Killenger

Did you use robotics? What mod and what version you running? I've been wanting to make a robot armed station that unloads cargo. But I have been running the newest version of KSP.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/33312-Showcase-SSTO-s%21-Post-your-pictures-here This will give you a broad view of what works.

One more thing - A large cockpit is unneeded extra weight, use the lightest possible till you get the hang of it or just have it unmanned with a hitchhiker can attached. I hope this is not to large for you starting out, think simple. It's easy to get carried away and over complicate the design. Scratch having the wings at angles, for now stick to strait wings and rely on your control surfaces to get you off the runway. Having your wings curve down or up slightly is only beneficial in certain circumstances. I feel that throwing that in there on your first try could cause the thing to get so complex that it will never work. This is an older SSTO of mine, but it is a good example of how the back of your aircraft should look, don't use aerospikes though. noticed the image was not working, try this instead - http://postimg.org/image/mig1mot1d/full/ See how the center of thrust is inline with the center of mass? If you try all this and the thing still spirals out of control off the runway provide me with these pictures: top view, bottom view, and rear view. Also a picture of the instant you start spinning out may help me tell you whats wrong.

Your center of mass is too far above your center of lift. I hope you have nuclear engines on the bottom as well, otherwise that thing will never fly. You gota be as symmetrical as possible. Your center of thrust has to be inline with your center of mass. Use mechjeb surf feature, before take off set it to 30 degrees and wait till your in the air to hit execute, if your plane is stable enough mechjeb will take over no problem.

The testing of that lander must have been a horrendous grind, I cant believe you got that all the way to Duna without some piece of it falling apart.

My greatest work is finally nearing completion, I'm taking a break from testing her to share. It weighs almost 140 tons loaded/fueled and I have been testing it transporting a 18 ton rockomax fuel tank shown on its large docking port below. This build has been very troublesome as it is the largest SSTO I have yet to make and its center of mass is so far towards the back. I started working on it last Sunday I believe and have worked on it every day since. She currently only climbs to about 22 km before wipe-out, working on getting it to 25-26ish before I consider it final. So you may be asking yourself, WHY?!?!?!? After all, its massive, clunky, not fun to work with, and has resulted in enough fatalities to justify unmaned testing (application denied) Well it all started with a bit of excessive atmospheric thrust - It worked.... reasonably well - it was one of my first attempts and I had no idea that I already had more turbofans than I needed. So I continued on in this fashion - That worked even better, I pressed on. This is where I hit a breaking point, excessive thrust led to excessive mass/drag and eventually, excessive fail. Sure was fast on Kerbin though. I hit the thrust wall like a thousand part craft smacking into Eves atmosphere and if I wanted to get any real Kerbal space science done I would need a more economical craft. The only thing this was good for was going way way too fast to land, exiting Kerbins atmosphere way way to hot, and being way way to heavy to get more than a Kerbal into orbit. And so it was born Eureka!.... a breakthrough! It showed more promise than anything beforehand, not a bad looker either, it lacked the excessive weight of its predecessors, but still something was missing... It had become obvious, I had to go fully nuclear. and so the success of the Eureka was short lived, and a new race to a fully nuclear SSTO had began. Many proof of concept tests were performed to find things like efficient TWR's, etc... and I decided that a fully nuclear SSTO would not be all, she had to be a monument. Why have spent all this time making something if it was not going to be magnificent! After my testing I discovered that a final TWR of between 0.5-0.6 was the minimum to get yourself into orbit during a vertical burn above 20 km. Early Tunguska, it took hours to get the wings large enough to get it off the ground - I'll update this with the final build and the docking array that will be designed for it. It will dock from the rear and the array/ship will look similar to a clothespin hanging on a clothesline UPDATE: Success! Almost 27km before killing turbofans and I'm in orbit. (It got a bit airhoggy, I hid the massive number of intakes)

Exactly, en-corporate atmospheric engines into its pre 20km launch stage and nuclear engines into its above 20km launcher stage and your launcher stage may almost take you to Duna. Your drive is pretty small really, you may be able to load that thing up with turbofans and get it to 20km off that thrust alone almost, if not use turbofans for an assist with a few skippers/mainsails for a first stage that gets to orbit/almost to orbit, next stage is nuclear and finishes off your orbit/gets you going to where you need to be, and your drive system finishes the job. Just saying a bigger launch stage is not always better and I'm betting you have a huge dirty mainsail launcher stage. I've lowered alot of my launcher stage part counts by doing this. Sorry to throw that all out there, I know this thread is not about the launch stage.

