moar ssto

This is another mission done quite a while ago, not so much time after heat shield magic wings were indepedantly discovered by several players. In terms of mission finish time, it was the first craft of its kind to complete a full mission of any sort, as well as the first EC powered ssto. These kind of SSTOs are remarkably efficient in terms of getting into orbit, reaching at least 30% of effective payload fraction launching from Earth with a still acceptable thrust to weight ratio, and without any crazy mass optimisations. They are also ideal for tackling atmospheric bodies with high dv needs and mid to moderately high gravity levels. With this kind of basic setup, stock super-kerbins, super-jools, real scale Earth sized planets lacking oxygen, real scaled superearths and some real scale gas giants(fine for at least the dv requirements of Saturn) and super-scale terrestrial planets, at leasts up to 10xearth, can be orbited single staged, with various level of difficulty.

Thank you It was quite a while ago so I don't know the details, but I was stuck at the upload craft menu.

I think I had issues with uploading things to kerbal x in the past.

Thank you Thank you. Yes, I can, but how do I upload craftfile, or otherwise send the file to you?

I recently edited out the clips of a mission done one and a half years ago. While there are claims of fully reusable lunar missions done with stock parts predating this mission way back, they relied on splitting the timeline during stage separation, so in their respective timeline, either the booster crashes, or the payload never reaches orbit. To my knowledge, this was the first stock craft, based on mission finish date, able to finish a fully reusable mission beyond LEO in RSS(there is a interplanetary SSTO launched earlier, but I only managed to finish the mission after this was done due to a mission extension and some complications with the Kraken). It was based off of some earlier sstos, being scaled down to basically just be able to get up to leo with the lunar lander., so payload fraction wasn't high, just below 2%(at least 4.2% can be attained on large, stock part conventional wing sstos in RSS). The three solar panels were clipped into two, solar panels don't occlude each other from sunlight in this scenario. As for the mass, this mission was done before I along with others discovered magic wings, if this was done now, the mass would be way lower, probably around 2t, which I might explore in the future. Magic or conventional, there is a lot of design space and optimisation to explore with stock SSTOs in RSS.

I came back from Jupiter sea level and from its four Gallelean moons in a fully reusable craft,(a modular ssto). Mission was done in collaboration with OndrikB.

I see, yea, there will be some debate over whether or not they are wings, as dispite they are not put under the same category in sph, they do have a lifting surface module, as with regular wings, and has a decent(in fact, extraordinary) lift related aero characteristics.

Is the 2/3 payload fraction wingless craft a purely ballistic craft? Or it uses very long takeoff runs to use wheels effectively as wings, or it has some form of magic wing? An ssto without any aero optimisation is quite hard to judge, as you can gradually transform a craft, from just a pile of draggy fuel tanks and engines, to some rootfairing flag montrousity, and including the various widely used forms in this process. You would need to ask very particular questions, like whether there are non standard liting surfaces, whether there is a root fairing, whether there is a fairing, whether there ispart clipping, whether there is node occlusion, ect.

I don't think there is much issue with stock aero model, except for the need of more informantion that allow users to better understand their craft global behaviour, and more stability(removing load/computer caused inconsistencies, like fairings not occluding a a part during one loading, while occluding the same part on the same craft when loading the same save next time again). Stock aero model,being not realistics and intuitive, encourages you to do more science in the game, to summerise behaviours and interactions, and encounrages looking at data, like drag cubes, float curves, lift coefficients ect, numerical wing loading, rather than intuitive things like how pointy/streamlined it looks, and whether wings look big or small., though I won't disagree that for starters, this feels more blackbox and frustuating than a more shape dependent system. Stock aero model also encourages you to use some level of matheatical models, complicated enough to let you ponder for a while sometimes, while simple enough that you don't need intense extra game computational resources to do optimisations. A FAR like shape dependent system could preserve some of these, but I think the complexity involved, for those that are interested in deep optimisation, is just way too much, directly working with shapes, will involve a lot more variables, and the math propabbaly won't be as easy as something you can do on the back of few sheet of paper and a calculator, but would probably involve decent amount of programming, and possibly modding to extract detailed craft shap from the game. As for aero exploits, and peculiarities, as long as being fully aware of them, a player can simply choose to view them as pathways for optimisation, and use them, or bugs that hurt gameplay/realism, and avoid them. These things, as long as the player being aware of them, is easy to control to whether include or not include in a craft. There is, however, a much bigger problem with ksp's physcis, is it's inconsitency and errors, which would be far more manecing than now if when we introduce interstellar distances, and celestial bodies with more extreme physical characteristics. (orbital drifting, loading under terrain/mid air, terrain bugging out for distant bodies, structure of craft degrading over times you load it ext.) If you have played with some real scale exoplanet packs, for which we are talking about distace measured in lightyears, you will see, how annoying, and sometimes deadly, these issues are.

