AeroGav

I'd be interested to see Andrey's design. Certainly if you're pushing the performance envelope some part shedding is acceptable. If not and he's new to the game, he still deserves to see his creation fly. After that look at design improvements. I wonder if he's actually building an SSTO rocket, that would make a lot more sense. Even then, a cluster of Flea SRBs that give 4g acceleration for 8 seconds is a good way to get up to 240 m/s. Closed cycle has an ISP 10 times worse than Air Breathing, seems crazy to do that in the atmosphere. Looking at the numbers - Rapier Airbreathing 105 static kn Closed Cycle 162 Atmospheric kn so, for an extra 60kn thrust you'll burn an FL-T100 worth of fuel (0.5T , Cost 150) after 9 seconds Strap on a Flea, you get an extra 160kn thrust from the Flea over and above what the Rapier is doing in Airbreathing, for 1.5T mass and cost of 200. A Flea burns about 9 seconds. The Panther costs 200 and makes 85 Static thrust in Dry mode (giving a whopping 9000 ISP) vs 130 in AB, for a mass penalty of 1.2T. So, drop tanks, solid boosters or drop engines? fun tradeoff

The criticism would be valid if it only just made it to orbit but this thing can fly to Minmus with an ISRU loadout unrefuelled, empty it can land on Minmus with 900dv left, and it can put a 7 ton payload in an elliptical orbit with a periapse at Mun's altitude - not bad for a 42 ton t/o weight. For the price of two Panther engines. That is much, much cheaper than a rocket of the same capability. 1 - use low aoa and build speed - i use low aoa through the whole flight. But trying to go above mach 1 makes too much drag below 10km, even in a shallow dive. 2 - go back to the drawing board - yes if i reduced the wing area by 75% it would go supersonic at sea level and you could fly the way you describe. But then it would only be able to fly above 20km by running a high nose angle and would have too much drag to accelerate on the power of 2 nerv only. So then you start fitting lots of oxidizer tanks and get less delta v in orbit. Also wouldn't fancy landing that on Duna with small wings..

Foxster that's the most Kerbal thing i've seen all day, nice ! Gibster those pix you shared seem to show the centre of gravity and thrust axis (pink indicator) but where's the blue centre of lift indicator? Those fins look very small in relation to the size of the rocket. I'd probably rather four larger ones than six small, you can control pitch and yaw independently. Also it's very tall and thin. Should still be possible to get that working but i do find shorter fatter rockets nicer to fly. More frontal area = aero lossses but sometimes it's worth it for an easier life. Short and fat -

I'm a spaceplane guy not a rocket enthusiast so it's not my strongest area. I think there is a mathematical formula giving an optimum ratio assuming no gravity or atmospheric drag. For me it's about which engines perform best at each stage of the ascent. At the beginning you need high TWR and good atmospheric ISP. Gimballing isn't needed because fins are better for steering you aerodynamically. Above 10km vacuum ISP trumps the atmo rating. Above 20km gimballing is helpful. And by the time you're really motoring along, mach 4 +, orbital effect is cancelling much gravity and you're above the atmospheric drag, you can get away with a lower TWR. Example early career games I might have a Reliant with some flea boosters for the lower stage. A Swivel mid stage and Terrier upper stage, for when we're over halfway to orbit. Late game I might go with Vector / Dart / Nerv. Booster stage - goal - to get to 240 m/s as fast as possible. Lower stage - maintain 240 m/s then accelerate through the sound barrier at 10km Mid stage - high vacuum ISP rating with moderate TWR. Don't want to get too fast too low but don't want to start falling back. Upper stage - Once at mach 4 or above 35km we can start to relax. Even if your TWR is only 0.6 or so until some fuel burns off, you're gonna make it.

