Hodo

While I have designs that have drag chutes for landing I rarely use them, unless I am landing on a short runway, Island strip. While this craft could easily land on the KSC runway I was testing a heavy landing.

It does work in FAR. This is one I built last year. It worked fine actually. The trick was trying to balance the CoL where it should be in relation to the CoM, and maintain control of the craft at supersonic speeds.

Good job, that is a mighty nice looking craft there. As for landing practice. I did touch and goes for a couple of hours in my craft to get the hang of their landing characteristics. What I would do is launch the craft with about 1/4 of the fuel they would normally launch with, this way I could simulate a landing while light. I would also do a few with full fuel, this would give me an idea of what the craft is like when heavy.

The biggest problem is the placement of the gear, you have to many for the size of that craft, and your primary gear are not straight. They have to much camber which is causing the craft to go one way or the other. Then with the fact that your gear are behind the pivot point of your aircraft (the point just behind your CoM where you CoL is in your screen shot) you are just forcing those gear into the ground making the camber issue worse. The speed is not a major issue but your lack of wing is. 75m/s is about 140-150kts which is about what most of my SSTOs of that size take off at.

I was using Infernal Robotics, but scrapped using that for the swing wings due to strength issues. And ultimately scrapped the swing wing designs all together. Most of my craft that use flaps I have found it easier to place the flap position almost directly inline with the CoM. There will be some nose pitch issues at high flap settings with a lot of flap deflection but you can dial that out with a bit of fine tuning.

Here is a swing wing design I made a while ago, and lost the craft file... but the design worked great in FAR. The trick with the Flaps can be seen in the pictures in the album. I dont have a very deep swing to the flaps, they come out maybe 10deg 15 at most.

Don't try to return straight from the Mun. I usually shoot for a parking orbit before I de-orbit the craft. This way I am not going 4000m/s on re-entry.

It depends on my craft and its TWR in closed cycle or rocket mode. If it is a heavier craft like this. Then I begin the burn at around 26-28km ASL. But something like this REAL heavy craft, it starts its burn at 25-27km But this craft which has a greater than 1 TWR I can start my burn at around 30km and it only takes about 20s for it to achieve a 100km orbit at that point.

Actually that is FALSE. There has been a space plane in real life, the Space Shuttle was a "Space Plane" Just not a SSTO space plane. The trick with DRE and re-entry on any aircraft design is to stay high as long as possible and get your speed below mach 5-5.5 before you go below 27.5km ASL. I find if you are returning from 100km orbit you should set your PE for around 5-10km, this changes based on your crafts glide slope. Also you will want air brakes or some kind of spoiler to create as much drag as possible to slow the craft down when coming down. You can see in these pictures one of my craft from the last version of KSP on re-entry with FAR+DRE.

This was a design I made a while ago for a stock (FAR) "fighter" it worked quite well as an SSTO and was quite easy to fly even at low speeds.

Not available for DL yet, I am still working out some minor issues and fine tuning. But when I do release it I will post the DL link.

There are several landing gear that will take that mass, I have SSTO space planes that weigh more than that and the gear takes the weight. The problem I see with that craft is the lack of clearance you will have with the ground and those fins that stick down. If it were a tail sitter I could see it landing and taking off. The other issue I see is it doesnt have much of a control system for atmospheric flight. This would be a huge issue if you plan on ever flying it anywhere where there is an atmosphere. I see that you have FAR installed have you looked at the flight data readouts for FAR to see if that craft is even capable of flight?

You aren't the only one.

I never needed additional shielding on any of my SSTO Space planes on re-entry. I have found if you come in at a reasonable angle you wont have that big of an issue. That is an older picture but the approach hasnt changed.

I found away around it but sometimes I want gear under the craft or the design doesn't lend itself to bulky sidepods for gear. Like this.... This is a simple small fighter I built a while ago and still use for some aerial survey missions. But its landing gear are not quite conformal to the craft... kind of a minor issue for me. But I have a larger scale of this craft that is a science/cargo hauler and it has a bay just above where those gear are placed, and those gear take up almost half of the usable space in the bay. You can see the tops of the gear in this picture here in a different SSTO.

What about a steeper angle to the wheels so you can side attach them, like the Mig-23 landing gear.

I have a question for BD, can you make the part of the gear that attaches to the craft a bit thinner, it sticks WAY up into a cargobay if attached to the bottom.

