Rune

That sounds as if you found the same instability problem I did at first, and tamed it (kudos for it, BTW! :)) ...or that actually raising the wings to the midsection did improve the stability as I had hoped. In any case, what seems clear is that that nosecone is not the most heat-resistant part in KSC. Could use the uglier nosecone but, you know, uglier. Question: when you spun out, did you get the feeling that maybe when you were going subsonic you might have managed to recover it? Because I always manage to catch it, but by the time I stop fighting SAS and moving fuel and look at airspeed, it's reading 200m/s and the ground is awfully close. Oh, and I LOL'ed pretty hard at #6. Just did it with an Orca, coming from an inclined trans-Minmus trajectory, to reach KSC in two aerobrakes instead of three. I reentered in, like, 30-45º of Kerbin's circumference. Rune. Ballistic reentries FTW, it seems, Faget would be proud.

Well, ladies and gentlekerbs, since it's been a while since I uploaded anything, how about that ring station I've been showing off? It's pretty much done, and you can be my guinea pigs for the latest changes. Have a go at it! https://kerbalx.com/Rune/Tsiolkovsky-Station This stock version has some tankage inside the bays instead of the USI greenhouses, so it can do a bit of refueling... but really, you'll need extra tankage if you want it to hold anything significant. And as a plus, you can tell me if the Korolev SSTO boosters are landable by the average kerbal. Rune. You get eight tries per launch.

If I followed my own naming schemes to the letter, it should be the Von Braun Mk something, seeing as how I've reused the name or all my toroidal stations. Then again, I chose that name in the first place because for some reason toroidal space stations make me think of him on one of those old Disney films. I also kind of want to name something after Korolev, because after all I admire him quite a bit more, but a booster strikes me as more appropriate for him (and hence the SSTO family I think just got its name). But thinking about it a bit more, wasn't Tsiolkovsky the first guy that proposed toroidal stations to provide artificial gravity? Now that guy was amazing, considering when he came up with his stuff. He is credited as having come up first with concepts such as multistage rockets, H2/LOX propulsion, and even the freaking space elevator, all circa 1900, way before everybody else started seriously thinking about space exploration. Rune. An intellectual giant if there was ever one.

Well, so far the imaginative WiP name is 'Mk3 Ring', so yeah, open to suggestions. Chakram sounds more like something I would name on of my SSTOs, tough (not exactly a pointy object, but it kinda follows the theme). And yes, the booster is an interesting 'little' subassembly. I'd have to credit @Temstar's Hurricane family for a bit of inspiration for the front section, tough. I used to have a two-vector SSTO, but when his thread resurfaced a couple days ago, I got the nose straight from him. Sorry, had to, it looked too good not to do it. With that, the big booster for the Base-In-A-Box (~40mT), and a tiny single-vector one I also have lying around (~7.5mT to orbit), I might end up releasing a family of SSTO chemical boosters. Rune. It is basically a 1:2 scale Hurricane, without the external tank.

The problem with unbreakable joints is that it doesn't stop the jitter, it just stops you from breaking up... which can be worse, trust me. Anyhow, Here's hoping 1.2 will fix things. In the meantime, the quest for a humongous ring in orbit continues: Actually I think I've got the launch part covered with plenty of margin (that's ~80x80kms with 350m/s left over), but the boosters show a very unhealthy roll-related instability that can get you into a flat spin if you are not careful during reentry. Which I haven't been, because I've been testing. I think it has something to do with the vertical stabilizer, insufficient roll authority to counteract it, and/or the sluggish response of the control surfaces (relative to the insane roll rates it can build up really quick). Anyhow, with proper fuel balance (moving it forwards to the 3.75m tank), it is landable, but the low wing loading and that nagging tendency to completely lose it make hitting KSC difficult challenging . I have either overshot because I was careful with low AoAs, or I've lost it when I started braking hard and recovered with too much speed lost to reach KSP (the nice parts is, it is recoverable). I have managed to limp to the runway, tough, so maybe I'll just leave it as a challenge. If I make it too stable, you might not be able to recover from dives! Oh, and there is one nice unintended feature of the design... the front wheel is pretty flimsy, but even in the harshest landing, well, all the important expensive gear is in the back, so this pic below? That counts as 'mostly recovered', fund-wise. It is surprisingly easy to achieve, BTW, I've already blown the nose twice in three landings (the first one I had forgotten to install the wheel, so kind of my own fault really) but I've always recovered the back intact. Rune. A million and something to put on the pad, BTW. Great way to get rid of excess funds!

I'm still working now and then on my Mk3 ring. And actually, I think I finally have a good launch option... which is not as crazy as it seems. I mean, it's pretty crazy. But if one chemical SSTO will lift ~16mT, eight of them should lift, well, moar. See it emerge majestically form the smoke... Yeah, that is maybe a bit too much smoke, we could do with a slightly less sluggish ascent. But the funny thing is, it kinda works much better than any of the alternatives I've tried: Rune. It may drain wrong until 1.2, but with Vectors involved, that's pretty irrelevant.