When the game was still in Beta I see that folks managed to create electric powered ion planes. I missed out on all that, but wanted to see if it was still possible to do something remotely similar. I used tweakscale to boost the size of the Ox-Stat panel as much as possible , and covered my wings in them... (also note the thrusters have been boosted to 1.25m diameter, and the larger Advanced Canard) I knew that the Ion thruster wouldn't produce much thrust in the lower atmosphere, so i stuck a jet engine on the back with the idea to jettison high up, and fly to orbit and beyond on ion power. Unfortunately, it looks like these panels made my wing really draggy. Even after firing up my stack of Dawn thrusters (an extra 60kn), we're not able to pass the sound barrier at 12km. I suppose I could have tried flying even higher, but it doesn't bode well. Also, we've used most of our jet fuel. I guess if the sound barrier is our target, i should have swapped the Rapier for a Panther or two, which are more efficient. Worse, it appears midday sun at the KSC only makes enough electricity for about 12kn. That won't cut it. Fuel cells perhaps, to boost us to orbit? It looks like the only way to do this is to mod parts. Wing with flexible conformal solar cells that add no drag and not much weight. High power high temperature 1.25m fuel cell that can run off atmospheric air and hydrogen/LF.

EEW, how much Oxidizer does that burn up out of interest? These days I don't use any Oxidizer at all, just run off a combo of Panthers (that i jettison after mach 2.7), Rapiers and then NERVs. There's a bit of a cost in chucking away engines of course, but the lower tier jets aren't that spendy and outperform Rapier and Whiplash at lower speeds. How much better would your delta V be if you just hung some engines (or even solid rockets?) off the wing that you ditch when airborne. You can see that I just hang my Panthers off the back of NERV, since the Panthers will be used below 20km and the NERV above 20km - they'll not both need to be active at the same time. Also btw, I have a lot of wing area. I normally only use the afterburner as i'm crossing the sound barrier and above 15km, but if I do start with full AB, we don't need much runway... Landing performance is pretty good as well Ironically, the large wing explains why i need Panther "boosters". Rapiers produce very low power below Mach 1. I get too much drag if I try to break the sound barrier below 10km. The upside is that we can land anywhere, and it's extremely efficient above 25km.

I crashed landing the thing (kerbal survived, but literally nothing of the ship left) , so went back to a pre-descent save. 1971 Xenon in Mothership, Lander has 700 Xenon. It's a single crew ship, the lander can and crew cabin are there for RP reasons. Fullly fuelled, the lander has 1639 delta V. So yes if i forget about landing on moho, fly the ship intact until the mothership is dry, fly the lander, then use the EVA pack and finally send that plane up again to pick her up. But that's hardly a reusable moho mission, plus we missed the whole point of going. Plusck - yeah I could aerobrake on Kerbin but would have to be very conservative. If the velocity is high i'm not going to capture at all or just blow up trying. Even though i might be able to re-enter it, it's not going to land though, it has no chutes. The space plane is pretty capable , i've landed it on Minmus and still had 900dv left , so it could meet us part way home. However, I'm pretty much resigned to flying up another ion ship, this time unmanned, refuel the lander.

First mission to Moho here. Used this plane to lift the interplanetary stage - And that's the single crew ion probe. Has a crew cabin so it's not a total spam in can setup, the drive section detaches as you can see with a command chair. That's the lander. Somehow i've burned 11k Delta V getting there, am now in low orbit with just 2300. I take it some kind of rescue mission will be needed, or is the return leg less costly, is there anything clever that can be done with aerobraking / assists?