Test it for me haha, Duna has less gravity than Kerbin so I think so. I just know how to get em off the ground If you feel the need for more thrust add some of those tiny red engines or put a single aerospike on it with your nuclears I'm all about efficiency now to spare me refueling PS. Basically what I'm trying to say is the most efficient number of atomic engines for an SSTO is a thrust to weight ratio between ~.5-.6 (very approximate, its not easy to test these things since there is so many variables such as when you kill your atmospheric engines) But to get into orbit like this you have to have a balanced air intake to drag ratio with balanced lift that has the proper amount of control surfaces. You also need a long near vertical nuclear burn after you kill your air intakes and air-fed engines (it may seam like your going to loose your apariapsis but at the last minute you'll start gaining again, usually around 40km). BTW most of my craft are kinda unflyable without the use of mechjeb as the ASAS sometimes does not provide enough torque alone - so when your climbing you will want to set mechjeb (I highly recommend it). I have played with using multiple avoinics packages/sas modules to help my ASAS maintain control, it seams to help a bit adding extras when you can't seam to get a larger craft under control. I always start by building a nice diamond shape of wings around my aircraft, add wings until the thing starts to seam somewhat neutrally buoyant by the end of the runway, then add a small amount of "bite" to your wings by tweaking their attitude a bit (to slightly curve your wings use shift key + W, A, S, or D key) if the thing flys down the runway like a floppy fish and spirals out of control, try adding some down force to the front of it by curving your frontmost wings/control surfaces down. Also how level your craft is when sitting on its landing gear effects this alot, if the nose points up on its landing gear then the thing will have more of a tendency to lift early which can be good or can spin you out of control on the runway. Try to make your craft look like this as much as possible (include your wings into this shape) <---X-O----------\ Front of your aircraft = < Center of mass = X Center of lift = O Edge of aircraft's rear most wing = \ If you find going full nuclear beyond the scope of what your trying to accomplish here, I still recommend going at-least half nuclear and using something like aerospikes. Use the aerospikes only in pulses when you need the thrust, the rest of the time burn the nuclear engines for longer efficient burns. Nuclear engines will make the difference between a half tank of fuel left in orbit, and almost no fuel left in orbit. I just checked the gravity of Duna, I think you would be able to take off from there as your TWR is going to be atleast .5 and Duna has less than half Kerbins gravity. (Not to mention your TWR will be alot higher because you just used enough fuel to get to Duna) One more thing - the larger your craft is, the harder it will be to land it. Landing is really not my thing and its not something I make plans on doing, I'd perfer to send an SSTO with a lander module as payload into orbit around my target planet, drop the lander payload, visit the planet, return the SSTO, fly back and stay in orbit docked in a station somewhere. I'll land my smaller SSTO's that weigh like 10-30 tons but anything bigger than that has been tricky for me. -Another note, I've been working with my new SSTO all night and I discovered that a TWR of .5 is where your nuclear engines will come close to overheating, my SSTO is at .54 TWR and it comes to about 85% overheat, just some good FYI

Put atmospheric engines that detach to aid its launch into orbit (you aren't showing your launch stage?) regardless, you can go full atmospheric and nuclear like SSTO's. Extremely efficient

Very nice man, I have yet to make a roll proof rover myself as all my rovers seam to end in tragedy once I decide to pedal to the metal to get to my rendezvous

I'm using 12 turbofan engines and 12 nuclear engines for my newest build to bring a 20 ton payload into space. Use mechjeb, make your basic craft, balance the thrust to wieght ratio of the nuclear engines to be between .5 and .6 when your craft is complete, I usually start at 1 to give me plenty of room for adding fuel to the final design. In order to get into orbit with a thrust to weight ratio that low your going to have to burn almost strait upwards as soon as you kill your atmospheric engines - but your going to orbit at an isp of no less than 750 when you do it this way, you'll actually have extra fuel. Your going to need a ton of lift at the back of your craft and you are gunna have to use atmospheric engines. So in short start with this 1. 2 jet fuselages like dual mk2 tanks 2. 12 tons worth of rocket fuel (liquid and oxidizer) 3. Roughly 10 intakes 4. 4 nuclear engines 5. 4 turbofan engines 6. Add wings so your center of lift is behind and stays behind your center of mass, if it doesnt take off and you already have huge wings in the back try adding control surfaces to the front. 7. Add vertical control surfaces for stability (tail-fins) 8. Add landing gear (pay attention to how level your aircraft is and how that affects its takeoff) 9. And your hitchhiker container of course Hope it makes sense and helps, good luck

In the past I wasent making a very good lift profile for my aircraft, I was making up for it in thrust though. I'm trying to make something more economical and it worked great. This thing climbs up to >28,000 with its air fed engines still on max thrust. Notice the docking ports - They "should" interlock so a better connection and alignment of the connection. ^^Rockets on side so you should be able to carry a load with this once in orbit but it is untested, I'll test by pairing these together and seeing how that works. Only in space of course.^^ By the way, this is what happens when you come in way way way too hot on EVE.

Dunt dunt dunt! I have no idea what I'm doing but here goes, should be awesome either way! Using an older version because I don't have my new one fueled yet, hence it can be sacrificed. later.... edit- Aerobraking thru Eve's atmosphere, landing looked sketchy and I don't think I'd be able to leave. and exiting eves atmosphere

What because of its size? It's actually capable of vertical takeoff Getting into orbit does heavily rely on its nuclear engines for a longer constant burn with the skipper only running when your going to lose your orbit without it. The displayed mechjeb thrust to weight ratio doesn't account for the fuel it loses so it does rise to over 1 so it has the thrust to get into orbit. The displayed 1900 delta velocity is also wrong because that doesnt account for the skipper being used in pulses with the nuclear engines running for a long efficient burn while getting into orbit. Heres its younger brother btw: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/33379-Wing-Xero-MK2-Vertical-takeoff-SSTO Went from 8 turbofans to 14 hehe.

Shes fast for her size too, if I linger at 20 Km or so I'll beat 1 Km/s easy. 14 turbofans 2 nuclear 1 skipper