mk1980

if they decide to actually do a KSP 2 rather than some sort of spin-off or completely unrelated game as their next project, i think they should move away from the unity engine and develop their own custom engine that can handle more complex physics. as for gameplay features etc. - don't really know. i guess it would be nice to have more detailed planets and more stuff to do once you get there. not sure about colonization, other star systems and all that jazz. I don't think that fits the spirit of KSP. it's mostly a space travelling game with somewhat realistic rockets and orbital mechanics, not a sci fi game based on technologies we might (or might not) have in a few hundred years. i kind of grew attached to the kerbals with their stupid bulbous eyes and their huge heads, so i wouldn't mind seeing other games from squad that use kerbals as protagonists. doesn't have to be another space game. could be anything, really.

it doesn't use the same amount of fuel. it uses less than half the amount of fuel compared to the Poodle. And that's also its main selling point - you get a lot more mileage out of your fuel reserves, so you can get to places with much less fuel (or get to places easily that would be very difficult to reach with much less efficient "normal" rocket engines). Note that the LV-N only burns the Liquid fuel and has no use for oxidizer, so you should use LF-only tanks (airplane fuel tanks) for nuclear ships. The downsides of the LV-N are low thrust, heavy weight and high cost, so it may not be the best choice for relatively simple tasks like going to the Mun. It's very good for interplanetary transfers, though.

i think your landers should get the job done easily. they'd probably have enough fuel to not only land on ike/duna but also return to orbit and transfer back to kerbin. the duna lander could have used some more parachutes (especially some drogue chutes) for a pure parachute landing. not sure if that will be possible - but a "semi powered" landing (ie do some retro burning to get to parachute safe speeds and to reduce the speed of the final touchdown) should work all right. heat shields are generally not required for duna in my experience. the lander probably has enough heat resistance to survive direct aerocapture from transfer. using the same lander for ike is actually a bit overkill. Ike has pretty low gravity, so a terrier engine would have been more than enough. your safety margins are pretty large with the amount of fuel you brought along, so i think your mission will work as planned.

a while back i used a rocket plane to get a mun lander to LKO the lander was designed to fit in a mk3 cargo bay, since you use the longer version of the bay, you might be able to build a larger, fully reusable lander (my lander used drop tanks to make it small enough). as an added bonus, you could do some aerobraking upon return and get back into an orbit and the space shuttle could pick up the lander and carry it down to the surface. does that make sense as a mission?

if you want to unlock the tech tree in the least amount of real time, your best bet is probably to do a few trips to mun/minmus to get enough science to unlock the mobile processing lab. labs can churn out enormous amounts of research points within very little real time and very little manual input. just collect some data somewhere and get it to your lab for processing. boring but very "real time efficient"

i don't think there's much use for cargo shuttles in career at all. you could just launch the payload directly with a rocket that is cheaper than the disposable components you use for the shuttle launch. basically, it boils down to "it's not worth launching a 20 ton shuttle that delivers a 5 ton payload when it's cheaper to directly deliver the 5 ton payload". mk2 shuttles are nice for crew missions (tourists for example), though. the mk2 passenger cabin weighs less than the hitchhiker and an mk2 shuttle survives reentry without heatshields and lands without chutes, so mk2 shuttles can be lighter than pods of similar crew capacity and have a better recovery value.

i don't play RSS, but if the gravity turn works similar to a kerbin ascent, "add 1500 m/s" won't work. kerbin has ~2300 m/s orbital velocity and you usually need something like 3400+- m/s to orbit, so a simple rule of thumb would be more like "+50%"

actually i only wanted to test your craft, but then i couldn't help but redesign the whole thing (except for the orbiter/shuttle, that is mostly "intact" still. i realize that this ir probably not what you were looking for, but i made a few images anyway. maybe they can serve as inspiration