Oh, we are not accepting that reality, and have decided to substitute our own. I'll wait off-camera for the tanks to fill up form an earlier save, then try the "timewarp quickly" trick until I can get a clean separation. I swear! Rune. Maybe when it's more massive it will jump slower?

A little Public Service Announcement for all those people out there that use my Base-In-A-Box series: without a shadow of a doubt, 1.1.3 is very broken regarding landing gear. And I'm not (only) talking about the confirmed occlusion bug, no. Tough that's also a thing. Sadly, there seems to be hard limit either on part count or mass (most likely mass form what I'm seeing), when handling landed structures. Long story short? If you make the bases big enough, they will get 'the jitters' next load around and promptly blow themselves up and warp whatever connections remain: That's Pinnacle Base, and it seems to have a very big issue with me trying to fill that Orca. It didn't complain the slightest bit when I docked it empty, and note that just in case I saved and reloaded to see if bad stuff happened. The only thing changing was the mass, due to the ISRU being at work in the background. And that is how it ended up after violently undocking said Orca (yes, that is a static picture at 0m/s without any roll). Apparently all those warped connections are perfectly fine . Now for the fun part, stuff to work our way around the issue: -The first piece of advice is simple: touch nothing until 1.2 comes, and see if that fixes things. Could work, I hope it is leg-related and it gets fixed, but it could also not happen. Basically, have faith in the gods. Not my style. -If you absolutely have to touch it, and it keeps on exploding (say, like me, you really, really want to disconnect that Orca to use it elsewhere without the base you spent so much effort to build blowing up). Then timewarp is your friend. Try somehow to trigger it before physics kicks in enough to make you not be landed anymore, and you might get lucky and do it before the whole things starts jumping up and down (basically mash the key for timewarp as you load and pray). Once that is semi-stable, right-click on some docking port and try to undo timewarp and disconnect the port at basically the same time. It is tricky, but once you sever a sizeable portion of the base, the 'jitter' seems to stop. And of course, keep a sizeable amount of save backups around. -If you are going to build a new one, keep it simple and light. And sadly, disconnect the mining modules to perform any refueling of Orcas or other ships. Which would leave the base unpowered or the mining rig without the big solar panels, but hey, it's a temporary fix. Definitely my recommended protocol from now on, to keep the base with as few connections and as light as possible. Rune. And that is one of the reasons I'm not playing much lately. Everything is very explody this version around.

Yup, I have a big rock on LKO with 1,200mT out of the 1,400 it came with. It is also unbelievably fun to fiddle with using KAS. Rune. D classes will already give you hundreds of tons and are much easier to wrangle, tough.

Well, that's one way to do it. It's nice to open the presents on the ground right? Also, I dig that you modified it a bit to suit your needs. Did you refuel on Duna's SOI, or all the fuel for the job was stored inside the Orca? It can take an awful lot of Ore to convert with the ISRU unit on the box, I know that. Rune. The Orca is so polyvalent, I'm hard pressed to come up with new things... everything can be done with it!

Yup, it's a nice little SSTO. The weight class is more of a single-RAPIER design (that would make it slightly more efficient), but hey, don't let that stop you form going all moar thrust! Alternatively, I'm pretty confident it could have twice the fuel and payload, and fly just as well, so room to grow (and nicely placed symmetrical tankage that is easy to expand). Also, don't discount rear-facing docking ports, @adsii1970. When you are closing with a station you are usually facing backwards, so they save you one close-range flip at the cost of a control point swap. Plus, a pointier nose saves on drag (but the shielded docking port is an awesome heatshield precisely because it's blunt). Rune. Fortunately this design can mount both.

Polar bases are cool, you learn a lot about orbital mechanics flying missions to them. In fact, that last one I showed is in the Munar south Pole, right next to *redacted*. It does provide a lot of awesome shots, tough unfortunately I'm just a few degrees off of having Kerbin on the sky at ground level. Illumination is awesome, tough, It's almost a peak of eternal light. That's local noon, and look at the shadows. And just when you go a bit up, or while you are going down to it, you are greeted by kerbin on the horizon. Rune. Then again, there is this awesome spot near the north pole where you get Kerbin framed by crater walls, gotta put up a base there some time.

Depends, but the classical answer is "bottom first". You can of course go the DC-X route, and reenter nose-first before flipping for terminal landing. No need to be afraid of the turn, because it would be done at subsonic speeds by stalling the whole thing, as @Tex_NL says. That was done so that the thing could maneuver in the high atmosphere, since an engine-first reentry is mostly ballistic. It did carry a structural penalty due to having to build the thing so it flew. If you go bottom first, however, you should take some steps to protect your engine instead of your nose. This is the reason all of Bono's SSTO concepts used aerospike engines: he intended to use them as actively-cooled heatshields by bleeding fuel trough them. This is cool, because it means that the heatshield subsystem is almost weight-free. A separate heatshield would be a mass hit a SSTO can ill afford. It is also cool because an aerospike nozzle is perfect for a SSTO. Rune. And for boop's sake, chutes are heavy. Mt per landed mT, one of the heaviest landing systems!

