PotatoOverdose

I'm not a huge fan of the old model where any design was workable as long you had enough jets and an absolutely ridiculous amount of intakes. The current model kills those designs, which is good. Aesthetics be damned, if you want to just make neat looking SSTO's with no regard for "the simulation", press alt-f12 and disable gravity. Congrats, now anything can be an SSTO - go and fly your star destroyer.

Yes, those are fuel-containing wings, Big-S Delta Wings and Big-S Strakes to be specific. Your plane looks good, and I think Mun planes are definitely possible.

Mount the nuke to an unused fairing + reasonably large fuel tank - all of your heat problems with nukes will be gone. Fuel tanks and fairings are really good at absorbing nuke heat- I used a 1.25m fairing and an MK 2 to 1.5 adapter and can run the nuke without exploding - at least for 10-15 minutes.

Also, if you make a single stage to minmus plane, you can have an ISRU craft there make unlimited quantities of fuel. Minmus has very low land/orbit dV requirements, so it's a perfect place for a mining/refuel station in orbit. A Nerva SSTO, fully refueled will then have over 9k dV to deliver payloads to any point in the solar system - and the entire setup, the Single Stage to Minmus plane, and the ISRU fuel craft are fully re-usable - forever.

The pre coolers just add a nice bit of liquid fuel and a nice bit of intake. Looking at your craft here and my craft here, there are a few key differences. I count 7 engines on yours, mine only has 5. 4 of your engines (the jets) contribute nothing to the orbital burn once you reach 1200m/s+, so are dead weight. The nerva on my planes, while dead weight in low atmo, is actually noticeably useful in high atmo, giving me +0.4 TWR when I need it most. You have 3 radial tanks mounted on each side of the mk2 fuselage - mine has 2, that means there's more surface area to create drag making your plane less efficient. You also use a lot of small wing components - I count no less than 24 wing pieces and no less than 14 additional control surfaces. My planes have 6 wing pieces and 6 control surfaces. Just compare this: With mine: You CAN build an ssto, that carries a multi-ton payload to orbit, and has well over a thousand dV in orbit. Mine carried 3 tons with 1365 dV left over, it's perfectly doable. You just need to make some changes from pre-1.0 designs.

Actually, I got the idea from reading some of your posts, and fine tuned a flight plan for my own craft, so credit where credit is due. Incidentally, it can also be done with 2 Rapiers and a Nerva instead of 4 rapiers. 4 is more efficient, much more dV left over because of better TWR, but 2 is perfectly viable. Here's one of my earlier craft achieving it. Hadn't solved the nerva heat problem yet, so it's a bit warm.

Here's the flight plan: pitch up to 20 degrees until 18km. - Near surface you get TWR of 2, at 18km you get TWR of less than 1. Pitch to -10 degrees until you pass the sound barrier (re-entry effects, usually around 10-14km depending on the craft). Once past sound barrier, your TWR shoots past 2 or even 3, pitch up to +10 degrees and maintain until +1200 m/s, usually happens around 20km+. This particular plane can get to around 1300m/s. Once your TWR drops below 1 (happens around 22-26km), activate the nerva and rocket mode on the rapiers and pitch up to 30+ degrees (45 if you can manage it but I usually can't) - maintain burn until apoapsis is at 80km. Once in space, burn to circularize, this will use the remainder of your oxidizer - now you just have a nerva and 800-1200 units of liquid fuel. The idea is to use gravity to help you break the sound barrier.

I can get much farther than a 150ish km orbit with the leftover 1365 dv. Like duna. And that's all with a 3 ton payload in the cargohold. If I ditch the payload, ascent will be more efficient and could maybe do laythe with some clever gravity assist at jool. Since when are duna and laythe "bad" for an SSTO?

I dunno, I think this plane looks kind of like the first image in the original post. Gets 1365 dV in LKO with a 3 ton payload in tow. And the nerva can last ~15 minutes without exploding things.

Won't claim any particular creativity, but this gets 1365 dV in LKO with a 3 ton payload in the cargohold, and the nerva can run for 15 minutes+ without exploding anything. Will probably take it to laythe once i have an ISRU refueling craft out there.

Do this challenge: http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1lyfv8/weekly_challenge_eve_and_back/ Single launch manned roundtrip to eve and back. That will keep you busy for a while. Also, ignoring all of the Jool moons, eve, and other planets is like saying "Oh I put something into orbit, I've overcome every challenge this game has to offer, I win." Not even remotely close. You've just scratched the surface. And once you accomplish all of that, do the grand tour in a single launch.

Doing a complete eve round-trip in a single launch ~300 ton rocket. Here's the lander just as it's about to touch down. And here's the entire related album: http://imgur.com/a/8tqU2#0

Here's a picture of my Eve return vehicle. And here's the entire related album: http://imgur.com/a/8tqU2#0

It depends what you're going for. If you are just going to land, fly around a bit, and then land again it will work just fine. If you're hoping to land, take off, and re-orbit, odds are you wont do so well. Reason being that due to the thicker atmosphere, and having only rocket engines available, the optimal launch trajectory is a pure vertical ascent until you pass through the thickest part of the atmosphere. Wings don't really help with that and just weigh you down. But if you are using an expendable probe, it really doesn't matter too much. As for useful tips: for just flying around keep your rocket throttle low, a plane flying around at 5 atmospheres of pressure has a somewhat lower terminal velocity on eve than what you'd expect on kerbin. Also, you don't need that many solar panels. In fact you could probably replace all of them with a single RTG and be able to fly around at night as well, and with a better frame rate.

Gliding down to eve allows you better control of your landing site, so you could, for example, land on top of a 6km high mountain far more easily with a glider than with parachutes. That's the core concept anyway, but there are other reasons why gliding down on eve isn't a good idea.