Dear K-Prize commitee and fellow kerbonauts,
This is my first time doing a challenge like this so my first working craft was far from optimal I'm sure, nevertheless I made it to orbit (and with about 1.4% fuel remaining, no less ). I thought I'd share my final workingish design along with some of my failures along the way! The final craft is at the bottom if you just want to see that.
I actually lost my first real attempt at the save because it was some time ago and I never had the foresight to take screenshots or anything as such before my hard drive failed a few days after. As they say, hindsight's 2020 and I'll be using SSDs from here on out! It was, iirc, a fairly simple design using a mk2 body using 2 vectors for high altitude thrust and two whiplashes with precoolers and ramp intakes for atmospheric thrust. As you might predict, it never had anywhere near enough delta v at high altitude to make it to orbit. So I figured I'd try a new design with a larger body to hold all of that juicy rocket fuel. I used the mk3 form factor to design a new ship with fuel for itself and a couple cities to boot. The original design consisted of 4 vectors and 2 goliaths, however, this suffered from several different issues, not least of which a missing set of landing gear!
After correcting that and adding more goliaths to increase thrust, I started having problems with the entire wing sections falling apart!
I decided to the, opt for a more space-shuttle esque design, with heavy thrust at the back (4 vectors and 4 whiplash) and flatter, shorter wings (big-s delta). This worked much better, in that it got off the runway, however, the shorter body didn't hold enough fuel to get itself off the ground and unlike a bee, this craft had to obey the laws of aviation and as such it set sail on a fateful voyage that (thankfully) ended in a safe landing back in kerbin's oceans, after a short, suborbital hop.
After this, started trying to using, as the old adage goes, more thrusters, however, this, rather predictably, didn't quite help with my predicament of not having enough fuel.
So, after all these failures. I gave up and moved onto greener pastures in some other games. The next day, however, I came back from work with a renewed sense of determination. I had 328 hours in the game and I'd be damned if I couldn't complete this challenge. So I sat down, taking in my knowledge of vectors not delivering enough thrust and big ships being too hard to lift and stay intact, and I came up with this.
This ship used a much smaller, LF only frame to get itself as high as possible with as low as possible mass. The total mass when fully fueled ended up being only 20t, almost low enough to build in the starting hangar and runway. The ship also featured two nerv enginges which provided the high efficiency thrust at high altitude that the ship needed to get into orbit. The following screenshots are actually from an slightly different early ship which had fewer parachutes which actually caused the loss of one of the nerv engines at touchdown, as the ship was travelling very fast and the wheels didn't allow much clearance.
And of course, my poor poor fuel tanks after *just* making it into orbit.
Sorry for the long post, I just thought I'd share my first-time experience with some of you veterans to remind you of the days when this was hard for you (it still is for me haha). I hope you like the design I finally settled on and rest assured that I'll be tinkering away to try and complete some of the sub-challenges soon, but for now, I'm happy with my ship actually making it to orbit and back. This is the first time I've done an SSTO successfully and hopefully it wont be the last!
