RoboRay

The SSTO Pegasus Clipper approaches Elysium Station to refuel for its trip to Duna.

You can construct escape towers out of stock parts, but they greatly add to your part-count (decreasing performance) and frankly don't work very well (limited acceleration, when fired). NovaPunch has a couple of very effective mod Launch Escape System towers, and there is also one in the Stock Parts Expansion Pack, both available on the Spaceport. The KSPX pack tower doesn't include the decoupler function found in the NovaPunch version, but it looks nicer. If you're comfortable editing the part.cfg file with a text editor, you can add the decoupler capability to the one in KSPX, or just stick it on a decoupler as intended. You want to set up the Abort Action Group to fire the LES motors and decouple the command pod from the rest of the vehicle, and shut down all the other motors on the vehicle. Set the LES tower up in your normal staging to decouple itself from the command pod and fire the LES motor.

Indeed, it's a craft that does not shed any parts between leaving the pad and reaching a stable orbit.

The one in the folder for the part you want to change.

You just add up the numbers between your and your destination. The "subway" map is the one I use, because it gives you the values for the intermediate steps, rather than just taking you to your destination. Sometimes, your goal is other than reaching low orbit or landing on another body. I'd love to see it updated, but the maker never responded to requests here or on reddit. I guess he's done with KSP. I've dabbled with recreating his visual style a little to update it myself, but rarely have time to even play, let alone work on a play-aid.

Yes, you are correct. You do burn less fuel in total by making the entire injection burn from LKO, due to the Oberth effect. However, what if you have a craft that's not quite capable of holding enough fuel to accomplish its mission? In that situation, it can be beneficial to make the 1km/sec or so burn to get to an outer fueling station, then top off the tanks and make the rest of the burn. Less efficient, overall, but still leaving you with more fuel on board when you arrive at the destination than if you had made a single burn from LKO.

It took me 8 kicks to get my ion probe to Moho. You do have to plan ahead and start your transfer early, though, especially heading inward. Jool's transfer window is much wider. Refueling on the fringes of Kerbin's influence is an option I'm about to start exploring myself. I just put a fuel depot out there, past Minmus. 15,000l of liquid fuel and 18,000l of oxidizer should last a little while.

Yeah, those are huge. An SSTO design is always going to be a marginal performer, and the law of diminishing returns on added mass in rocketry still applies. So, it's exponentially easier to build a small SSTO than a big one. You really do not need all that intake-spam, either. More than one per engine helps, but even just one per engine is still possible... you'll just need to use more rocket fuel. For example, my very first successful SSTO spaceplane used one intake per engine. My current two-seater design does use more, intakes though, so that I only need tiny rocket motors and not as much fuel for them. But definitely try smaller designs while learning how to make an SSTO. Once you've figured out the narrow band of tolerances they require, you'll find it easier to build a large one. I suggest not shutting your jets down at the same moment you engage the rockets, though. As the rockets accelerate you, your intakes become more effective and gather more air, enabling the jets to keep thrusting for higher and longer. I control the jets and rockets with separate action groups, to maximize what I can get from the jets.

You don't need a higher TWR. Do perigee kicks. On multiple orbits, every time you pass through the ejection angle for your transfer, burn prograde for two or three minutes on each side of the angle, raising your Ap in the direction of the transfer injection. Just before you build up enough speed to enter a hyperbolic trajectory (when your Ap is near Minmus' orbit), set up a maneuver node to complete the rest of the transfer as one longer burn.

Ram intakes don't offer any advantage over others for a low-altitude aircraft. In fact, all of the other intakes are actually more effective down low. It's only in high-altitude hypersonic flight that the ram intakes are by far the best choice.

Yeah, but the whole point is that you're adding more ion engines to increase thrust at the expense of delta-V. If TWR is more important than maximized delta-V... rather than the miniscule TWR improvement you get with more ion engines, going with the LV-N instead simply makes more sense.

If you don't want MechJeb for precision guidance (which works great for hand-flown landings), the only other solution is practice. Lots and lots of practice.

Depending on the age of that thread, the surface features of Eve may be different now. Anyway, barometric pressure on top of that mountain was 2.4 bars. Another kilometer or so would help get it down close to 2.0, probably, but if you're far off the equator it may not be much of an over all gain.

Tantalus Station: A fuel depot with a capacity of 15000l of liquid fuel and 18,500l of oxidizer on the fringes of Kerbin's gravitational influence, beyond the orbit of Minmus. Last stop for outbound flights that need additional fuel for their missions.

If you're carrying multiple ion drives and lots of xenon tanks and all the power generation equipment they need and all the supporting structure for them, maximum efficiency isn't your goal and you'd probably be better off with a single LV-N.

You can even set your jet engines to two action groups, so that half of them shut down with one group, as you get close to the flameout point. This leaves enough air for the remaining engines to keep working a little while longer, until you need to shut them down with the other action group. You may want to go ahead and start your rocket motor when you shut down the first set of jets, if their thrust is insufficient for you to continue accelerating upwards. Imgur is a very painless way to host images for free.

If you enable part-clipping (ALT-F12), you can actually fit your probe pod (and a battery) inside the hollow decoupler on top of the launch vehicle.

Ike, to support Duna missions.

Oh, I wasn't using a maneuver node for my long capture. I expected to be in Moho's SOI for a little over an hour at my arrival speed and calculated it would take right about two hours to match velocities. With that long a burn, I knew the exact start point wasn't critical. So, with Pe set at 40km, I oriented the craft with the nozzle right on Moho's limb and started firing about an hour before the SOI transition. Even with 4x timewarp, it was tedious. I doubt I'll do it again, but I'm glad I did it once.

Because of the ASAS (and even MechJeb) oscillations, it's much more propellant efficient to to put a single set of RCS around the craft's center of mass, Apollo CSM style, than having multiple sets spaced out from the CoM. You can do this with quads, like Apollo, or with linear thrusters pointed outward. Just remember to add forward/aft thrusters if you go with linear ports. The linear ports are the most efficient way to do it, because they provide no attitude control and so waste no monoprop on the oscillations. You can make it easier to keep the craft balanced by putting your fuel tank in middle instead of down by the engine.

You don't have to wait until you're in the SOI before starting your capture attempt. My Moho mapper started the capture burn an hour before entering the SOI. The reason to use them is to have a small, lightweight, efficient vehicle. If you don't have much patience, don't use them.

Hope you remembered to put the surf boards on top.

Probes: Crewed: Rovers:

I spend a lot of time in planes, and I spend a lot of time on Laythe, and I think you've come up with a fantastic design. In fact, I will be copying it. The avionics package is tricky with the Mk1 cockpit. I usually stick it out on the nose using a little truss, like this: It never occurred to me to make a tail-pod for it, EA-6B style. I'm going to be trying that, too. I think the regular jet engine would be better for a craft that's not going to trying to get back into space or make high-speed, high-altitude transits, though, and have limited refueling options... it's more fuel efficient.

Having your rear landing gear too far back can make it almost impossible to raise the nose. Put the wheels just behind the CoM, but not quite so close that the nose tips up and the plane sits back onto the tail. This is my preferred landing gear configuration: The rear wheels are the pivot-point when you try to raise the nose, so the further forward they are, the easier it becomes to take off (so long as they aren't so forward that you tail-strike the runway).