AeroGav

Not edited as nicely as the above post, but here's my re-entry, 1. landing gear down and cargo bay doors open, for more drag, slows down faster (apparently rubber tyres are more heat resistant than thermally hardened spacecraft parts) 2. pitch up to 20-25 degrees above prograde. Max lift is at 30, but it falls off quickly past that point and given how hard it is to hold an exact pitch angle, i usually shoot for 20 or so. The lift keeps you out of the thick atmo till you're really slowed down. My plane got to 752/1400K on the cockpit, having so much wing helps with 2). Also, I think i just won the spot landing competition. That's a seriously slow touchdown speed my plane has.

I'm going to try two variants of this plane. The first will have a pair of Juno pods, which should double my excess power and thus climb rate below 10k. They get about double the ISP of the RAPIER but the main thing is the time to supersonic will be halved. It's not much extra mass, the pair of them equals half a type one engine, and i currently carry three. EDIT - testing complete. Original aircraft - 1506/2080 LF remaining at 10,300M and 420M/S velocity. With two extra Juno - 1733/2180 LF remaining at same altitude and velocity. The second variant, i'll use C7 hardpoints to make a pair of jettisonable type 1 engine pods, to which i'll attach Weasels. They can power the plane up to near 10k and 0.8 mach on their own, with the Rapier shut down, drawing only on the fuel in their own engine pod. I'll put a parachute in the nose cone of the engine pod, and just before they exceed the operating parameters of the chute, i'll trigger the chutes and jettison mechanism, and start up RAPIER.

Well the videos of this flight are being uploaded as we speak. It turns out, it's not as easy making these videos as Scott Manley makes it look, in fact I go so far as to call it rocket science. On the first three vids, i had the game sound muted by mistake, so no engine noises, just me regurgitating all the aero theories i ever heard in a random order into a cheap mike. The fourth video has game sounds , but a muted mike. What do you reckon the touchdown velocity of the above vessel to be?

Regarding rear stabilizers - if you're going to have canards and rear stabilizers, i prefer to have tailplanes with the controls disabled or just put a small rear mount wing there, and do the pitching up and down with canard only, that way you get the passive stability of the stabilizer pushing the nose back into line but when pitching up to get more lift at low speed or thin air, the canard is contributing to total lift rather than subtracting from it. I'm not sure this is a thing really.., stability is probably determined by centre of lift vs centre of mass only.

I just did a spot of accountancy - 9,400KG Fuel 4,000KG Payload 11,830KG Systems (engines, cockpit, landing gear, service bays, batteries, radiators, reaction wheels) 5,396KG Airframe (wings, control surfaces, tailcones) I have really gone to town on the airframe, loadsa wing, tail cones on every open node, been very generous with fins and canards, so the airframe mass is 17.6% of the takeoff weight. Will be impressed if anyone manages more than that. The fuel fraction is pretty low for a spacecraft, but Systems is the biggie - no doubt because i'm carrying 6 tonnes of reactor. It needs about 35kn thrust to maintain level flight, and at times the RAPIER only does twice that, so half the thrust is being lost to do nothing more than just maintain. If I doubled my thrust, I'd have three times as much excess power therefore climb three times faster, for twice the fuel consumption. The best solution would be another RAPIER (since i'd probably be able to fly level to 29.5km instead of 25km) but I find the 10-20km part of the profile difficult to get right as it is, let alone making it even more frantic. It's flown like an "S" shaped curve - as you transition supersonic and the RAPIER goes into Banzai mode, you have to pitch up to avoid excess speed in thick air, but then you need to start pitching down again so as to hit your top speed before busting the service ceiling. I started pitching down at 16.7km and ended up ballooning to 24km, then overshot to 16km, finally hit 1250 on like the third oscillation ! The main thing about adding more engines is extra drag nodes. I wonder how much two Juno will cost me? Alternatively I could just mount a pair of Wheezy turbofans on jettisonable pods, they get 2.5x the ISP of a RAPIER and by themselves they'd give three times as much thrust (7 times the excess power for climbing!) and i can ditch them as soon as we go supersonic.

To my understanding , the SABRE is a rocket engine, that can compress atmospheric air and cool it down with the incoming fuel stream , in place of using liquid oxygen. As such it behaves as a rocket engine in both modes, it's not going to care about velocity, though the bell nozzle will have an optimum atmospheric pressure for efficiency?