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=7003A8806D8A6B2C!728&authkey=!AOsqIdClIzQFSOc&ithint=file%2ccraft This is what I finally came up with, lot of Kerbals died to make this happen. I'm an airplane person so this is the first heavy lift rocket I've built successfully. That black and white tank at the top is partially filled to make a 30t payload. I've taken the largest available 1.25m tank and used Modular Fuel Tanks so that it holds only LF and no OX - brings it's capacity up to 800 LF. I've then mounted two of these radially to the payload, with NERV engines on the bottom of each 1.25m tank. Then I took the smallest size 2.5m tank, again swapped it over to LF only, and stuck it to the bottom of the payload with a decoupler. There's a pair of fuel ducts to feed its contents into the 1.25m, and it the decoupler can be used to jettison it when empty. This comprises the Minmus injection stage (50T). The core stage is the second smallest 2.5m tank with 4 Dart aerospikes. There are four orange tank boosters around the side, and asparagus is used. The first two boosters to get dropped don't bother with fins and have only one engine type - quad Vectors. The two that hang on longest, have winglets and stage off the Vectors for the more efficient, and lighter Darts once we hit 1.3 Mach. 302 Total weight. Launch technique - 1. Off the pad, all those vectors give an insane 5g acceleration. Jeb likes it. I start holding down the CTRL key at 185m/s so we don't start getting mach effects/drag down low, with the aim to stopping acceleration at about 225m/s 2. At about 8km, and with some gravity turn done (it's a bit reluctant tbh, maybe too many fins) i hit the prograde assist and Z to go max power, accelerate through the sound barrier FAST. 3. At 1.25 mach I press space bar to swap two of our orange tanks over to Dart engines instead of Vectors. 4. Shortly after this the left/right side orange tanks are dry, SPACE to stage em' off. This stage also starts up the NERVs. 5. next stage drops the remaining two boosters. 6. next stage drops the core stage, so the NERVs are our only power. 7. final staging is to drop the small 2.5m tank when it's empty, the NERVs then just run off the type 1 tanks they attach to. I am however, an airplane person so usually use a spaceplane for the IRSU job. Nice to have landing gear to taxy over the surface on, and the Big S wings have plenty space to stock up on LF to refuel clients with. For minmus i would just use solar panels , Minmus is bugged and solar panels give power even at nighttime. I was squirrelly about bringing just one drill and dropping down to the much less efficient small converter, but honestly, if you're not having to stop and start the equipment every day and night cycle, you just "fly " the vessel but go into a high rate of time acceleration and are done in no time. It's nice to have enough capacity to refuel your client in one hit though. This plane just did a series of planet hopping flights that ended @ Eeloo. It's got the rubbish small converter, only one small drill and the lame solar panels (not the fabby Gigantors, they won't fit without clipping). Even so, it can refill it's 3300LF capacity in one Minmus day. Install something like Kerbal Attachment System and you can put filler caps on your ships. With my experience of that tour, i'd probably have more batteries in place of that stupid little fuel tank i'm using as a radial attach node at the front of the bay. And I wouldn't take off with ore onboard hoping to convert in orbit - not worth it with the less efficient converter, it's just dead weight. Fill the LF, bring the smallest possible amount of oxidiser the tweakables allow for the Vernors , and no mono or ore when taking off. https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=7003A8806D8A6B2C!719&authkey=!APpaxbR8Rs0uLHQ&ithint=file%2ccraft **this craft needs tac fuel balancer and kerbal joint reinforcement to work, most likely..