900,000 founds for a mun landing sounds very expensive. maybe it would be a good idea to check some of the premade rockets in a new sandbox game (no worries- you can start multiple campaigns in parallel - the new sandbox game won't kill you current career save). the "KerbalX" stock rocket is a nice rocket for training mun landings. it's actually a bit overengineered, but that doesn't matter. it has a capsule with 3 seats and i think it would cost something like 60,000 funds (of course in sandbox there are no funds, but the price is displayed anyway). load that rocket and try to get it to the mun. if you fail, you lose nothing. after a few tries you'll probably get it right. you can also check the in game trainign missions if you haven't done them yet. maybe you can learn a thing or two how to build and fly cheaper rockets that get the job done on a reasonable budget.

according to the wiki (no idea if that's still accurate) flyby is 1 XP and the xp modifier of minmus is x2.5, so the minmus flyby probably only counts as 2.5 XP but is rounded up in the display. if that's how it works, your kerbal actually only has 7.5 XP in total.

i'm a bit confused about the orbit from which you reenter. is the shuttle in a high orbit or in a low orbit? shouldn't matter too much either way i guess. try different techniques. Streetwind explained it much better than i could, but in my experience, it's often a good idea to come down relatively steep. it's dangerous to put your periaps at 20 km when you come in from a trip to mun or minmus or an interplanetary transfer, but the heat resistance of spaceplane parts is actually more than enough to survive a failry aggressive reentry from a stable kerbin orbit. assuming your shuttle is somewhere in a relatively low orbit (something like 70 to 150 km), it's probably safe to do a retro burn that puts your periaps below ground level (but not too far below - you don't want to drop down vertically like a stone). this way, you don't spend much time in the upper atmosphere where you just soak up lots of heat for very little drag. while you're still in the upper atmosphere (40km or higher), you can probably keep a radial attitude without too much work. the critiical part of the spaceplane is the cockpit - and by "pancaking" you make sure that the cockpit doesn't take all the heat. also, this means that you use the broad side of the wings as huge airbrakes. you still won't lose much speed so high up, but you won't heat up the cockpit and you will lose much more velocity than by going in nose first. once you get lower, you probably wont be able to keep the nose pointed in radial attitude - aero forces will more or less try to force it into a "nose first" dive. you want to avoid that at all cost - in a nose dive, the cockpit takes all the heat and unfortunately, the cockpit has the worst heat resistance of all the parts. if you can't hold a radial attitude, start pitching the nose up and down. this way, the wings will still act as airbrakes at least for the few seconds before aerodynamics force you down/up again, and the cockpit will be out of the airstream for a bit and has a few seconds to transfer heat to adjacent parts. to be honest, the easiest solution is probably to turn the spaceplane into a drone plane and get rid of the cockpit altogether. use a combination of adapter tanks (mk3 to 2.5 and then a 2.5 to 1.25 meters) and put a service bay and a shielded docking port in front (as the nose). put a probe core with some batteries in the service bay to control the plane. the shielded docking port is very heat resistant and if you somehow blow it up, the service bay below it is even more heat resistant.

i think you're overestimating the problem. you will lose a few hundred meters AP altitude (probably even a few kilometers) when you cut your engines while you're still somewhere at 30-40km current altitude, but the loss looks much worse than it really is. in my experience, when the plane (or rocket) gets near orbital velocity, the AP increases very very quickly. at first, it takes a long time to get it to 70km+, but once you're moving around 2300 m/s, a few seconds of thrust can raise the AP from 70 to 100+ km. the reverse is also true - lose a few m/s to drag and you lose hundreds of meters of altitude. i don't really bother trying to get an optimal cutoff point. i usually cut off when the AP is around 80km and if it drops dangerously close to 70km during the "coasting" phase, i just fire up the engines for a second or two to correct the problem.