I'm not sure if this is a point for General Discussion since I can certainly get to orbit with these things, however, the inner min-maxer/perfectionist has hit an imponderable. I've started building my spaceplanes with RAPIERS, NERVS and liquid fuel only. I size the wing such that it only needs 2-4 degrees angle of attack to maintain lift in the very thin air above 20km, which with the stock aerodynamics, this is the optimum AoA for lift/drag ratio. This means I can fly as high as possible on airbreathing mode, and also climb as well as possible given the meagre thrust of the NERV. Recently I built a MK2 Trimotor with two NERV and one RAPIER, and no Oxidiser. The payload was two mk2 crew cabins (4 T), the vehicle mass 30T, 2200 LF. The problem is, at low altitude, the natural airspeed of this airframe, at 2deg AoA is very low - something like 100 m/s sea level, rising to 240 by 9km. At these speeds, the single RAPIER provides only 70-80kn thrust, leading to a climb angle of just 5 degrees. Slick though this airplane is, most of the thrust just gets used keeping airborne, with not much left over to climb. After about 15 minutes, I finally reach 10km and the natural, 2deg AoA cruise speed of the airframe is edging up 260m/s owing to the thinner air. The RAPIER are finally starting to make halfway decent thrust and the climb angle has gone up to a heady 10 deg. However, if we go much faster we hit the transonic drag brick wall. Fortunately, 10km is high enough that the NERV will give about 690 ISP. It's not the full 800 they do in a vac, but a lot better than the 160 they insult you with at sea level. So, I light em up briefly and nose over to a shallow dive until i'm at 1.3 mach. Of course, this takes you into the RAPIER more speed = more thrust positive feedback loop. Between 10-20km, it's tough to hang on to the dang thing and maintain the right climb profile, so that you hit the RAPIER max thrust velocity before the air gets too thin for you to have any power, but not too soon so that you overheat or waste fuel fighting drag. In summary : 1) Below 10km Subsonic - I have too much wing, and not enough engine 2) 10-20km Supersonic - I have slightly too much engine, and it's tough to find the right climb angle before you bust your service ceiling 3) Above 20km Hypersonic - I'd say my airplane performs really well Out of 2200 starting LF, I use about 45% below 10km while impersonating a DC3. I use the same fuel again lifting myself from 10km subsonic to orbit, leaving about 15% to spare. Did shoot a video of the launch but it's a big edit job. So What's my point? Well, first off is it realistic for a SABRE type engine to gain >5x the static thrust at mach 3.7? I can understand this in a RAMJET, is it also realistic for a turboramjet, or do turboramjets just loose thrust more slowly than a normal engine owing to their ability to bypass the compressor / having a lower pressure ratio optimised for air that is already highly compressed by the inlet system? I can't find much mention of this in the SABRE design, but does it also have similar features which would explain the incredible thrust growth? The fact the engine produces such widely differing levels of thrust according to airspeed makes it hard to match to an airframe for all flight regimes, as alluded to above. On a Practical Level... what steps could you take to mitigate this in the design, and are they actually worth implementing? 1) I could add another RAPIER, which would also help >20km. Would make the mad supersonic phase even crazier and it's not really a low TWR SSTO then is it :-) 2) Could put decouplers on the back of the NERVs and attach some engines to use up to mach 1.3 then be jettisoned, but dumping jet engines over the countryside kind of goes against the SSTO spirit

I'm in a "no rockets" career challenge and honestly I see no reason not to use the Panther, once you've got it. At 20 km it uses only a tiny amount more fuel than a Wheezey, but you'll be doing Mach 2.5 instead of Mach 0.9. A lot of the contracts you get require observation of specific co-ordinates at altitudes exceeding 19,400M. With a Panther that's your cruising altitude, on a Juno, Weezer or Goliath you need to bring a liquid fuel rocket to turn on for a pop-up climb to fulfill these missions - pain in the rear. Panther only guzzles if you run it wide open at low altitudes.

This is a Space game, so the number one consideration is performance fast n' high. In that sense, the pecking order is - 1. RAPIER pros - just awesome cons - weak subsonic thrust, but shouldn't be a problem for aerodynamically clean spaceplanes. For other types of aircraft this is a disadvantage. 2. WHIPLASH pros - very good performer. makes excellent sub-orbital, zoom climbing air launchers cons - no reason to use once the RAPIER appears. Comes rather late in tech tree. 3. PANTHER pros - not that far behind the whiplash and appears relatively early. 4. JUNO pros - You can actually make a barely orbital spaceplane with these. Hang about 10 off your wing, should get to 12km at 1.3mach, then fire up a fuselage mounted Terrier. At 17km they flame out, use a decoupler to blow off the cluster of jets. You'll probably want your undercarriage on separators too, as you'll be on fixed gear at this point. Considering how early they appear, this is good going. BTW all the people who say the Panther is thirsty are dead wrong. Yes, it guzzles fuel in Wet mode at low altitude. Take it up to 20km in Wet and it sips away. Circumnavigate the globe on less than 800 fuel.

