SpacePixel

Not really a VTOL, as the single RAPIER, although on a hinge, can't supply enough static thrust to lift the aircraft off the ground, but closed cycle or a short takeoff run does the trick. The Barbaris is a compact exploration craft, featuring a triple fuselage. The lower fuselage holds an intake, engine on a swivel, landing gear and the main wing. Above the lower fuselage, there's two more - the left and the right. The left has a cockpit and the right can be swapped out to supply additional fuel, crew of two in a passenger module, or a set of science experiments. This unorthodox arrangement ensures the center of mass is aligned with the center of thrust in VTOL mode and in vacuum, and the fuel drain has no impact on its position. More than that, the wings fold to barely fit the aircraft in Mk3 cargo bay (see spoiler). It's not terribly easy to fly and land, especially on Laythe, although a skilled pilot will manage, but I still think this architecture is massively superior to uninspired double rotating nacelles (as a matter of fact, seen above on my previous craft)

The Big T is your smallest large spaceplane. What is that even supposed to mean? Well, unlike some of its more gargantuan brethren, The Big T does not seem horribly out of scale for anything useful, as it's about the smallest you can go after you ditch Mk3 for 5m fuselage and has an actual purpose. It's meant so solve a problem I had 4 years ago when I still had time to fly the crafts I built. I saw that SSTOs are more often limited by cargo bay dimensions rather than upmass potential. At 60 meters long, the T features a gigantic 5m cargo bay spanning the length of the craft. The nose swivels up for loading and unloading; since the nose stores a lot of fuel and is thus pretty damn heavy, an elaborate system of pistons and hinges helps raise it up under gravity. The wing is designed so as not to clip in the cargo bay and angled at 3 degrees. 8 RAPIERS in the engine assembly as offset 5 degrees to reduce torque.

I snapped this screenshot after a test flight, and I think it beautifully conveys the scale of some of our spacecraft that we don't often get to really appreciate. So, in the foreground we have the affectionately named "Space Yacht 2". It differs from 1 in that it has half as many rotating RAPIERs, consequently losing the ability to VTOL on Kerbin, though it can still do that on Duna. It retained the two-storied cargo bay, where on the lower level you store your rovers and refineries, and on the upper deck your rotorcraft. Finally, it gained 2 NERVs tucked away in the ramp segment; they can be fired when the ramp is lowered. Though certainly not dragless or overpowered, it easily breaks the sound barrier thanks to swiveling nacelles -- you can tilt them in flight to achieve 0 AoA and a massive reduction in drag.

@TwoCalories, @Kimera Industries thank you for the kind words and I managed to snap a picture which looks a little better to my taste: The TUFX profile is Lighthouse 2 I think from this pack, and clouds are Blackrack's volumetrics. I tweaked no settings, but I do photoshop the colors in my screenshots. I guess one could tweak TUFX and PlanetShine to achieve the same end result, but more often than not I go for a particular feel and Lighthouse 2 offers a great baseline from which you can go pretty much anywhere.

This rather bland screenshot features the Superstorm, my sleekest spaceplane yet. At around 50 tons of liftoff mass, it packs an SSTA package on just 2 RAPIER engines. There's a 10-degree offset NERV between the RAPIERs to avoid thrust torque in vacuum and a tiny rover in the Mk2 cargo bay. The spaceplane flies about as well as you'd imagine with all these wings (stall speed could not be measured), and somehow does not have a travelling CoM. It's a surprisingly useful, beautiful and stable spaceplane for me, who can usually only manage any two of the three.

