diegzumillo

You usually have to tweak the ascent curve to fit your rocket. Some rockets require a smoother ascent profile, and that seems to be the case with yours.

Given the habit of exploding when flying too fast on lower atmosphere and the fact that jets produce less thrust on high altitudes, would you agree the best ascension is a straight line at an angle? That's what I'm noticing so far. Every successful SSTO gets to orbit by picking some angle (usually 30) and going with it until it stops working. - - - Updated - - - Gah! I love KSP and I was pretty optimistic that this launch would be a game missing next to nothing. All these years it relied on some mods to fill in the blanks but I expected them to add the basics of everything that was missing by the time of launch. We still don't have INFORMATION! this has always been KSP biggest sin. It's a rocket science game and it doesn't tell you even how much delta-v you have, just the most important piece of information. Not during construction, not during flight. I can see a spark in that direction in the engineer's tab and the information tab in-flight but it's missing everything basically. Delta-v is just the bare minimum though, to make planes we would need waaay more than that, specially with the new aerodynamics. Sorry. End of rant.

I'm noticing another important thing in my experimentations. The (turbo) jet engine seems to lose thrust as it gets less air, which makes gaining surface speed at high altitudes extremely challenging. On the other hand flameouts are less dangerous now. I did a couple of SSTOs already but my goal is to get one there using jets and the nuke engine. I like the nuke engine because once you're up there with it you can go pretty far with less fuel. But this is pretty challenging now, as finding the sweet spot in the atmosphere where you won't burn to death but can still use the atmosphere to gain speed is super difficult. That is necessary because the nuke engine is very low thrust, you can only get to orbit with it if the jets put you in a high orbit with plenty of surface velocity. I'm pretty sure it can be done, but it will take a while

Ah, this looks like a good thread How is the supersonic speeds influencing things here? I haven't made any useful observation about that so far. Drag certainly is making a huge difference. If I try putting anything at the front of the plane that isn't a nose cone, the whole thing becomes unstable and tends to flip over. So far I'm loving the whole thing. Learning a new system is fun, and more when the new system is more realistic. My main complaint is lack of information. FAR was hard but we had a huge panel with great information, here we have nothing. There's the debug menu but it doesn't seem to update, I don't knwo what to do.

I got it. Not very efficient but it makes it I made a thread to try and get a conversation about the new aerodynamics and described the process that got me to this plane but the thread didn't work.This community grew a lot over the years and, in the process, lost a lot of quality.

There we go! one SSTO on the new system, finally. Maneuvering the plane is very difficult so the only way I found of reaching orbit is to pick an angle of attack from the take off and stick with it. In this case it was 30. I'm pretty impressed with the new system. Just as we would expect in real life, the working design is long and thin. Drag really is making a huge difference. The nose of the plane is now sacred! the only thing that goes there is a cone, if you want your plane to follow a straight line. Maybe.

Real physics behaves like that but I had the impression KSP had only angle of attack and altitude influencing. Oh well, no matter.

Just noticed something interesting. My plane was going pretty high (at the third level of atmosphere, forgot what number that is) and pretty fast (300m/s surface) and my air intake was starting to run thin, so I was preparing myself to turn off the jets before they flame out. Here's the strange part, my air intake started growing again. I immediately thought I was losing altitude but nope. I believe the air intake system takes speed into account now (did it before? I never noticed).

Can you give me more information? I can't see anything. - - - Updated - - - Ohh! debug menu as in actual debug menu doh. Hm, it shows information but it doesn't seem to change when I change my plane. I'll have to look into it. As for progress, I did managed to make an SSTO already. A very simple one, just a rapier and no wings (vertical liftoff) so it's not exactly the point of the thread but still... Another thing we should keep in mind is that with this new model anything remotely aerodynamic generates lift! and if we are making SSTOs, chances are we are making very fast planes, so we really want our planes to be as thin as possible. My point being: you can make a plane without wings basically. Large wings means drag.