you could use aircraft wings on the bottom of the rocket (Structural Wing Type A for example) and either use them directly as landing gear (don't know if they have decent crash tolerance) or add landing legs or stuctural pylons at the low end of the wings. You also get a wider base this way, so the rocket is less likely to fall over, and the wings act as stabilizers during ascent. also, that little lander can could probably be lifted SSTO by a skipper + 1 jumbo tank. i think the mainsail is a bit exsessive. not really sure it's worth the effort, though. don't neglect real time (ie. the actual play time you spend) as an economic factor. the time you spend deorbiting and landing the lifter rocket could be spent doing other missions that probably yield more funds than the recovery value of the SSTO rockets. it may actually be more economic to use much cheaper "throwaway" rockets to get the job done and do a few simple high yield contracts to fund your operations. an average satellite contract within the Kerbin SOI yields something like 50k -100k funds and can be done with a rocket that costs little more then 5k funds (plus the cost of the science experiment specified by the contract)

in my experience, you can pretty much brute force your way out of the atmosphere with rapiers or a combination of aerospikes & whiplash. basically, just put a shielded docking port on the nose of the plane so it doesn't burn up at high speeds. my usual ascent profile is to climb up to about 10 km fairly steeply, then level out, breach the sound barrier and resume a shallow climb to gain as much speed as possible before switching over to rockets. the high heat resistance of the shielded docking port makes sure your plane can survive the heat, so you can "milk" the jet engines quite a lot longer than with the mk1/mk2 cockpits. it's not an elegant solution, but it gets the job done efficiently. the key here is that jet engines deliver lots of thrust at high speeds and as you climb higher, drag gets lower, so you can keep accelerating even though the engines lose thrust at higher levels. with a shallow climb from ~10 km upwards, rapiers typically top out around 1600 m/s at 20km+; the whiplash is less efficient at high speeds and tops out around 1350 m/s. from there, you basically switch over to rockets and keep accelerating. not really sure if it's worth climbing steeper when you switched over. i guess it depends on the arodynamics of the plane. don't try that with an mk1 or mk2 cockpit at the nose of the plane - they will just explode (no idea if the mk3 cockpit is any better, i don't think i ever used that thing) the nice thing is- since you're already at 1600m/s before you switch over to closed cycle, you don't need a whole lot of oxidizer to accelerate further until you reach orbital speeds. i'm sure a more elegant solution with optimzed drag and angle of attack can get the job done with less fuel consumption, but the simple brute force approach works pretty well with anything from small crew shuttles that only transport some kerbals to giant cargo planes that lift substantial payloads to orbit. also, the docking port obviously comes in handy once you're in orbit and it basically works a heatshield during reentry.

yet another entry from my side. this time the goal was to get a ridiculously large payload to space, using a ridiculously large plane. as seen in the first image, the "Winged Nightmare" has a total mass of 466,160 kg and 185 parts (including the payload - the big fuel tank thing strapped to the back of the plane) the payload mass in orbit (after deployment) is 96,410 kg (as seen in of the images below) i didn't manage a landing on the runway, but pretty close (last image)

oh yes, you're right about the excessive fuel. that was one of my first SSTOs so it's not really optimized in any way and i probably made lots of rookie mistakes in the ascent. i guess my point is that you could probably just slap on some more fuel without doing a fundamental redesign and it would still fly reasonably well. in the end, it's about getting stuff to orbit. imrpoving overall efficiency is the elegant solution, but in some cases a simple "brute force" approach will get the job done, too.

you're probably overthinking the whole problem. you don't make it to orbit because you don't have enough LF/Ox fuel. here's a simple low tech SSTO i made a while back (as you can tell from the landing gear, it's from version 1.05). got it to orbit, but it only had ~150 m/s left at 75x75 km orbit, so it could use some more fuel if you want to get to a higher orbit. in retrospect, it would have been smarter to use a single swivel instead of a pair of thuds. that alone might improve efficiency enough to get it to a higher orbit and back (i think)

another spaceplane i recently made. basically a sandbox concept for a big fuel tanker. the biggest plane i built so far. originally, the plan was to get the fuel in the (locked) 4 segment mk3 Lf/Ox tank to orbit as payload (4500LF/5500 oxi). actually it worked better than expected - arrived in orbit with a bit more than 9000 LF and 10000 Oxidizer. who needs ISRU when you can get 100 tons of fuel to LKO in one flight i think i'm getting the hang of that SSTO stuff. might make something even bigger. some day. surprisingly, it only took about half a dozen struts in total to make that monster stable.

