Exothermos

Oh, I'm sure I will! I haven't had time to even play the game this week, so I have yet to fiddle with them. Based on the stuff I've seen in videos they do seem to be a little "easy mode". But I haven't been averse to spamming intakes to get results, and I will use these parts with similar abandon. I'm really looking forward to reducing complexity and part count on future designs, and I'm probably going to retrofit older designs as well. That's an interesting point about the nuke / jet versus runaway weight issues when using the rapiers. When I saw the ISP numbers it seemed likely that Rapiers will be best for LKO missions. Here, total weight and fuel efficiency isn't terribly important. Interplanetary stuff probably will stick to jets / nukes. However it might make sense to switch out some engines in large designs for the rapiers if it is weight saving. For instance on the aeon I could, perhaps, drop the set of aerospikes and a set of jets to be replaced by one set of Rapiers. We'll see! It's a new frontier and, I think, a new hay day for SSTOs!

If we angle the jets towards the CoM, would it be Staboass? Nice planes!

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that one in general. I'm working on a cargo craft to deliver payloads to LKO based on the construction of the Aeon, but it is fighting me, surprisingly. It works, but I want it to be an easy and enjoyable experience to get to orbit. I'm fighting to avoid the 25 degre, half-hour climb to orbit that crafts with high payload fractions seem to suffer from. That means increasing the TWR for a more authoritative climb, which means more engines, and thus parts, which is computer-wrecking "no fun". It's a challenge, but if it were easy it would be boring!

Take a break or try just goofing around. Make something out of the parts you never use. Try to get something ridiculous to work, or visit another planet. Don't make SSTOs for a while. Eventually something will spark your imagination and you'll be back at it with a vengeance.

In regards to your Bat'leth SSI shuttle, you meantion "...the ship has a tendency to not stick to exactly where you are pointing." My SSI shuttle does exactly the same thing, and it is what made me dump it on that community in exasperation. It "Hunts" around randomly. Do you have any clues as to the cause? Some of my other heavily clipped, small & dense designs show this tendency too, albeit in a much more subtle way. I'm thinking it's a large mass / short fuselage problem.

I finally got off my butt and finished these! They're available on my build thread. Rune: I agree with the others, that little SSTO is sweet. I love the T-tail, It's like a Learjet with a rocket pack Fellow314: Now THAT's a payload fraction! Did you have to use any of the payload's fuel? EDIT: Never mind, I can see you have delivered different payloads too... seriously impressive. It doesn't look like it should work. You should drop the .craft file for us so that we may all learn!

4 NEW SSTOs Added to the Front Page OP! Here is the Aeon Post for safe keeping: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Aeon Cargo SSTO I've been working on this ship for quite a while, and it has finally come to fruition. Inspired by pa1983's awesome interplanetary SSTOs , I decided to try something similar. The goal was to deliver a big, heavy rover to my little Duna colony with an SSTO. Ideally, accomplishing this all in one stage: Plane takes off, goes to Duna, lands, drops cargo, achieves Duna orbit, transfers home. On top of this, for playability, I wanted to try for less than 500 parts. This ship achieves many of those performance goals, but not all. A Tug will be needed for the planetary transfer between Kerbin and Duna, and the partcount is around 600 with a tug in place. This keeps the part count down to a playable 550 on the SSTO section (At least it is playable on my computer; see Tips section for performance tweaks). Oh well, you can't have it all. While I was at it, I decided to try a few new things on this design with landing and payload delivery. Landing on Duna in a spaceplane is incredibly difficult. The atmosphere is very thin, and the terrain is... "duney", making normal glide slope landings all but impossible in a large SSTO like this. Parachutes to the rescue! One can land this ship like a conventional powered vertical lander, slowing with aerospikes, or go for a fuel-saving powered paragliding-style landing. Personally I like using all those lifting surfaces and do the paragliding. Just make sure to hit f5! Once landed, putt-putt around until you find a reasonably flat area to deliver the payload. extend your kickstands [7], kneel the plane down [8], uncouple the payload, extend the main legs [9]. Now you can drive your rover out! For take-off, find a gentle downward slope, turn RCS on, and hit the main engines. You can use the vertical Aerospikes [0] to help lift-off. There is plenty of gas and power to get back to Low Duna orbit, and if you were thrifty with fuel (use your NERVAs as much as possible, not the aerospikes), you can then make the transfer back to Kerbin on one tank. Tips: 1) For a huge performance gain with almost no discernible side effects, turn the physics passes down in your settings. "Max Physics Delta-Time per Frame" is the setting, slide it to the right as much as needed. You can further tweak it in the Config file if you want to. 2) Ascent on Kerbin is standard Air Hogging fare. Turn Engines off as needed, and accelerate at 30k altitude. 3) When landing on Duna, chose the lowest point possible for easiest landing. 4) For Kerbin reentry, the plane handles best with full Fuselage tanks, if you have left over fuel pump it to these parts. Do not fly at high angles of attack on reentry. 5) Rover particulars: Lock stearing on the rear wheels, and turn off the motors on the front most wheels for maximum stability. The rover will do over 25 m/s on duna, but that is... "Not Advised". 6) The ship will function manned or unmanned. If you elect to have a kerbal (or 5) on board, click the docking port on the nose and hit "Control from Here" to orient everything appropriately. Action Groups: [1]Outboard Jet Engines [2]Jets [3]Jets [4]NERVAs [5]Aerospikes [6]Air Intakes [7]Kickstands [8]Gear [9]Main Legs [0]Vertical Aerospikes So there you have it, a big rover-dropping SSTO truck. One could easily repurpose this design for LKO payload delivery by deleting all the heavy landing apparatus, and slapping your own payload in. If you don't have much experience landing spaceplanes on Duna, you are going to crash it at first. I did, a lot. And frankly now that I have this under my belt, I probably won't revisit the idea for Duna. Conventional rocket powered landers really make more sense there, but where is the adventure in that?! Landing on Laythe, on the other hand, is a cinch in comparison. But I'll leave the particulars for you to discover. DOWNLOAD Aeon Cargo SSTO

