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.

While you're not wrong about real life being harder (duh), your comparison is extremely flawed. While the obstacles we have to overcome in ksp are smaller, the tools we have to do so are also less efficient. For starters, the fuel tanks we get have a lower fuel fraction compared to real life rockets. Our orange tank has a fuel fraction of 88.9%. A real orange tank, like the one on the space shuttle, has a fuel fraction of over 95% [source]. Likewise, the TWR of our engines are absolutely horrendous. The F-1 engines (most notable for ther use in the Saturn V vehicle) had a TWR of 94.1 and lifted a 3000 ton rocket. The Merlin 1D engine (used by Space X) has a TWR of 159.9 [source]. Also, the real life nuclear engine has a TWR of 1.8. Higher TWR means you need fewer engines to lift the same amount of fuel and payload, which again gives real rockets a massively improved propellant mass fraction. Given the exponential relationships between delta V and propellant mass fraction in the tsiolkovsky rocket equation, the tremendous significance of these two points becomes apparent. If you want to compare Jool to Venus, fine, but then you have to give the LV-T45 a TWR of 159.9 and the LV-N a TWR of 1.8. And then Jool becomes a whole lot easier:). And we haven't touched on the fact that we don't have 10 meter parts like the Saturn V, we only have 2.5m parts, and given that volume of a tank is proportional to r^3, well.....

I agree 100%. That's why, imo, "I just use stock parts" shouldn't offend anyone and shouldn't be considered derisive toward mod users. Hence my first point, stock parts provide a common frame of reference. Nor should it ever be considered elitism. It's just people playing the way they want to/are able to.

What about those people whose computers can't handle all the extra memory and computational resources that extensive modding requires? Are they elitist too for asking for stock solutions, since that's all they can use without taking a significant performance hit?

Stock parts provide a common frame of reference. Take an Eve return mission as an example. One of the most challenging things to do in stock KSP. But it becomes significantly easier with the kethane mod (due to kethane jets), or FAR (reduces global dV requirements for Eve's extremely thick atmosphere), or the hooligan airship mod (which can take you up many tens of kilometers, massively reducing dV requirements). Those mods (kethane, FAR, airship) are popular, and reasonably well balanced. But they also take much of the challenge out of an Eve ascent, and as such do not have a common frame of reference for comparison with stock eve ascent missions. Individuals specify that they use stock craft so that there vehicle is compared to other stock vehicles and any suggestions/critiques fall within that envelope. A stock vehicle, a stock solution to a given mission, is usable by everyone regardless of their personal preferences or their PC's specs. Some people have computers and ksp setups that just don't handle running a plethora of mods all that well.

Hmm, I didn't know that about lower ISP engines, learn something new every day. I would be interested in seeing just how much the 48-7s wins over the LV-909, if it isn't too much trouble to plot. I suspect it won't be that big of a difference, but I could be wrong.

Its a good small engine for small payloads. For larger (>10-15t) payloads there are better engines. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it is obsolete. There is probably a large area of overlap where the LV-909 is within 5% of optimal efficiency of the 48-7s. The problem with your graphs is that they don't really show you how close is the next runner up. Since a large vehicle will require a lot of 48-7s engines, the LV-909 will win out on part count in many cases which leads to better fps and performance for larger rockets, while only loosing a marginal amount of dV. The situation is probably more inline with the LV-T30 and the aerospike, both of which are really close to one another in allround performance but occasionally outperform the other at a given task. Personally I think the 48-7s just fills a gap in the stock parts for smaller in-line engines, which is a good thing.

Eve really isn't that tedious. You can do a complete round trip for around 300 tons in a single launch without refueling once. You could probably do it for less if you use ladders, but I find that too buggy for my tastes. Here's a picture of my 308 ton rocket that does the round trip, and an album where I show my latest trip for the reddit challenge. http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1m25k2/challenge_eve_and_back_308_tons_370_parts/ The trick is to get a lightweight eve ascent stage. Mine was around 27 tons, as an example.

Thanks! I've found that for my designs at least, NERVAs don't work too well with low part count ssto's. The low TWR of NERVAs means many maneuvers will require more dV, and the relatively high mass of each NERVA (2.25T) reduces the overall amount of dV that you get (on small craft anyway). The LV-909's on the other hand give me a good TWR allowing me to do maneuvers for less dV cost. Likewise, the single jet engine has a much easier time pushing two LV-909's and the lower mass of those engines gives me nice boost to overall dV once I'm in orbit. You can get around this by having 20+ air intakes and a few jet engines take you to 40km+ at 2000m/s+ and then using a NERVA or two, but then you don't get a low part count which is what I wanted (especially since extra intakes will probably require extra struts).

Here's my SSTO, admittedly it has a 6:1 ratio but I think it looks feasible. Goes all the way to Laythe without refueling. Stock (/w kerbal engineer), 60 Parts, 15 Tons, 6 air intakes. The above album is an overview of my most recent flight.

Here's my SSTO, the Gnat 7. Goes all the way to Laythe without refueling. Stock (/w kerbal engineer), 60 Parts, 15 Tons, 6 air intakes. The above album is an overview of my most recent flight.