My house rules change from game to game, depending on what aspect of the challenge i went for. I just started a game with Kerbal Construction timer, for instance, which encourages re-use because building vehicles from scratch takes a long time, and tech doesn't become immediately available after unlocking the node - forcing you to keep playing with low tech parts until the new stuff is developed. I think it's a case of making the mission challenging enough for yourself without pushing it beyond you completely. So, if possible I like to give some kind of safety option to my crew, try to ensure that every mission failure needn't always result in fatality. I also like to give them a reasonable amount of living space if leaving Kerbin SOI - if your vessel has three times the crew capacity that is actually being used, for example, you can say the crew have reasonable opportunity to stretch their legs. However, I did just do a Minmus -> Duna -> Laythe -> Pol -> Eeloo tour on a MK2 IRSU space plane. The ability to reach Minmus direct from Kerbin without resorting to in-orbit rendezvous to refuel (i hate docking in orbit !) would have been in jeopardy if i added more crew cabins. This is how Kerbals should be able to experience long duration missions. Unfortunately I'd have had no room for the IRSU gear... Used that plane to lift this Ion Minmus probe to orbit. One crew, who has a lander can and mk 1 cabin (3 seats) to live in. As you can see, the drive section detaches and has a command seat to accomplish the landing. A bit of roughing it at the climax of the mission, but at least you get to walk around a bit if you manage the landing. A few constants though - biome farming is off, unless the challenge specifically is to build a rover. Otherwise you can unlock the entire tech tree without visiting anything other than Minmus, and spending hours driving a rover over every square inch of that moon is hardly fun. My aircraft are built with stability and crew protection as a priority. As soon as I unlock the inline cockpit, I build it into the middle of the ship and surround it with crumple zone. I have plenty of wing area so the crew have a chance to survive forced landings and misaligned landing gear incidents (by far the worst hazard faced by Kerbal aviators), use dihedral, plenty of vertical stabilizer (s) and conservative centre of gravity placement , and design so there is insufficient control authority to cause departure from controlled flight or structural breakup, whatever the cost in agility. As for rockets, excitement is surely part of what you're paying for. But I'm an airplane guy so these things need to be easy to fly if they're to be usable by the likes of myself. A Kerbo-NCAP rated cockpit from a career game. Can also undock in orbit.

OK, got the Furniture mod. Trying out this prototype was one of the most dangerous missions they'll have ever accomplished, risking death by crushing, decapitation and ejection from the solar system. Despite their heroic sacrifices, I was unable to squeeze in the fridge, double bed, or bookcase. Still, I have lived in worse apartments than this.. For a start, it's going to be pretty warm with those LV-N next to the living quarters. But we need to close the roof if we want to keep the heat in, and the space out. The powder room is not unlike an Emirates flight. However, we can go one better than their poxy shower.. While Kirry runs a bath, Jeb browses the internet for entertainment.. In the bath, Kirry is also able to find entertainment. Jeb in an advanced state of entertainment. Movie time.

What really drives me nuts is airplanes that constantly try to veer off to one side or other. My long range spaceplanes need 25 minutes to get to orbit, that's a long time to keep tapping Q since going one degree of course requires a costly orbital correction. Worse, career mode games require you to fly to the other side of the Kerbin to take measurements - and i'm forced to keep tapping the keyboard the whole way. I've added multiple vertical stabilizers, used gull-wing dihedral, at best these can sometimes stop the bank angle exceeding 15 degrees so your plane only flies in a wide circle rather than diving to the ground inverted if left unattended for any period. No, you can't use SAS because it's not designed for planes. It keeps a constant nose angle that doesn't allow for magnetic heading changing as latitude increases, and holds a constant pitch that doesn't allow for the curvature of the planet, so the nose slowly rises with time. A minority of the time, these super stable designs actually do fly straight. But the next time i use the same aircraft it veers left. And the next time it wants to veer right. If the plane is veering off course, quick save , quit game, and reload is the only way to cure it, which kind of confirms its a physics glitch.

I'm not yet brave enough to tackle stuff from the "challenges" section of the forum but this kind of thing can be fun. Particularly as I'm a spaceplane head, and i've never built a large rocket. What mods are allowed btw? I have tweakscale installed ATM but won't use it, what about Modular fuel tanks? This lets you swap the contents of tanks to suit a particular need. For example, I was going to radially cluster 3 mark 1 liquid fuselages around the payload and put a NERV at the bottom of each for the upper stage, but I need 18 tonnes of fuel to get from LKO > Minmus and was thinking of fitting a 2.5M tank and swapping the contents to be 100% LF , not waste any space for oxidizer. Is that cheating?