This craft features a complete exploration package -- 6 RAPIERs, 2 NERVs, 8 VTOL Terriers, a crew complement of 6, a dorsal docking node and a 2-segment Mk3 cargo bay with a ramp to be occupied by a mining rover, a lab, a runabout shuttle or anything else to suit your fancy. Although quite draggy and probably overweight for its powerplant, it feels as a proper sci-fi spacecraft with a bridge and all. Captaining the thing from IVA is some of the most fun I had in KSP -- cycling cameras, aligning docking collar to the station arm, dreading "RETARD RETARD" GWPS callout upon a late flare (landings are insanely fun!), looking out on the ship around you like some age-old captain, really a beautiful thing. I also want to try putting a shuttle in the cargo bay which was explicitly designed for rovers and cosplaying some Star Trek in Joolian system sometime

Your drag model has no power over me! Archimedes is a single-seater VTOL SSTO, capable of reaching orbit on Kerbin and Laythe with some dV to spare for docking. It's actually my remake of my friend's stock replica of my 2017 modded craft that itself was lifted off Star Citizen promotional material (talk about a crisis in creative industries...). The defining ring with contra-rotating propellers incurs unpleasant drag and breaking sound barrier is a slog, but the flight thereafter is a rapid and very enjoyable ascent. Same goes for liftoff and landing -- it's got a very low stall speed and you can easily land on a dime in VTOL mode. Powered by 2 RTGs (perfectly balanced). It's a rather useless runabout, except of course if you need to land on aircraft carriers. It's not that large and can hover indefinitely, which makes for nice landings on rough seas of Laythe. I wish I could add folding wings, but it doesn't seem that easy to figure out geometry in stock.

Things can only get bitter The Turtleback a different kind of landing craft -- it isn't meant to come up to shore to offload its cargo; instead, it's an orbit-capable aircraft carrier. 2-unit cargo bay at the bow opens to reveal an elevator that moves aircraft up to the flight deck and down to the hangar bay. You can cram up to half a dozen aircraft in the hangar, but this is rather much, unless you plan on conducting adversarial engagements, in which case it's rather too little. Usually, you'd put there a couple folding helicopters or tiltrotors, and use the rest of the space to place a submarine and/or a mining rover for a more balanced and sensible mission profile. This vehicle is yet another study on Laythe operating base -- a project that's about to turn half a year and is yet to produce any meaningful result, -- which was primarily motivated by the fact that sea-spaceplanes with ramps looked rather ridiculous trying to deploy the contents of their cargo bays on the ice sheets surrounding Laythe islands. The Turtleback treads a very fine line between looking cool af and utterly insane, but at least I'm happy with how it looks -- a relatively rare occurrence.

These are some magnificent planets you've made, but I could help jumping at the chance to ask you what's with the craft? This retro rocket looks magnificent, does it work? If yes, how?

It becomes a little more obvious that all my screenshots look very much alike when I post too often... Here's another orbit-capable seaplane, this time a small crew shuttle. This one, I'd say, is probably more realistic than not, and has awesome steering. Small crafts like this usually have big trouble getting airborne due the waves and whatnot, but this one can manage to take of from 0.4 Scatterer waves, which is not a lot, but in the ballpark what real seaplanes can do. The center of mass here is again offset from the center of thrust -- something which seems inevitable in case of seaplanes which are not willing to get their engines wet -- so there's a Vernor engine right near the tail to combat this; sure, this may not be terribly efficient, but I am yet to see a seaplane that has CoT aligned with CoM

If Kraken loved us, would He allow such a thing to take flight? This magnificently ugly flying boat is one of my more successful attempts at producing a cargo seaplane SSTO with a loading ramp. A seaplane might be easy to build, as long you're willing to get your engines wet and turn off water physics in Scatterer; I was willing to do neither and suffered the consequences. I'd like to direct your attention to the floats and away from the ugly nose; the floats are placed at such an angle so that they make something of a flat floor in the cargo bay, which renders floor plating somewhat redundant, plus this helps integrate them smoothly with the Mk3 fuselage. Note that the floats also house plenty of propellant, which helps with the moving CoM -- the craft is unbalanced, yes, and I hope someday I'll come up with something less unhinged, but note that it's not meant to carry heavy cargo at all, just some rovers and submarines and whatnot -- it's for Laythe really, after all. Also, note that the engine assembly is integrated into the fuselage, slightly mitigating torque while avoiding getting water into the engines.