Audio communication is the method of choice amongst earth's higher mammals and i suspect that unless we're touched down somewhere truly exotic it will be the case on another world too. Also if you think about how many languages have evolved on earth, virtually every possible grammar system must have appeared in one of them. I think the good old method of pointing at objects and saying their name would be a good way to start, bear in mind that astronauts are (highly) selected for intelligence and they are going to have an audience with brightest minds that alien planet has to offer - university boffins, code breakers etc. Explorers of the New World managed to learn completely unrelated native american languages after all. One obstacle however, is that all of this involved speech between humans. The human ear is, i believe, very good at discriminating between slightly different frequencies in the part of the audio spectrum in which human speech occurs. Alien speech could well fall outside this range however. Audio analysis equipment may be necessary to identify what may to us sound like identical syllables, which will greatly slow the process down, and may mean that aliens and humans may never be able to speak each other's language well enough to be understood. Of course, we could just send them an email...

Nice, that's a definite improvement. Fair old bit of liquid fuel left over there. Maybe put a nuke powered orbital tug up there to dock with, so you can offload some of that. Or, make a trimotor variant of that plane with a mixture of nuke and RAPIER engines :-) You could use the nukes from 20km upwards... would be pretty easy to increase the LF tankage further... attach big - s wing strakes to the leading and trailing edges of delta wing - looks pretty good in an F-15 sort of way, as well as on the fuselage head of the wing, like on an F-18

Assymetric flameout = not enough intakes. The rapiers should keep going then stop together at 29.5km. How I'd arrange things personally - 2 into 1 splitter -> pre-cooler -> RAPIER that way you have 2 pre-coolers and 2 RAPIERs or 2 into 1 splitter -> pre-cooler -> pre-cooler -> RAPIER which would give you 4 pre-coolers for 2 RAPIERS , overkill ! Re: ascent profile yeah that picture of 360 m/sec at 16km is way too slow, at least for your craft. My "vark" can just about stay subsonic up to 16km but it has a lot of wing area for its size, so under the same conditions has a much lower angle of attack. Then again your subsequent attempts sound like they're going off the other extreme - too fast. Remember - 330 m/sec = Mach 1 , significantly increased drag 240 m/sec -> 460m/sec = transonic region, increased drag you want to spend little time operating in this region , either be below it, at lower altitudes when the air is still thick enough to support your craft at such a low speed, or above it. If I recall correctly, drag goes down after crossing the sound barrier and is lowest at 460-660 m/sec before it starts going back up again. I'd definitely change your wings for big-s delta ones, they have a little more area and they store liquid fuel, this will stop your rapiers pulling on your rocket fuel tank reserves while in airbreathing mode. It's hard to stay on an exact number while handflying but try to stay on a particular AoA if possible , to minimise drag. If i'm only planning on going a few degrees above or below my prograde , i often fly with prograde set on the SAS and just make inputs through that.

RE: 2 into 1 Adapter I must admit, I was just regurgitating advice given previously on this forum, but hadn't tested for myself, besides which the device may have been buffed in last patch , especially given the appearance of the new and somewhat more aero 3 : 1 mark 3 adapter. I built 2 craft, both had a mark 2 cockpit and short mark 2 rocket fuel fuselage behind it. One had a mark 2 to mark 1 fuselage adapter, giving one centreline engine attach node, and three radially mounted mark 1 fuselages as engine pods, for a total of 4 engine attach nodes. The other used one of those much-maligned 2 into 1 splitters, and only required two-way instead of 3 way symmetry on the engine pods to achieve the same 4 engine config. The pods were outfitted with tail cones at the front end, and the "Swivel" chosen as the engine in all configs. Getting a stable config was a challenge, I had to put mark 1 structural fuselage immediately before each engine to move the CG forward a bit, and also attach a pair of fins to the centreline engine. Both test vehicles were given 15.8 seconds of fuel, however the 2 into 1 splitter design had lower dry mass so had to be ballasted with excess oxidizer. Final launch weight 14602 and14604kg respectively. Both carried 362 units of liquid fuel, and had 4 swivels. The one with 3 pods made it to 23, 543M. The one with 2 pods and the 2 into 1 splitter reached 24, 144M. This looks like a narrow win for the splitter after all then? One thing though, I don't very often find myself wanting two engines on my design. One fuselage mounted motor with two pods is a very flexible config that lets you use two RAPIERs and one NERV (or two NERV and one RAPIER) on a mark 2 fuselage spaceplane, without getting into asymmetric thrust issues as you bring dissimilar engines online. I was going to say, NERVs are for spaceplanes with interplanetary intent, a pure low orbit cargo truck or kerbal bus should only have RAPIERs , but looking at the payload mass challenge thread, folks are using NERV for their final stage there too. If you use big-s delta wings and strakes, you just tend to end up dragging unused liquid fuel to orbit otherwise....

