (I went for 45 degree climb until flameout) it took an additional usage of monopropellant to rise peri from 65km to 70+, but still, it's stock aircraft, and it still had a tiny bit of fuel for landing. Landing itself is quite easy, the main trick is to lose enough speed in upper atmosphere, which can be done almost too easy with just raising and lowering nose of plane. So "No more SSTOs" title seems at least strange to me.