It's coming! It's being released this weekend with a couple other smaller SSTOs. Basically, whenever I have time to write up the post and juggle all the file and picture editing/dumping.

Woah! This is a surprise, Cool! Thanks everybody! I will endevor to release some of the 5 or 6 SSTOs I am juggling "while the iron is hot", so to speak.

The fact that these work at all in KSP is amazing. I love your decoupler rotor design, and how the fuel lines infinitely twist around the shaft and somehow the structural pieces pass through each other while rotating. v0v The end result is a freaking helicopter in a game where no rotating or gimbaling pieces are provided! I'm glad you provided an escape pod plan too. I may or may not have used it many times. So great.

Good! It's almost there. I'm just tweaking fuel flow stuff and other minor things. I have to do a couple more missions with it to shake-out any issues. Technically, it is not really VTOL, or rather it is only VTOL on the Mun. It takes off and lands conventionally on kerbin, and delivers payload on the Mun vertically. This allows the payload to deploy with out crazy acrobatics, or wheeled payloads and loading ramps. Thoughts on big VTOL SSTOs: I found that VTOL on Kerbin with a Cargo capable craft is really just too expensive from a weight standpoint. Creating a greater than 1:1 TWR vertical engines with a full payload is silly when you can have wings do the lifting for you, and then you aren't carrying a bunch of gimmicky dead weight for 95% of the flight in conventional forward motion. In this case 4 light LV-909s are all that are needed to provide 1:1 TWR on the Mun. I suppose a True atmospheric VTOL would have good use on Laythe to avoid eventful landings, but for descent parachutes would really be the way to go (something like my Aeon). Then, once lighter after delivering the payoad, vertical engines could eliminate a need for a bouncy takeoff run. The other way to approach the VTOL issue is what we see in Cupcake's cool dropships. With using the same engines for vertical and horizontal flight and translating the whole vehicle one can avoid two sets of engines. However, when lifting heavy loads, a LOT more Jets and liquid fuel would be needed when compared to a winged aircraft. These are just dead weight in the upper atmosphere and space, of course, so there is added inefficiency there. I like little VTOL SSTOs for the coolness factor alone, but when it comes to these more demanding Lifting SSTOs, it is just too inefficient. Eh... it's not going to win any awards for maneuverability on full tanks, but it can hold it's own. Plenty of control authority, and rotation is about 100m/s. Once the rocket fuel is burned it is, naturally, a hot rod: Stalling at 35 m/s at sea level. As far as fuel concerns at orbit here is the shot above with all the HUD info. So at nearly 150km it has over a third fuel left for orbital maneuvers. It isn't going to the Mun or anything, but it's got plenty of LKO DV. Overfloater, your lifter is really cool. Thinkin' out side of the box!