I've just completed the test flight of my latest space plane. I wanted to see if it was capable of lifting a modest IRSU setup to Minmus. It could. So then we refuelled and went to Duna. Then Laythe. Then Pol. Then Eeloo. And finally we are back home. At 42 years, it was, quite literally, a journey of a lifetime. The only problem is, they've been cooped in a cockpit for 4 decades. Perhaps Podsy and Kirry are romantically involved, have a Netflix account or are just very, very good at travel chess. And if the former is true, there is then the problem that certain things should never be shared. That means no "Apollo bags". Maybe they went on EVA to use the bathroom ? Hopefully they had some consideration for their fellow kerbonaut, and sprayed a bit of RCS afterward. Or advised them to "give it 10 minutes" before going outside. What is the best way to give our Kerbals somewhere to swing a cat? Most of the crew cabins are about bums on seats, rather than letting our intrepid spacefarers stretch their legs. The 2.5M habitation module doesn't actually look all that homely or roomy. The mobile processing lab seems a little more welcoming, perhaps a crewhab + lab + commander's cupola is the best stock combo. But then mass piles up so quickly. And none of these options integrates well in a mark 2 fuselage. Perhaps if I download furniture mod, and just kit out one of the cargo bays, or are there any mods with a greater variety of habitation modules (eg. for mk2 aircraft) on offer. Nudging towards the dreaded real world, should extra living space add mass as quickly as command pods? After all command pods contain more than just a pressure hull, there's reaction wheels, batteries, life support, RCS, avionics etc. If you wanted to tack on a bit more pressure hull with a sleeping pod, tv etc. than would mass really grow as fast as volume. Eg. Vintage Mercury Pod 1.7 Metre Cubed, 1.1 Tons = 1.5 M3 per ton Contemporary Orion Pod 20 Metre Cubed, 10 tons = 2 M3 per ton ISS 916 Metre Cubed, 420 Tons = 2.18 M3 per ton

By the way, if Jeb forgets to wind up his Kerbal Alarm Clock and misses the launch of the mothership, i have a monstrosity Laythe plane that could get there on its own. https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=7003A8806D8A6B2C!727&authkey=!ALzHMCmQJPIc63Q&ithint=file%2Ccraft After pressing the space bar another few times, you end up with the transfer stage... The lander stage. It's almost looking cute at this point. Finally, the Laythe upper stage/Kerbin return stage.

Does anyone else spend so much time making aircraft, that they never got good at huge rockets, moar boosters and in-orbit assembly? So that when you feel an urge to view the outer reaches of the Kerbol system, the easiest way is to make a plane that leaves bits of itself behind en-route. (Intentionally) https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=7003A8806D8A6B2C!727&authkey=!ALzHMCmQJPIc63Q&ithint=file%2ccraft This one's already lost a stage - the landing gear that it took off on, wasn't fast enough to F12 sorry. It'll be raining Rapiers, three of them at any rate. As we pass mach 6, we shed the outboard NERVs. Above 50km, there's no need for the extra control surfaces. Nor those empty wings. It leaves us an aft CG but since there's no real atmosphere we get away with it. In orbit. This stage has about 650 fuel left in it, enough to get us to Laythe I reckon - 5000dV? I couldn't be bothered to fly to Laythe today, but I did verify that the Laythe airbreathing stage works on Kerbin - it's actually kinda sporty. Unfortunately the rest of the plane fell onto and wrecked the space centre. After launching the cruise missile separating the airbreathing stage, the return stage was also given a quick once over. The landing gear of the Laythe stage have already gone by this point. It could probably use some more optimisation but it's a start, at any rate. For career mode games, something a little more prosaic - Or we could just build an utter monstrosity It's easier than you'd think, once you get your head around it. The trick is to stay symmetrical in two axes (lateral, vertical) unless you're a true genius. Tacking on stages to the back of your airplane is fine, just remember to add a wing section to each engine part so that the lift offsets the weight and shedding this item has no effect on your CG. And if your new stage needs more engines, use bicouplers. Don't underslung pods, because you won't be able to keep the nose down when the air gets thin. Those planes I linked, look asymmetric , are asymmetric, but don't act asymmetric because they got wings on them heavy bits. You underslung your motors you get off the boat. Never go full asymmetric.