I think the reason for angling the wings 2 or three degrees is that your engines can be level, putting all of their thrust into forward lift, while the lifting surfaces are angling up and still making lift. At optimal AoA you're getting a lift drag ratio of 20:1 so 1 KN of thrust is getting turned into 20+ of lift. That's a very worthwhile tradeoff. Without positive incidence, in order to generate lift, you have to angle the whole ship upwards - that means some of the thrust which could be making forward momentum which would then be exchanged for lift in a 20:1 ratio, is instead being turned directly into lift on only a 1 for 1 basis, which is a bum deal. Your spaceplane is mostly type II fuselage , which does generate lift like, though I don't know if it gets the same L/D ratio as proper wings. One last reason, which I alluded to before, is that you can fly some of the ascent with Prograde hold set on autopilot and it'll still climb. The "Vark" craft I posted above takes over 20 minutes to reach orbit, this helps to save wrist cramp. Incidentally, I was doing a "low tech spaceplane" for a "no rockets" career mode challenge yesterday. Made a craft with 10 Junos and 1 swivel that barely made orbit (it jettisoned the Junos when they flame out, so was costlier to operate than a rocket, it also punched off its fixed gear on takeoff and could only land in water.....), then improved it when I unlocked the Terrier. Finally I wanted to see how far I could take the thing if I pushed re-usability out the window. The fuselage consisted of 3 FT400 fuel tanks... I put a stack separator in behind the forward FT400, and added it's own Terrier. After the first two rocket tanks ran dry, I'd stage and leave the airplane behind at 33km. However , it didn't even make orbit. Did the airframe still help that much even at that altitude? Or did the extra mass of the heatshield, parachute, second Terrier negate the benefits of dumping two empty FT400s, wings, tail fin and canards?

I've seen something I call hysteresis (a big word, not sure I'm using the right technical term) that've seen when using SAS on my own space planes and in youtube videos of other people's rockets. Basically SAS continually overcorrecting and having to compensate for last correction. It's average trajectory does match prograde. but it constantly jerks either side of it with the control surfaces flipping back and forth like mad. Creates drag, wastes electric power, bleeds your RCS dry before you get anywhere. Saw a mod that helps you tune that out? Can't remember that name. I'm guessing the physics / rounding errors described in previous posts apply to aircraft too. I've never built a completely stable aircraft no matter how hard I try. Centre of mass well forward, check, mahoosive tail fin, check, gull wing design with dihedral on outer sections - check, wing attached to top of fuselage so centre of mass below wings - check. This trainer plane felt really easy to fly compared to anything else I've flown in KSP (stock or self created), but on one of those Kerbin observation missions, involving flying halfway round the planet, I noticed I still couldn't let go the joystick completely for long periods, or use time acceleration comfortably. The problem was roll axis - let go the stick in a 1degree left bank, and despite the dihedral, high wing design etc, it gradually rolls further and further (about 1 degree per second) into the low wing, rather than righting itself, like such a design surely should?