Glad you like it! I must admit, I have experienced the reentry spin a time or two as well in the Ardent. I've since realized that this is because the drag from the air intakes is so far forward, and the fuselage is very short, so that the plane wants to swap ends on reentry. The best way to avoid this on the current design is to keep your intakes closed until around 15,000 meters and keep your nose on your Navball pip. You won't need them anyway. Also, a steep reentry angle seems to exacerbate it. As my previous sentence alluded to, I am in the middle of optimizing all of my designs with little fixes that I have learned in the months since their original design. Currently the Accipiter and the Agilus are on the Table and are essentially complete. The Accipiter is getting more thrust, better fuel flow, and much lower part count, and the Agilus is getting an engine swap to decrease time-to-orbit, decrease weight, and increase DV when in space. I'll make the Ardent my next priority on that list. I'll fix that forward drag problem on the base variant, and see if I can make it a little more friendly for the rough landings on Laythe with a "field" variant. This will likely mean more lift for slower rotation and stall speeds. Thanks! It's probably due to an unhealthy obsession with the game, and with SSTOs in particular. I was late to work this morning because I was building SSTOs in my head while staring blankly at the shower wall.

I like your SSTO, Material Defender. However, I LOVE the name; It's killing me Actually, "Straight forward" SSTOs don't get enough love around here, what with all the clipping and modding we do. Here's my first reliably successful SSTO, "speedybox". No clipping, no spamming of Ram Air Intakes. 2 Ram air Intakes per engine (exposed to airflow with believable paths to engines) and 3 radial intakes. 28k max altitude on Jet engines, the rest is on aerospikes. It's pretty hard to do. If you have a straight forward SSTO, share it!

These are so good... Now do a Rafale! And a Mirage 2000, and a Mig-29 and a F106 and an English Electric Lighting and a THUD! and and and...etc.

Woah, well I'm glad you are back in the saddle! I don't necessarily want to take this thread on a tangent, but if building stuff is what makes you happy, DO IT. And share! That's, like, 80% of the fun for me. I build all sorts of stuff and do things in the game that I never share, but any victories that aren't worth sharing, are hollow ones for me. If you need SSTO building tips, or need help with my craft in anyway, ask away! Besides me, there is some seriously talented builders that frequent this subforum and this thread, even. Heck, most of the cool building techniques I use in my craft are strait-up stolen from those folks! (you know who you are ) You should do the same. Slap stuff together and steal stuff from other people just to see how it works. You can even take apart ships and drag cool components over to the new subassembly tab to use on your own builds. Eventually you will figure out what you like, and what you don't. And that's where a style comes from. I hope my craft show a certain aesthetic style in that regard. ps, I've got both big serious SSTOs and some fun little SSTOs in the pipeline (check out the SSTO showcase thread), as well as some other stuff so if you like my stuff, stay tuned!

wait... can you then reattach those rovers to the downward facing docking ports and then drive your whole lander around? Because that is ridiculous and I love it.

The Satelite of Love.

In a Fit of clipping that would make your mama blush, I made 2 things tonight that are probably bound for the SSI catalog. The first is like a fat little egg plane A-wing: I think it's cute The goods: It's also VTOL The other is a Space Taxi based on some construction techniques I picked up around the forums, and wanted to try. Specifically the integration of the Lander Pods. It's also VTOL.

Woah, that thing looks mean! I'll give it a whirl, as it's also a good reason to actually install Fueltastic.

My big Dropship nears completion. It's mission profile is to deliver moon base parts. It's getting there. A few more missions, and some tweaking are needed. The most recent mission revealed a surprising but minor CoT problem from the main horizontal rockets. Lots of little fixes to make, but it's in the home stretch! An over-engined variety was hilarious, but ultimately too silly to justify.

I like that intake design.

woah. Nice necro. At least the subject matter is cool.

Is the basic jet/turbo jet combo worthwhile for SSTOs? It seems like the weight of the basic jet would off-set any low altitude advantages. Or are the momentum gains worth it?

He's the honorary commander of my space station. He has been there since 0.18. His bones must be jelly by now.

holy moley! awesome. I bet you get about the same frame rate as these images have, though. XD