One Rapier, Two NERVs and two droppable Panther engines as "boosters". I'm kind of thinking about things from an aircraft point of view and not an orbital mechanics one. Flying at 2 degrees AoA where lift:drag ratio is best, it needs about 40kn of thrust to simply stay airborne. Anything over that can be used to climb and accelerate, it does a mixture of both so that it stays at more or less the same angle of attack as the air gets thinner, because that's how the pitch trim has been set. Over time, an increasing portion of gravity is counteracted by orbital effect rather than wing lift. 40 seconds before MECO. --------------------------------------- As you can see in this case we're not really lobbing ourselves upwards on a ballistic arc hoping to accelerate to orbital speed before coming down again, rather just flying up like a low powered transport plane. Obviously the more total energy i can get out of the RAPIERs the better , because their ISP is 4.25 times higher than that of the NERVs. But, you have to take into account what would in a rocket be called "gravity losses", ie. if the airbreathing engines are only making 45kn, i might still be gaining energy, but 90% of the fuel is just being used to stand still so i'd actually get more per pound of fuel by starting up the thirsty closed cycle engine. Cheers for the formula !

I'm not sure you understand my post, but I probably didn't explain myself very well. I think you are talking about a zoom climb scenario. I was referring to steady state operation in jet mode. Imagine you career games where you built a plane with early jet engines and are trying to see the max altitude it can reach sustainably (not a zoom climb, where it stalls and falls back again). That is similar to how things go at the end of the airbreathing phase of my spaceplane launches. When climb rate has more or less died away, i start the NERV engines. Now, do you trim the plane to maintain Mach 3.75, which is the speed at which rapiers deliver max thrust, and use excess power to climb. This will yield the highest altitude before specific excess power drops to zero, and the aircraft can only climb by trading airspeed for altitude which is, as you point out, useless. Or do you go for a slightly higher speed, which will yield a lower altitude, but may be worthwhile because power tails off more slowly between mach 3.75 and mach 4.5 than the way it falls off a cliff above 24km. Which one gives more total energy? --------------------------- BTW I'd dispute the assertion, "potential energy is useless". Potential energy = height. Kinetic energy = speed Going to orbit is the process of going from 0 in both to at least 70km altitude and mach 7. Kinetic is the lion's share of the work, but potential energy "height" is by no means useless. --------------------------------------- OK, i need to drink a lot of caffeine and dig around the kinematic equations i vaguely remember from my school days. That way i can quantify how valuble (say) 100m in altitude is compared to 100 m/s in velocity. In otherwords, if you threw a baseball straight up at 100 m/s on Kerbin but there was no air resistance, how high would it go. What is the formula that gives this..

Hi guys, as you probably know, the thrust output of all air breathing engines is modified by two factors in KSP 1) the atmospheric density curve, specified in the config file. With all stock engines, thrust gets less the higher you go, though the Rapier does well in this regard since thrust loss with altitude is slow up to 20km. 2) the velocity curve specified in the config file. With some subsonic designs like the Wheesley and Goliath, the trend is only downward with increasing speed, but most actually gain thrust initially, before tailing off as you go faster still. The Rapier again does best here, peaking at a higher speed (mach 3.7) than any other engine and tailing off in power more slowly above optimum. So, the goal of air-breathing flight is to reach the highest possible speed and altitude before engaging the lower ISP closed cycle engines. This is where the tradeoff comes in. If you accelerate to mach 3.7, the velocity at which Rapiers produce maximum thrust, then you will be able to reach a higher altitude before your specific excess power reaches zero. On the other hand, I've noticed that thrust declines VERY quickly above 23km, halving between 24km and 26km for example. Given that power holds up pretty well , is it worth going over your max power speed, and accepting a lower peak altitude instead? Can anyone remember the equation that shows what altitude can be reached from a given velocity in a vertical climb, assuming no drag. Eg. an object moving 100m/s straight up, how far will it reach before falling back ? With this info, the total energy (kinetic + potential) of each speedrun method can be calculated to find the best. eg. i can plot a graph of thrust vs speed and air density, calculate "total energy" to get the optimum?