We don't call it plain-looking, we call it realistic! There are crafts that are exceedingly laborious to build and fine-tune, and then there are crafts you sketch in a notepad, build in the game and they end up working perfectly fine right off the bat. Lancesse is a prime example of the latter; I just built it by the sketch and found perfectly balanced CoM for both empty and fully fueled craft, as well as well-aligned CoL. Functionally, it's a replacement for the Aquamarine Marlin of the early SX series of 2020, while visually it's somewhat reminiscent of the silly-named Empire series of 2014 (9 years ago now, goodness! I should've found another game to play by now). It can ferry kerbonauts to locations around Mun and Minmus, or take them to Duna and beyond, provided you've got the gas stations going. The visually bulkier nacelles make for a kind of muscle car look, while the shape in general looks very natural, without taking the suspension of disbelief a little too far. How easy and enjoyable this craft was to build may or may not introduce bias into my description of it

Good afternoon, gentlemen. Please observe my tiny aircraft carrier: Now, my problem is that the CoM is slightly offset off the centreline due to the weight of the superstructure: I would think nothing of it, however this small offset results in the following: That's unfortunate, but I could just balance the superstructure with an ore tank or something, right? I could and I did -- see picture 1. This, however, does not remedy the issue of the carrier developing a list the moment the CoM moves even a little off the centreline -- aircraft movements on the deck cause near-capsizing, to say nothing of a hard landing -- on a runway that short one rarely has the luxury of choosing where to touch down. The floats solve the problem of the list... ...but look utterly ridiculous, don't fit in the fairing (yes, the flight deck folds to fit the carrier into a 5 m fairing) and therefore will never be used. A massive keel is also not an option. So my question is, how do I make the bloody thing stable? I've filling up the tanks under the waterline, emptying them, filling them with only liquid fuel -- no change in the list. I've been giving some consideration to creating an active system to steady the carrier with SAS or moving a weight port and starboard, but I've not yet been able to figure out the details. As such, any help will be appreciated.

Explain your smolness Pictured is the Logre reconnaissance tiltjet coming in for a landing at landing ship SSX Egerie. While the VTOL is pretty self-explanatory, the carrier is actually a design study on a Laythe operating base. It's built around a single Mk3 fuselage, and features a landing ramp for deploying rovers, an elevator and a flight deck for aircraft, as well as submarine launching dock. My original idea -- to which I may yet revert -- was to even make the flight deck unfold so that I could pack the entire aircraft carrier into a 5 m fairing -- yeah, talk about a tight fit. This craft could serve as Laythe exploration hub, featuring a complement of transport & exploration aircraft (2 helis and 1 tiltjet), a mining rover, and a science-laden sub (yes, it all fits!). Moreover, the carrier can even host lighter VTOL spaceplanes -- the limiting factor is not even flight deck size, but the weight of the spaceplane that, if misplaced, may, well, heel the ship most severely, resulting in aircraft sliding off the flight deck or even a capsizing

At long last, perfectly balanced. As all things should be. If you've missed the previous installment of the Solmourant saga, I'm happy for you, but to quickly recap I've spent a weekend trying to balance aesthetics, NERVs and Darts, failed miserably and went back to work. I am now proud to say that I feel that I've remedied the aesthetic issues of the previous version of this space cow derivative by way of finding a neat little spot for the NERVs right by the CoM where they don't seem to generate way too much drama. The new Solmourant is all about more cargo, less hassle. Its CoM moves for no one, part count is below 80, the docking port is conveniently situated for a change, and VTOL thrusters enable gentle powered landing on any site. It's rather pedestrianly rated for Duna and nowhere beyond (yes, you can take it to Laythe; no, I do not recommend it), can barely lift off with 8 t of payload (is that what you call "more cargo"?), and is notoriously sluggish under Mach 1, but in exchange you get 3.5 units of Mk3 cargo space you can put down anywhere between Eve orbit and the asteroid belt. Effective cargo space and unloading mechanism more than top cargo mass for interplanetary payloads, in my experience. Not once have I been constrained by mass, but always by the lack of a ramp or a cargo bay short in either length or height, if not both. Hopefully, Solmourant will suffice for my payloads for years to come. (Also apparently the name means like dying sun? I wouldn't know, I've only taken French on Duolingo).