If I understand correctly, the OP is asking about what the nearest thing to a space opera style shuttlecraft that we'd have a high likelihood of being able to build within the next 20 years , assuming unlimited R&D and using nuclear power. The short answer is not very like one at all, but if you've solved the problems of artificial gravity and FTL travel I imagine such a shuttlecraft is trivial. Anyway, it's a fun question so let's run with it.. Nuclear, the only known technology is fission. That means radiation - to solve the heavy shielding issue, you only shield the side of the reactor facing the crew compartment. Under power, that reactor is going to spit instantly lethal doses of X rays for considerable distance on the unshielded side, and even shut down the residual radiation means you'd have to approach it via the shielded side. However, so long as it doesn't melt down, the radioactive materials should remain within the reactor itself, so once it's flown past to a safe distance, the atmosphere it passed through will be uncontaminated. I'd use that reactor to drive a nuclear turbojet at lower altitudes, higher up it can power a conventional nuclear thermal rocket. Build all of that into a spaceplane, and you'd at least have a re-usable ground-orbit shuttle with comfortable delta-v reserves. You never see sci fi heroes fretting about launch profiles and delta v on a routine flight, nor boiloff, so I presume the propellant is going to be room temperature storable like maybe, plain water. Note this depends on landing on Earth where there are runways. If visiting a more primitive society , things get much harder. A seaplane perhaps? Could you possibly design an airframe that can fly slow enough to land on water while having enough go a high mach numbers? At least you could desalinate the seawater readily at hand to refill the tanks. What about a helicopter with folding rotor blades for the final landing phase? trouble is helicopters have much lower max speed & altitude capability than fixed wing, the nuclear thermal rocket stage is going to need more delta v, more fuel, therefore be heavier, then will it be able to achieve a high enough TWR? Thrust lift alone, like a VTOL aircraft, with current tech solid core fission reactors, even unshielded, no way to do that in earth gravity I'd have said. Especially given all the fuel you'd be carrying for the climb to orbit.

One last thing, your ascent profile is very different to how i fly, but then your craft has more engine and less wing, so it may pay to treat it differently. Also the experimentation i did seemed to show that how you fly the first 20km has very little affect on overall fuel use, most of which is down to how much you get out of airbreathing above 20km and how the closed cycle bit is done. I tend to fly a constant angle of attack rather than shooting for a specific pitch angle, and stay subsonic a lot longer. Generally I fly up from the runway using pitch trim at 2degrees AOA, making manual inputs to surpress oscillations, until i'm getting to 240m/s at around 10-16km, which is the sound barrier. Drag doubles at the speed of sound (330 m/s) , so i try to delay going through it, then punch through fast in a shallow dive when it can be put off no longer. When i'm delaying crossing the SB i add more back stick to keep my speed below 240, until i'm getting to 7 degrees or more AoA, at which point I've gone as high as i can subsonic without lift induced drag killing me, so i release the stick and let it dive through to 430, at which point we're through the drag peak. Because of heat issues, i also try to not exceed 1000m/s until 20km or right before it.

Rapiers produce max thrust at 1250 m/sec so since the heating problems in 1.05 I no longer see the point in going faster. Once I hit that speed i use excess thrust to climb, it should be possible to get a slick, 20 tonne craft to at least 25km airbreathing this way on just a single rapier. I assume you're not using any aerodynamics mods? Looking at that craft 1. You're using engine pre-coolers for intakes - good. Since 1.05 this is the lowest drag way to feed an engine. 2. You have RCS blocks - I'd be careful since there are far fewer physicsless parts these days, or they add significantly to the drag of the parent item. Consider couple of advanced reaction wheels in a cargo bay instead. 3. It looks like you're using a 2 into 1 adapter. I'd heard these were real draggy, and best left off. 4. The two mark 1 fuselage pods either side of the main fuselage are extra frontal area, and contribute a total of four drag nodes (2 from the front of each, 2 from the rear). If you don't need them to mount engines, consider putting whatever is there, inline in a longer main fuselage. 5. Tail cones are the lowest drag part to begin or end a fuselage. You can also clip them to the back of your engines, and offset them so they're not occluded. A bit gamey but hell, the game messes with us enough times, gotta take your chances when they come. 6. That tail fin is tiny ! Well, if you can fly it with that, more power to you ! I disagree with what was said about making wings smaller, but it is a matter of preference. Personally I'd make them even larger. There's a nice chart someone did in the tutorials section, lift drag ratio vs angle of attack, basically you get best L/D at 2degrees AoA subsonic and 5 degrees at 2000 m/s. Edit - The critical phase of your flight is probably the transition to closed cycle mode, when you're at 24km+ and doing 1250 m/s. The air is very thin at that point so even though you're going mach 3.7 you need quite a lot of wing area to keep your AoA below 4 degrees, otherwise you're incurring unecessary lift induced drag. Extra wing area makes re entry and landing easier too. Wings don't cause parasite drag with stock aerodynamics so the only penalty is the mass of the wing itself, which is tiny compared to your engines and fuel. Also the Big S delta wings and strakes offer the same lift/mass ratio as the other parts, and the same high temperature tolerance, but they also have considerable liquid fuel tankage to boot. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BworS5V0CvPcNEU5UDktN3NJY0U/view?usp=sharing Edit - here's something i built just before 1.05. It's an attempt to min max the stock aero model. It does walk a fine line with overheating in 1.05. It's also the ugliest thing i ever built ! It's got a RAPIER with a NERV clipped into it and a tail cone clipped onto those for minimum drag. It can get to orbit on NERV and airbreathing RAPIER alone, no oxidizer, in fact it makes it with 30% fuel remaining. Small amount of wing incidence means you can fly much of the ascent with Prograde set on the SAS. There's an action group to trigger the NERV, IIRC.