Your Spaceplane has a lot less wing than the stuff I generally build, leading to inefficient flight above 20km - requiring the nose to be far above the prograde to get sufficient lift , creating drag, and also resulting in cosine losses to the rocket thrust - basically a lot of the thrust is going straight down, fighting gravity rather than accelerating you in the direction of travel. To get success with this approach requires a high thrust-weight ratio which means carrying a lot of engine mass all the way up to orbit. Finally, a MK2 monopropellant tank is a metric f-ton of RCS. That and engine mass is probably eating most of your payload fraction. I honestly never bring RCS because the ISP is so bad. Most of my spaceplanes don't even bring oxidizer or leave the tanks mostly empty, just a little bit to power any Vernier lift motors that are fitted. Reaction wheels FTW. My mark 2 has 4 pairs of big S delta wings. One Rapier (ISP 3800) that is only used in Air Breathing mode. Two NERVs that are switched on above 24km (ISP 800) Two Panther "boosters" attached to the rear of the NERVs. They operate in Dry mode (ISP 9000) except when passing through sound barrier and above 15km altitude (ISP 4500 in reheat). They get dropped above mach 2.7. Two long cargo bays. Most of the fuel tankage is in the wings, but there is a little bit in the mk2 to mk1 adapters and a smidge in the pre-coolers also. >>cruising to orbit. The large wings make sufficient lift at small nose angle, even at this altitude. So, we have low drag and can get away with the low TWR of two NERVs as our only propulsion, and take advantage of their high ISP. I filled the cargo bay with IRSU stuff and found this plane can still get to Minmus direct from Kerbin. From there it can refuel and easily make Duna, Laythe, Pol, then Eeloo. Because of the large wings it can land pretty comfortably off-world - That said, I have to give credit to your design in that it looks a lot more like real rocket planes. Certainly wins a "looks like it's doing 1000mph standing still" award. Use of monopropellant for orbital maneuvering etc. is good RP. Just some ideas for you perhaps. Since you're using tweakscale, you could make a much more elegant version of my plane by upscaling the wing and canard parts. I'd tried to keep things stock, but that means the design is pretty much going to need kerbal joint reinforcement if it's not to flop around like crazy.

Well done, that is hard to do ! Ferram Aerospace (FAR) makes creating a good aircraft so much harder. So many new ways to loose control. And landing speeds triple, so minor mishaps are invariably fatal. I don't use it any more, although you can optimise transonic flight better, I don't think it models hypersonic particularly, which is what matters for space planes. Even if it did, we don't have the parts to create wave rider style aircraft.

Me too now, bitten by the cargo bay bug. Guess airplanes just aren't supposed to have cargo bays? Shame to encounter this 9 years into a grand tour though..

Sorry to be late to party. I did build a mark 2 spaceplane a couple weeks back that can carry a set of IRSU gear and with enough range to get from Kerbin to Minmus, Minmus to Duna, and eventually planet hop her way to Laythe. It's got huge massive wing area and has a lovely low "no sweat" landing speed, even on the red planet - https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=7003A8806D8A6B2C!719&authkey=!APpaxbR8Rs0uLHQ&ithint=file%2ccraft The negatives are - a) You will need TacFuelBalancer or similar, otherwise the NERV engines will fail to draw from the wing tanks, where 90% of the fuel is. b) I'm hanging a wing off a wing off another wing off an engine pre-cooler which is radially attached to the cockpit. I've never tried flying it without Kerbal Joint Reinforcement, imagine it'd flap like a startled pigeon without. c) 9 years into her mission, she's developed engine trouble out on Laythe. I may be able to work around this and get to Eeloo. See this tech support thread for details - Here's the build thread for the long range cargo SSTO I based her on, contains flight profile info and design rationale