Hi all Planes have been my long time hobby in KSP. I learned how to make planes and SSTOs in vanilla KSP (pre 1.0) and in Ferram, now I have to learn how to make these in new KSP. So that's fun! I decided to make this thread so we can share our discoveries on how the system works. At the moment I see the potential for this new system to allow even more powerful SSTOs, but it does seem harder. It seems harder than Ferram as well, but I don't know for sure yet, as Ferram had an entire panel of information that helped design stable planes and here we have nothing. First thing I noticed is that my planes tend to flip. The center of mass has to be as close to the nose as possible, which is hard if you have all your engines at the back.

Very cool! Any plans on making it work with jet engines?

I'm not confused. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning In short, they decided to leave the early access category with a feature rich update. That qualifies to turn the version number to the next integer. What's wrong with that? You guys are too stressed, chill out. This community wasn't like this, all flaming each other.

I have the impression this whole thread is fueled by the misunderstanding of what 1.0 really means, which is nothing really. There is no standard on what each number means, (most games released are in 1.x or even 2.x) so we should really be talking about what the next version will look like and how that relates to removing it from early-access category. They think the game is developed enough that it can be removed from early access category. It has all the planned structures in place and a fair amount of content and features. According to them the game will continue being developed like it has, fixing bugs and adding features to the existing structures. Seems reasonable to me to remove it from early access. If nothing else, at least to stop making other early access look bad. Slightly off-topic but since some moderator decided to go willy-nilly locking every other 1.0 thread, it goes here now. The first thing I'll do in 1.0 is SPACE PLANES! It has been my main activity in KSP for a while and I can't wait for the revamped aerodynamics model.

I still use mechjeb. Delta v calculation is too essential.

Do we know if fuel flow rules have changed? I'm trying to make a spaceplane with symmetric flameouts using the good old placement order but it doesn't work.

That didn't take long at all! \o/

I discovered your mod yesterday, got super excited about it and today I installed KSP 0.90. What a bad timing! lol Anyway, great mod I'll wait for the next version anxiously.

First thing I did: I call it The Amazingly Impractical And Huge Stupid Looking Rover With Equally Stupid And Long Name. I'm extremely tired today but I had to at least download and take a quick peek at it! Looks excellent, can't wait to play around a little more seriously.

You could have a detachable wings system to get more delta v. I don't think it would declassify it as an SSTO, seeing you should put it back on when you want to return to kerbin. So you fly to orbiy, leave your wings, jets and air intakes orbiting kering, go do whatever you want, come back, put them on and start reentry..

Hello, crazy people. It's the op reporting back with great news! I learned a lot from this thread, so thanks everyone, and goslash27 specially! Here's the application of what I learned: Orbiting Kerbin with ~4800 dv left. Might need more than that to be really called interplanetary but I can totally see that happening now, it really doesn't have an upper limit. At least to me the bit of information that really tipped the scale is about TWR and ascent path. For some reason I was under the impression that large spaceplanes with large TWR were impractical so they needed an ascent that relied more on rocket engines. So now I threw that assumption out the window and only used a nuke engine for rocket propulsion, and 4 jets (with 2 air intakes for each). That gave the plane a TWR larger than 3, which allows it to pretty much reach 'orbital' speed inside the atmosphere.

I didn't have much time to play today, but I'll report back as soon as I make some progress

Wow, this thread really took off. Pun unfortunately intended. But now I'm convinced it can be done

Hm, I didn't consider I had to increase the air intakes with *mass*. I was increasing the air intakes with the number of additional jets only.

Ah, FAR explains it. I did make some interplanetary space planes with FAR too. It's harder in some ways but a bit overpowered in others. I enjoyed messing with this mod for a while but overall I think it's less fun than stock.

That's fantastic! So I am messing the ascent, I can't put anything that size and mass with only 2 jet engines. Is there any catch on your design, like 57 overlapping air intakes?