Hey guys, decided to give this a go with my old spaceplane design (rebuilt from memory from 0.16). It isn't quite SSTO, since it does drop a pair of fuel tanks, but other than that, it achieves orbit >70km, enough fuel for a bit of tilt correction and a deorbit. I haven't quite figured out the optimal launch path for this design, so you could end up with more or less. For this attempt I launched directly into a tilted orbit, as there isn't enough fuel to do it once you circularize and deorbit. Glides down very smoothly, can use a bit of left over fuel to correct or just glide, handles very well in glide. Plane is a bit odd, it needs about 1.5 runways to get off the ground, but 85% of the time survives the drop off the end, and then finally starts heading up when the ground drops off to the sea =) Good challenge, gave me a good reason to rebuild my spaceplane, and looking at the other designs, I may have figured out my lack of getting off the ground (lift farther forward). Thanks bsalis, and I may give it another go with something smaller, but it seems if you are going to go around the planet it will almost always take ~40 minutes, unless you launched clockwise, but you would have to circularize and deorbit almost immediately to get the required Pe and still make it back down in time. Guess that is what I will try next. So I typed all that out and then realized it is basically what bsalis said just above, anyway, worth a try.