Here's a story of Solmourant -- another long-range cargo spaceplane of mine. It originally started as a continuation of a spaceplane affectionately dubbed "space cow" (1). The problem with space cow, besides insufficient lift, was the travelling CoM, which required four VTOL engines to counter (note that with Parallax colliders there is no such thing as rolling landing on extraterrestrial bodies), and by the time the bloody thing reentered Kerbin's atmosphere it was about as aerodynamically stable as F-16. Fine, I figured, let's balance it (boy oh boy did I not realize what I was in for). So a second version was born (2), which sure enough was perfectly balanced (2 VTOL aerospikes on the underside not shown), but it had no NERVs, and therefore could only barely make it to Duna from LKO, and could not make it back. I figured, again, okay, fine, let's add the bloody nukes, but where? You can't casually plug 6 t of dry mass aft, hence (3), with nukes directly on top of the CoM. Forget about the radioactive exhaust, (3) looks abhorrently boring and much uglier than (2), it seems to me as though I've seen thousands of such spaceplanes and yet this contraption of mine is still somehow worse (it's 2023). So that's been something of a waste of a weekend, since I have to go work now and contemplate my life's choices that left me with an ugly, underpowered and perfectly balanced spaceplane. My only hope is that a little more LF+Ox will rescue (2) from its ineptitude.

I know what you're thinking and I didn't mean for it to happen, if it's any consolation Tempeterant is a craft of a breed of its own, and not because of the tail assembly. Long-range cargo spaceplanes are notoriously hard to balance, the ones with a loading ramp even more so. The usual approach, when a ramp is absolutely unavoidable, is to make the center hull entirely dry, so that the CoM wouldn't move as fuel is burned. Tempeterant, as you can tell, has a massive fuel tank in front of the cargo bay. One would expect the CoM to move back as the forward tanks are dried. However, I figured I could avoid the travelling CoM if I were to balance the forward fuel tanks with aft fuel tanks. So that's where the massive booms come from. and the tail assembly straight from bad 70s sci-fi flicks is just a logical consequence of these massive booms sticking out the rear. The craft is perfectly balanced -- even if only LF tanks are filled -- and can easily deploy large cargo without employing some elaborate lifts, cranes and other superfluous devices. Of course, I solved a problem which is completely made up -- I could've just as well built another Skyclone with dry center hull, and this thing sure isn't anywhere near as efficient. My only defense is that after a decade of KSP I've become so jaded that I do not care about petty notions of efficiency.

I turned on Parallax colliders and instantly regretted it Jeb is walking away from Jeanimarre, an all-terrain refinery rover, built specifically for Duna. It fits in a 2 unit long Mk3 cargo bay with wheels in stowed configuration which makes for easy deployment. The only sacrifice is, of course, size 1.25 ISRU module -- I couldn't make it work with a 2.5 m one. The attention-grabbing wheels are for scaling Parallax terrain. The rover usually runs at around 120 RPM or 10-12 m/s when traversing difficult terrain, but can reach up to 25 m/s on the dune seas. If you want to go even faster, we have a tool for that too -- it's called a plane. The torque of the smallest rotors which power the wheels, although advertised as meager, can not only backflip Jeanimarre if you're not careful when raising the throttle, but also helps it to move around entire cargo spaceplanes, provided you can get a decent grip and connect the awkwardly-situated claw. Parallax colliders are lots of fun and I like that they're actually making landing and travelling much more challenging.

Good thing the rocks don't have colliders... Tokatemak is a Duna circumnavigation craft built to be unfolded from a short 2-unit Mk3 cargo bay of a Celesta long-range exploration vessel. The vessel reaches speeds of up to 180 m/s when flying high, but more importantly can maintain level flight at just 50 m/s, which in turn enables it to actually land almost anywhere. Although I concede, a tilt-rotor could've been more appropriate (and Tokatemak may yet even become one) and certainly simpler to land, I like the look of this extreme canard design caused by the immense weight of the propeller necessary to push the plane through thin Dunatian atmosphere too much.