@boolybooly sorry for the late reply! I've been away for a few days. i might still have the quicksave a few seconds before the final landing where the panel was destroyed. does the roundtrip count as a proper entry if i reload and manage to splash down without destroying the solar panel? (i could make a screenshot of the F3 screen if i succeed) EDIT: last quicksave was literally only ~3 seconds before splashdown. i reloaded it and managed to splash the plane down a bit softer without breaking anything. see image below - no entries in flight events and part count in the KER display is the same as on all the other images. your decision if it's a legitimate entry to the challenge now. don't want to start an argument. if you say it's not, I have no problem with an entry in the gatecrasher list, either.

interesting. i usually do a much more aggressive deorbit, which works niccely for me. if i can afford the slightly more expensive burn, i do the retro burn about halfway above the desert on the continent west of KSC and burn the PE below 0. basically i burn until the projected trajectory intersects the ground about halfway in the gulf/ocean east of KSC. seems to work nicely. mk1 parts get hot but usually survive. mk2/mk3 are often down to safe speeds without even showing heat bars. whenever i try to bleed off speed in the higher atmosphere (PE at 50km or something), it just builds up lots of heat and doesn't really slow down. so my reasoning was - if the braking effect only really kicks in at ~35km, i want to get down to 35km ASAP so the parts are exposed to the heat for only a short time. with the retro burn above the desert continent, i'm usually down to ~35km somewhere near the west coast of the KSC continent and then speed drops very quickly to "safe" velocities where even Mk1 parts start cooling down again. seems to work, so i thought that's actually the way it was supposed to work.

don't think so. the rules state pretty clearly that ISRU and refueliling are not allowed for the challenge

thanks for the reply. no- forget that mk2 fuel plane. if i find the time, i might make a better version of it and post it as a separate entry. i finished a new roundtrip. hope it qualifies. didn't quite make it back to KSC and the F3 screen says one solar panel broke in the (final) landing. anyway - even if it doesn't qualify, i'm gonna share my little adventure. it's basically a replay of my first attempt, but this time i packed a few chutes for the final descent to dunas surface. not sue if this is allowed by your rules?

sorry, this time i overlooked your question the first plane is "Startours 2" (only found 1 image of its smaller predecesor, not worth posting). i think the images cover the start, docking and the landing. didn't find images of the ascent or descent. don't know why i actually added the other plane (the Mk2 fuel drone). it worked all right, but i only used it once and landed like 100 km away from KSC. so i guess that plane was a "partial success". are we allowed to post multiple planes? i recently started a little experiment with an interplanetary SSTO trip. might make a nice addition to the list. flew it to duna but failed to land. I could retry it and land it on Ike instead, or fly to gilly and land there. rapiers and nukes, no ISRU - i think that would be compliant with the rules of your challenge (?)

i like that idea a lot. always feels wrong to build all sorts of orbital stations and surface outposts and to expand previously built stuff and then leave them empty. and it feels just as wrong to randomly put some resuced kerbals in there without any purpose just so the station doesn't feel like the pointless emtpy husk it really is. contracts to get civilian personnell up there (and back) would make the whole base building business a lot more believable.

yes that has been my experience, too. i made a fuel tanker based on panther engines and it worked "ok-ish" but it was probably not worth the effort. it could lift a "1 segment" mk3 LF tank to my orbital depot (2500 units LF - 12.5 tons payload) but it was a bit unblanced with emtpy tanks and so i messed up the reentry and had to land it somewhere 100 km away from KSC. that reduced the recovery value quite a bit. in the end i payed about 12k funds for the fuel delivery. not super bad, but not efficient enough to put in the extra effort of landing the damn thing.