carazvan

Presentation In the left corner weighing in at 6.779t the Ion/TurboJet powered Flea SSTO! Plane stats TWR jet- ~3.0 (ground) ~4.0 (space) TWR ion- ~0.031 (ground) ~0.27 (space) deltaV after circularization (ion engine) - about 3500 fuel to get to orbit - 70-100 depending on ascent profile Solar panels can support ion engines at full power and batteries can run engines at full power for about 2 min 30 sec. Action Groups 1-toggle jet engine 2-toggle ion engines 3-toggle air intakes (all) 4-toggle solar panels (all) 5-toggle ladders Download SSTO Flea -full 200 part version shown above just without Engineering redux Info mod SSTO Flea (basic) -simpler 90ish part version; first of development to get to orbit also without Engineering redux Info mod SSTO Flea (devel) - this zip file contains all 6 versions during its development with Engineering Redux Mod parts attached, final version is v0.9 (note that weight and CoM in SPH are incorrect due to 0 weight landing gear)

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Presentation Here's my series of probes, submission is Comm Sat (Ion LR): Comm Sat (Ion LR) - 626 kg / 4866 deltaV / 0.08 TWR Comm Sat (Ion VLR) - 745 kg / 8576 deltaV / 0.07 TWR Comm Sat (Ion XLR) - 846 kg / 11473 deltaV / 0.06 TWR vs Stock - 675 kg / 4511 deltaV / 0.08 TWR <- Really the only problem with this is only having 5-10% acceleration after a short battery run and long battery filling time (TWR ratios are given for Kerbin) The first one is the main probe I use but others give up acceleration for deltaV, Launcher for it is a simple cheap design for 1t payloads (for when career mode kicks in) Action group 1 - activates the comm array & solar panels Probe description The panels and batteries give it full power for about 10 min burns in sunlight (runs about 75% power with fully drained baterries which if you need a longer burn than 10 mins you won't care about). Under no sunlight the engine runs for about 2 mins at full power. For slightly less TWR you can also get much more deltaV in the VLR and XLR configurations. Only real worry is to extend the solar panels before probe core runs out of energy Download Comm Sat (Ion LR) (probe only) Comm Sat (Ion LR) Launcher (probe and launcher) Comm Sat Pack <- This file contains all 3 craft & launchers as in 1 zip archive

The problem is that under high thrust the link between the orange fuel tank and the smaller fuel tank separates on one of the outer engines (that's why it stars being unequal in fuel usage - you basically lose an engine and it just happens to "stay attached" because it's pushing on the base of the orange one). You can cut back on thrust to mitigate it slightly but more certainly use struts between top of white 32 tanks and orange tank