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve With four swiveling engine nacelles and less that aerodynamic shape, it was never about performance, it was all about style. Coruscation is the pleasure craft for the adventurous-minded, featuring a flight deck for a snub fighter or a rotary wing craft, as well as a rover bay, all in a deceptively small package. Compared with some actual long-range craft, such as Cassandra and Celesta, Coruscation falls short in terms of range (although it can get to Duna from right from the runway), but rocks an advanced VTOL system with independent thrust vectoring to make stylish landings possible almost anywhere. It's something of an SUV of a spaceplane - sure looks tough and fancy, but in practice you better make sure you've got a refueling outpost nearby.

Oh dear, not another one of those! Here at SpacePixel Aerospace we're always taking a good idea one step too far, and today's victim is the First Order landing craft. Having liked the shape, I originally conceived of my rendition of it as a Duna cargo aircraft. Over the course of some years it has evolved or, more aptly, devolved into a supremely ugly landing craft with three ducted fans to provide VTOL capability, a forward-facing ramp to facilitate loading and unloading, and four afterburning turbojets for GTFOing out of the LZ ASAP. The crew cabin is on the dorsal side directly behind the cargo bay, which allows zero visibility of the landing area, but supposedly supreme protection, as long as you can survive the landing, of course. Overall, I think the craft is an interesting study on how a craft can get so ugly as to transcend ugliness and become endearing in its own way, though opinions sure differ on the degree to which it is endearing...

What is this, a boat with wings? It is indeed exactly what it seems it is. For when regular landing ships don't suit your flights of fancy, and even parachuting materiel down seems rather... uninspired, the Kaspian comes to the rescue. With enough space to fit pretty much any land vehicle and plenty of horsepowers to get it airborne, it also does away with the pesky requirements for landing strips and ground infrastructure. Just put it down in the nearest lake and enjoy a full-fledged mobile base of operations. The Kaspian is also rated for hostile environments (warranty void), and by hostile we of course mean Laythe, although any adversary you might encounter will be certainly stunned by the sheer nerve of pulling up in a plane that ugly. Beware of the rough seas though - you don't want to get sea salt in the turbofans, for everybody's sake, especially for that poor sod we bribed to get this abomination flight rated.

A momentary lapse of sanity So, this rather unconventional rover design is my, what, third approach to tackling Tylo, following a foolhardy Jool-5 and ingenuous if misguided 2.5m-size single launch. This new design is built for serious, long-range ground exploration, which would involve visiting the poles, scaling mountains and traversing vast distances. The low center of mass and wide wheelbase make for excellent stability at speeds even well above 30 m/s, and despite it the vehicle fits in a fairing only slightly wider than 3.75m. The landing stage design is borrowed from the Soviet lunar lander - an ISP-optimized stage slows down the rover from orbital velocity almost all the way to a full stop, is then discarded and crashes into the surface, whereas the rover lands under the ascent stage's power. Pictured is the separation of the ascent stage from the rover core upon surface mission completion.

Less is more, more or less So I, uhm, yeah, remember when Cassandra had sixteen engines and about a hundred tons of dry mass? Yeah, these times are long gone. Everybody seems to be awfully concerned about space whales' wellbeing these days, and gas prices aren't helping it either, so the 2022 Cassandra is a little on the leaner side. Losing some weight certainly helped -- while it does take longer to refuel with a smaller ore converter, the TWR in vacuum mode has increased quite a lot, and now Cassandra can easily land on Duna without unscheduled disassemblies. The shorter cargo bay can still fit the Kaupaloki ISRU rover, which can jump around most celestial bodies with a bunch of science equipment and two kerbals with a history of questionable life choices.

Land torpedoes! What? Why? For the life of me I couldn't design decent stock air-to-surface missiles. They did hit their targets, but had a bunch of specific launch requirements. So I came up with a much worse alternative solution from all perspectives except looking cool, of course. The land torpedo has to be dropped from <15 m and moving slower <100 m/s. Also, the terrain has to be either completely flat (icecaps, KSC), or at least relatively smooth. The rest is pretty straightforward - set the SAS to 'Target' and soon enough the unlucky craft will meet with a 190 kg metal slug at some 900 kph. Such a meeting generally has desirably disastrous consequences, provided the landing gears don't randomly send the torpedo wobbling all over the place, which happens a little too often. So all you explosion-thirsty maniacs better stick to regular missiles and asparagus rockets...