Bazzered

I cannot build a 'big enough' SSTO space plane. I will build a pretty big one, spend days or weeks tweaking the design until it gets to orbit with a nice payload, perform some quick and dirty space tricks, and then spend several more days re-loading saves/rebuilding and re-orbiting until I successfully land it at KSC. Then the moment it lands safely and I have a good, well-tested design, I go start something else. Something bigger. I went through about 15 iterations of this compulsion until I ended up with a 6,000 ton tweakscaled bohemoth that checked all the space plane design boxes, and FAR indicated it should fly, but it would inevitably explode spectacularly just a few seconds into flight. I spent about a month trying to fix the darn thing before I decided the game just wasn't going to let me fly something that ridiculously big to space. So then I gave up and reset my goals, and thought 'how small of a payload-carrying SSTO can I build?', and I built one, and then I thought 'hmmn, it's just not quite big enough...' and here we go again.

I was aiming at something potentially even larger - I know I can do it with multiple wing pieces, just wanted to look at feasibility of a single wing piece, and get some ideas how to accomplish that. On the other hand, wow that's a pretty bird...and I do agree with fine tuning wing shape with the multiple pieces, so maybe I'll just go back to the drawing board. Thanks!

First of all, thanks so much to all the B9 team! I run a lot of mods, but my favorite part of KSP is making space planes, and it just isn't the same without B9. I have a couple questions about the B9 Procedural Wings, in case anyone happens to know... Do leading and trailing edge shapes affect lift properties? Is the answer to this different between stock aero and FAR? If so, what are the best edge shapes for hypersonic flight in FAR? Also, I've gotten into trying to make an insanely large space plane, and the procedural wings only get up to about a quarter of the size I need. I can string together multiple wings, but then I'm basically doing what I hated about building custom wings out of stock parts. Just curious if it's possible to increase the maximum size, and if so what is the best way to go about it? Is there a max size value I can edit in the configs, or maybe I can enable TweakScale and just pump them up that way? Something else I haven't thought of? Any help would be appreciated, thanks!