KSP Version: 1.0.5.1028 Mods / Add-Ons: TacFuelBalancer, KerbalJointReinforcement In a nutshell: The Mark 2 Cargo bay occludes engines and intakes mounted alongside it, but the craft works normally on Kerbin. On Duna, one of the intakes goes inactive, but NERV engines worked normally, and I was able to leave Duna without problems. Out on Laythe, both NERVs and 2 of 4 intakes claimed to be occluded. Scott Manley made a comment that the physics become less precise the further you get from Kerbol, I am wondering if this is anything to do with it. The craft in question : https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=7003A8806D8A6B2C!719&authkey=!APpaxbR8Rs0uLHQ&ithint=file%2ccraft Here is the save file. https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=7003A8806D8A6B2C!720&authkey=!ALkTjVEdbx0EOPI&ithint=file%2csfs I have 5 flights in progress so choose the one that's landed on Laythe. The same aircraft is waiting to takeoff on the runway at Kerbin and shows none of these symptoms. I built this Mark 2 spaceplane with a load of IRSU gear in the cargo bay. I tried to keep it as stock as possible but I don't think it'd be useable without 1) TAC Fuel Balancer, because each NERV motor only has access to 80 LF in the pre-coolers, they won't pull from the vast wing tanks otherwise. 2) Kerbal joint reinforcement - I've never even tried to fly without it, imagine she'd be a very droopy otherwise. The tree structure of the craft is as follows - Root Part - Inline cockpit. Either side of which, is radially attached engine pre-cooler, offset aft. These are the parts with the occlusion issues. Pre Coolers - An additional pre-cooler is attached to the front node of the primary pre-coolers. Because of the offset, they appear alongside the cockpit. So far these have never occluded. To the rear node of the Primary pre-coolers the NERV engines are attached. Workarounds: After googling this error, I heard that I should shut down the engines and close the intakes, open the cargo bay doors, re-activate the affected parts, then close the cargo bay again. This did not work, the NERVs becoming occluded again as soon as the bay doors closed. Most threads on this issue were coming at the problem from the opposite direction, players were frustrated that the cargo bay was not protecting parts that were inside them from re-entry heat. Several mods appeared to tinker with the code in an effort to address this, and I was concerned this may have aggravated the "over-occlusion" I was experiencing. So, I removed Module Manager 2.6.13 and 2.6.18 from GameData, as the mods that required them were no longer installed. Again, I tried activating the NERVs and intakes with bay doors open. This time the NERVs remained on after closing the bay doors, however the rear pre-coolers still become occluded. Fortunately the forward pre-coolers have never been affected by this bug and are sufficient to power the Rapier. Escaping Laythe is at least now possible, though the bug has made things much harder. I cannot run the NERV engines from sea level or i'll waste too much fuel, however they need to be activated briefly in order to penetrate the sound barrier and then turned on for the remainder of the ascent once i've hit my airbreathing ceiling. That means briefly opening the cargo bay when starting up these engines, which will create significant drag and cost me velocity. Other Notes/Pictures/Log Files: Is there anything i can do to have my airplane work better ? Should I offset the pre-coolers outboard from the cargo bay in SPH? As for this flight, which has been in progress a very long time, is there anything i can do or just work around as described?

No pictures but yes i've done it a few times. I have tac fuel balancer so jettison all propellants to lighten us, lower landing speed and less kinetic energy to stop. Put the gear down to absorb some impact etc. And i design for crashworthiness, i prefer inline cockpits with modules further to front of fuselage.