I finally cracked the airbreathing VTOL SSTO problem in the "new" aero. Turns out, it's not that complicated! Payload ratio is awful, tough... Rune. And damn the lip of the VAB's roof, it could have been a glorious first test flight.

'These Star Trek shenanigans must end. I am not lifting off with that thing on the bay, Jeb!' Rune. Like me, Bill is more of a Star Wars buff.

Yup. I am by no means the first to come up with the idea (user @Giggleplex777 has a nice collection, I believe), but it is a cool concept to use. Short of like the biamese and triamese concepts for shuttle. Parallel stacking FTW! Oh right, that makes more sense. I was about to comment on the use of a Poodle within atmosphere... Still, I reckon that first stage could SSTO more than 5mT, the Twin Boar is a beast of an engine. Rune. But don't let me stop you flying Space-X style!

But those are rocket SSTOs! And just to show that inspiration and advice goes both ways, this is what I started working on after our last talk: It's rather small (5-7mT to orbit on its own), but since I can side-mount it, it can loft up a VB station ring (23mT and a boopload of drag). Granted, it's like 250% of the expendable launch cost, and only uses tankage with low tank fractions, but hey, if you recover all four boosters, I'd reckon you would save something (a quick back of the envelope calculation shows me the expendable booster cost around 45k√, and the fuel for this is about 22k√, so about half the cost). Rune. I'll be the first to admit I did it for the looks.

You kidding? Seeing the toys in action is always the best part. That's where we get inspiration and stuff! Rune. Plus, I also do it a lot.

Oh my, that takes me back. The lil' thing could SSTO all the way to Mun, IIRC, and had tanks within tanks. And the old parts look so clunky now! Rune. And yet, I still miss that cockpit.

That's a pretty weird metric, since final dV with payload would vary with Isp, but I just checked, and one of them is 4,898m/s, at 1.39 TWR, another 5,013 at 1.36 TWR. Vacuum values, of course. Rune. All numbers taken from KER.

Sure, if you are draggy enough 2,000º is more than enough, from LKO. Plus, being winged, you can arrest your vertical speed to stay up where you brake slowly and dissipate the heat over a longer time. A radiator next to the leading part also does wonders, I hear. The cargo bay can open sideways, but it was just a thought, I'm sure you'll come up with something great. Rune. Building interesting shapes with a limited set of parts takes a lot of head-scratching.

Nice craft, but... Altamira? Where are you from, exactly, if you don't mind me asking? Rune. I've been there, twice.

And the payload bay doors are also screwing with the lines. Gotcha. Mayhaps ditch the Mk2's (they have wings installed on them, and heavy wings at that), and build with straight rocket tanks and shorter wings sections, I'd think you'd shave some weight. Also, the vertical stabilizers are really big, you don't need so much. I half-use them as wings in mine, and I'll be the first to admit it's not efficient at all, Mk3's also have bad tank ratios and the shuttle bottom is a lot of dead weight. Mayhaps you could build something with wing sections that looks as good (or better) and shave a couple hundred kgs more. Rune. Also, turning Mk3s on their side makes them look much better, there is that.

Yup, they are fat fellas. I usually go by the rule of thumb of "one Vector per 10mT of payload", and work from there to get 1.3~1.4 TWR. As to how OP they are... well, it depends. They are not that different from spikes, only they get higher TWR (but lower vacuum ISP!). They are actually not that great once you leave kerbin, being so massive, so they tend to stay on LV's, and reusable LVs at that, because of their high cost. Mammoths are really much more cost-effective. And, well... they are at the end of the tech tree, after all. Right next to the aerospikes, AKA, the engine specifically designed to build chemical SSTOs. So yeah, I'm coming around to them. Just limit the gimbals so the launch doesn't look too weird! Cost efficiency... well, it's nowhere near what airbreathing SSTOs can get, I'll grant you that. But it is competitive with expendables, if you bring back those engines every time to the runway. VTHL SSTOs can also handle very unwieldy payloads, too: Rune. Technically that's a stage-and-a-half, but it can SSTO with ~40mT without the SRBs.

Just the nature of the beast, I'm afraid. Chemical SSTOs require very high mass ratios, which means that if you spend mass on structure and wings, you are cutting your payload severely, and will need a humongous booster. That said, a couple things might help: -Consider that you only have to glide when empty. Less wings means less drag going up, less weight to put to orbit, and only a scarier reentry. There is a reason the Shuttle glided with a 20º slope, it didn't need to do any better. -Vectors have a better TWR than spikes, IIRC. On chemical SSTOs, TWR is key, because engines are a sizeable fraction of the final mass in orbit. Tankage is the other big chunk, but there's little we can do for that, right? Rune. Best tankage ratio is with cylindrical tanks, BTW, worst with Mk2 and the various adapter-tanks.