Pretty sure i've had RAPIER craft able to maintain 1215 m/s and a slow climb up to 26km, post patch. The fuel use falls off with thrust, so it was worth hanging on to. That particular aircraft didnt carry any oxidiser, so at that stage i started up the NERV and left the RAPIER going till it quit at 29.5km. Useable lift is there till 40km with stock Aero.

Another victim of SPH gotchas ! Yep, over time you learn not to try attaching certain combos of parts, because even though they look like they should work , they don't hook on straight and leave you with a messed up aircraft. Attaching radially to anything other than a cylindrical aircraft fuselage (type 1, 2, or 3) barrel is high risk. Furthermore the fuselage pieces you attach to should be the same at both ends, and not tapering lengthwise Safe rocket/liquid/mono fuel fuselage short/long structural fuselage inline cockpits service bays, cargo bays, inline docking ports Unsafe (risk of subtle misaligns and you wasting the next three hours of your life) Adapters (tapering sections to join a type 2 to type 1 or type 3) Nose/Tailcones non-inline cockpits

Sounds like the 'chute is bound by mach number then, not absolute speed or dynamic pressure (or temperature). Due to low air pressure and temperature, the speed of sound is less on Duna than on Kerbin. Yep, a lot of stock parts aren't really set up with offworld use in mind. We could do with some nuclear turbojets and jet engines that run off only oxidizer when in planets with a methane atmosphere, for starters.

You could try changing your ascent profile. Even RAPIER engines start loosing thrust above 1215 m/s, so I'm not sure what the advantage is in exceeding that. Accelerate to 1215 above 20km then maintain constant airspeed and use excess power to climb. You might want to resize your wings for the higher, slower profile - in stock aerodynamics, best lift-drag ratio occurs at 2 degrees angle of attack subsonic, rising to 5 degrees at 2200 m/sec. With Ferram Aerospace mod, it'll be more like 10 AoA at mach 3.7. If you're finding the angle of attack needed to maintain level flight at those speeds and altitudes is higher than that needed for best lift/drag, you need more wing. If lower, you need less.

Regarding the issue of power, you are handicapped because the stock engines only cater for 1) flight inside an oxygen atmosphere 2) vacuum Inside a methane atmosphere, it would be possible to construct an aircraft that uses jet engines and carries only oxidizer, since fuel is literally everywhere. Even given an inert atmosphere, a nuclear turbojet, ramjet or turboramjet should be possible. With only the stock motors, you can't use NERV because the atmosphere is too thick or even Terrier, you'll be in closed cycle mode fighting atmospheric drag burning fuel and oxidiser getting less than 300 ISP. Maybe look at a mod like Atomic Age (has nuclear turbojet), or just mess around with engine config files in Notepad like i did in this thread -

Agree with what is said about parachutes, but this is proof it is possible to land an aircraft on Duna in 1.05. It does have a lot of wing though, on Kerbin it lands below 40 m/s, and 3 vernier engines thrusting downwards to help me flare without risk of tailstrike. I'd began the transfer orbit the night before the 1.05 patch arrived, and was forced to land on Duna with a vehicle designed under 1.04. Sounds like OP is very close to successful parachute deployment speed, at any rate.

Ah why didn't you say you were playing with FAR (Ferram Aerospace) mod ! That'll be why my plane wouldn't fly - it's heavily optimised for stock aerodynamics and has some tricks that would not work in real life, FAR is wise to them. Then again it messes with the stock aircraft too, the rules are so different. From what I hear, the stock aerodynamic model used to be virtually unflyable as well as hopelessly unrealistic. It's now more forgiving and quite easy to get stuff flying with it, in a semi realistic way. However, while it's still early days (only had it a week), I'm currently of the opinion that FAR does increase the difficulty along with the realism. I'm finding it much harder to create aircraft that are stable, capable of going fast high up and slow low down , like i can with the stock aero. That second plane looks nice. Change out the engine for a RAPIER , and the intake for an engine-precooler + tail cone combo, and it might make orbit...