hurdurdur

After all the advanced technology usage decided to take my knowledge down deep to the days of the beginning. This is space shuttle for small payloads, pretty small and pretty cheap. As this science stage has no proper wheels it lands in water. Everything but the boosters is recoverable. Price without the probe pictured is 14,506 credits (cargo is at the tail, since there is no cargo bay and drag in front would mess things up). I suppose an mk1 crew cabin would serve just fine there for crew transport as well. Struts are necessary since the command pod tended to fall off at landing ... and the front of the plane is normally not expected to fall off. Parachute is for reducing drag only, not used really. Takeoff is designed upside down due toe drag from the rudders, no point to fight it: Somehow forgot to take the screenshot from releasing the probe (had to go out to eva with the pilot and nudge it since it is so tight there). After detaching the probe pictured and doing the deorbit burn - i even had some fuel left (Jebediah knows he is in for a bonus). One must be very conservative with electricity though. Just remember one thing - there are no wheels, you have to land in water (at 50m/s horizontal speed it survives, or use the parachute (which i added to reduce drag only) and rocket engines to land on tail): Quite a scenic landing site. Full gallery from 2 flights can be found at http://imgur.com/a/naD3O

Here is my hopper that i use on .... Eve ... landing the bird there was quite a task (had to use a rocket assisted descent), but eventually all worked out fine. The klaw in the nose is there so i could easily dock with the mobile science lab rover that i also have landed on Eve. More pics at http://imgur.com/a/raMnz As visible from pictures also incorporates ore drill and fuel refinery, so i can cover distances, fuel up and do more. Biplane design was purely chosen to have max wing are and yet survive Eve entry behind the rocket that helped me to get down. Fuel refinery and science is in the nose of the aircraft, giving it a beautiful balance (COM almost never changes) and keeps it dead easy to fly.

Talking of rockets-that-assist-from-air-breathings , here is my heavy lifter with inspiration from Skylon. The rear wheel makes takeoffs and landings a bit easier. The whole design is there to get high twr and lift anything i can fit into the double cargo bay to orbit (and to land back safely again). Enough power and control to forgive a lot of mistakes. Unmanned since the mk3 cabin part is too heavy, docking ports on either end just in case, engine weight in the middle to ease balancing and flight. It is advisable to burn pretty much all the fuel before the landing, this bird doesn't quite have the wing area to make pretty landings when it's heavy.

My one more go at the shallow ascent. At 50km the crew cabin and intake wanted to catch fire really bad (last mm missing from explosion by the red bar visual) but somehow stayed together, on descent just had to rotate-tumble like crazy out of control in order not to burn up the intake. Used 1117 units of fuel to get up there (77x80 orbit), but since i had a tank extra this time i had 483 left - a bit better than the 2 intake plane, but i truly disliked almost catching fire. Handling was excellent, just had to control authority on the canards. I don't use the reverse cones on engines, sort of feels like too much cheating. edit: when i switch the cargo area in front of the cabin used ramp intake instead then i got way less heating problems and nearly the same fuel economy, had to pitch up more agressively after 1500m/s surface speed.

I'm afraid the "cruise into an orbit like an airliner" is since you were using the rapier to gather loads of speed at first. If i try the same approach with 2 nuclears + 2 panthers then the drag just wears you down. I managed one super streamlined design and barely barely get into orbit with that configuration, leaving me with less fuel than the over-nuked design here. Problem with panthers is that they have a low speed ceiling and in this super shallow ascent mode they drop the thrust before you even reach 15km properly. Also the cockpit started to show overheating symptoms since the acceleration took a while. You can prove me wrong with a better design of course Added a screenshot of a 2 nuke + 1 panther that actually made it to orbit (during writing this post) with a shallowisch ascent and then landed into the ocean since i had trouble pinpointing the ksp with the amount of fuel left. Pic of the smooth landing as well in http://imgur.com/a/hByvN

Redid my micro plane concept by replacing the panthers with ramjets and replacing one nuke with a ramjet as well. Figured it should make it into orbit just as well. Oh yes it did, it also went to mun orbit and back, proper flying would give even better results. Threw it into a video (Edit: fixed the link)

Nice indeed. I am still waiting to get a truck of my own to minmus, just for the style

After flying around with rapiers and all sorts of things i decided to try to do without them. Even without ramjets and the coned intakes. Here it is , panthers and and nukes only, no oxidizer at all, using parts that are available rather low in the tech tree. Ascent profile for this is somewhat unusual darting upwards sharply with panthers in wet mode until you get up to about 700-800m/s speed (panthers in wet mode since takeoff), then around 8k panthers are getting too fast and too high, starting to lose the power - time to switch on the nukes. Yes they only have ~50kN at these altitudes but it doesn't matter, aim for a ~30-40 degree ascent, keep watching your periapsis, as you keep this crazy ascent it will go further in time eventually coming to about 75km and 1m30s away from you, aim for prograde do the maneuver nodes etc. On my quite bad takeoff here i got to orbit with 628 liq. fuel left, i think not the worst i have done. On descent it's easy to lose control - to recover pump the fuel forwards, invoke panthers if necessary to regain control. Lands quite easily to ground at the end. Some more notes - i have bound "Lights" to close the intakes, i do it around 24-25k when the panthers lose the last of their thrust. When in orbit i switch the panthers to dry mode (fuel efficiency for landing maneuvers). After retrograde burn for deorbit i disable the nukes already in space and enable the panthers (and open the air intakes again!). As seen on the screenshot i actually had almost 25% fuel left after deorbit and landing, after some pretty bad flying. So you can fool around in orbit as well if you wish (those nukes are crazy efficient). The part after command module is structural fuselage, just to make the plane a bit longer and more natural. Into the service bay i hid some batteries, 1x6 solar panels and a probodyne hecs (so i could use non-pilots to fly). Hope this helps people who don't have rapiers yet in career, but really badly want just a space plane