The flattest body, exluding some very flat patches on earth, is probably Titan.It's still not perfectly flat as minmus, but overall comparable to the landcape near ksc. This plus it's very dense atmo and low gravity makes getting airborne from it really easy. The next flattest body is probably triton, comparable in flatness to some parts of eeloo, ie it is smooth enough to make getting a long and high airborne on a wheeled vehicle very hard, but not smooth enough to safely reach very high speeds. Some of the small saturnian and uranian moons are also quite flat.(the next flattest might be Rhea). Europa and Eceladus are no where near flat as I remembered though.

I'v made a fully stock ssto for rss about 2 years ago, then progressively expanded the performance envelope of stock sstos in RSS(with some part merging to reduce lag). For a reference, a conventional wing ssto, with refueling, can do all the planets, dwarf planets and moons except the gas giant themselves and venus, in a single staged round trip(plus the ability to go interstellar to a planet between the size of mars and earth and come back); a magic wing+dlc prop ssto can do a venus round trip without refueling, and ssto from any one of saturn, uranus and neptune(but without the ability to return to earth just by itself) while a magic prop ssto can do do unrefueled round trip to any one, possibly all three in one trip, of saturn, uranus and neptune, or ssto from jupiter sea level(but without the ability to complete round trip just by itself).

following maneuver nodes is a good way to preserve your argument of periapsis. That small radial component tries to act againts shifting aop by the prograde component not appliead at pe, of course there are limitations, for long burn time, neither method will conserve aop. and if your pe rises, even if you can keep it at the same argument, with the same final specific orbital energy, the eccentricity, hence ejection direction ,will be different from what you have pulled with the node. That will result in change in timing of your arrival. For that particualr burn, he didn't escape soi, just transfering to the Moon. And that is the reason you should avoid sizable final ejections. In the lower end, you need to do multiple munar/lunar assists to get to venus/eve.

But burns are not instantenaous, so pe will rise, I'v seen someone doing coulple hundred prograde burns and found himself needed to make an additional node to lower the periapsis again to the desired altitude. Maneuvers are not just about instantenous energy efficiency, but also about choosing a path that gives more energy efficiency. Burning in prograde, will cause you maximise instantanous energy efficiency at this given velocity and position, but if you can keep yourself on a lower, faster trajectory forehand, you may enjoy better efficiency. For the same reason, vehicles taking off from vacuum bodies don't use gravity turn, but rather picth up and fly as low and as horizontal as possible near the surface.

The best the way to deal with low twr burn is just to avoid using any substancial final ejection(by sending it onto a gravity assist chain, and avoid any direct transfer to non adjacent bodies), and split the orbit raising burns into many miniburns that conserves aop and pe height. This should reduce the losses to something basically negligable, reguardless you use prograde facing or node facing burn. Prograde facing burn is not neccessarily the best, since you will rasie your periapsis, which reduces the oobert effect on later burns. The net cosine losses associated with not pointing prograde is only O(single burn time^3), so really small for short burns. And when trasfering to a target with relative inclination, an innaccurate ejection burn can cause significantly large correction burns.

And the craft has landed, on the targeted landing site on trappist 1d