I have a couple that never got a release thread.... Finished it then never actually used it... kind of sad. This Rover.... LSR-1 I have it available for download, and others have used it more than I have... I may download it and put it to use now....lol Then there is my P-6 science aircraft. I use it for all aerial survey missions. And this horrible looking fighter... but it has something about it I just like. F-117 Vulture. It is DAMNED fast, mach 1.5 while below 200m! These are the poor craft in my inventory that never got much attention. I kind of miss some of them.

Yeah I went from making space "trucks" as you said, to fighters about a year ago. And honestly it helped with my overall design process. I learned more from building high performance craft and transitioned it to my larger aircraft and now I like to say I no longer build space trucks but I build space planes. I think my best landing speed on the SP-410 when empty is actually less than 70m/s and it comes to a stop before a 1/4 of the runway passes. I can almost use no brakes at all and still come to a stop before the end of the runway. I learned from looking at wing designs on Migs and Northrop-Grumman aircraft that I found there are better wing designs and how they work at different speeds. I remember watching a documentary on the Su-17 that just helped more than I can ever imagine. I learned about supersonic wing affects and subsonic lift on wings.

KCS123, I love your album explaining your design process it is really well laid out and worded. If I may throw some suggestions out there to see if I can help your future designs be a bit more efficient. In all of my designs I can achieve take off or landing around 70-90m/s which is a fair bit slower than your 120m/s on your craft. The way I have found to to do this is actually a larger wing area and a different shape to the wing. I have become a fan of deltawing designs but found they have some flaws in other areas like higher landing and take-off speeds. So I use a hybrid wing design like the Russian Su-17 Fitter and the US F-15 Eagle. They have a larger wing root which generates bulk of the lift at supersonic speeds and a smaller wing tip which is where a great deal of the lift is generated at lower speeds. Like this... A larger hybrid design wing. And an almost complete rip-off of the Su-17 wing.... As you can see the take off speed is low on most of the wing designs I have found to use... On a side note if I could get B9-Procedural wings to work with my install I would be happy but unfortunately I cant, so no fuel in the wings for me.

The ISPs dont change much it is the power levels that change in FAR. They are pretty much half of stock when sitting still so getting up to speed is a bit more of a challenge and thus gaining altitude is a bit harder than stock. As for my fuel amounts I like having enough fuel for any situation including orbital transitions and returns. I also find that your required fuel depends on the engines and again its role. Lets take this craft for example, SP-410.... It is my newest SSTO cargo hauler. It hauled 70 tons into an orbit of 100km x 100km and still had over 700d/v left with the cargo still inside, and over 1000m/s when the cargo was removed. This was without even touching the cargo fuel amount. But this design had a LOT more d/v when sitting on the ground because it was designed as a VTOL that used rockets to get it off the ground. And this small fighter had in rocket mode less than 1200m/s delta/V. And it was still quite capable of reaching my test orbit of 100km x 100km. Again it comes down to the design. I personally find no point in ever going to anything less than 100km orbit my lowest space stations sit at 100km. But I also am a bit odd in some of my thinking. I tend to over-engineer most of my designs. That was a sustained turn of 13.5Gs!

There was a Kerbal F1 circuit for a while there... they had 2 good seasons last year that I can recall. K1 Racing league Supercar racing league But my favorite was the drive from KSC to KSC2 rally back 2 years ago.

Its not a permissions thing, its a code thing. [ imgur ] 3N60t [ / imgur ]<nospaces

I know when I am designing a SSTO I put a minimum of 2.5km/s delta/V on it for fuel, but I have been known to go up to 6km/s delta/V when designing. But it depends greatly on the designs job and mission. Currently I am in the process of redesigning my whole spaceplane SSTO cargo hauling fleet. But not as actively as I once was. I only recently got around to finishing three SSTO cargo planes that I plan on using for missions. And I cant say I have messed with the new larger 2.5m stock aircraft parts. I just dont like the look of most of them, they are a bit clunky when used with other stock parts and dont help with the parts count at all. But I digress, it really does come up to the basic mission goals for that craft what it has for fuel and engines. If it is a cargo craft it will have a higher TWR when empty then it will when it is fully loaded. My combat craft all have higher TWR across the board but have lower fuel range and no real cargo ability they are also a fair bit more nimble. My science/recon SSTOs are easy to fly and have good range and a VERY small cargo/utility bay for science experiments.

SP-410..... HARM industries is back with another lifter design. The new medium-heavy lifter in the fleet is simple, easy to fly and surprisingly rugged. Capable of hauling nearly 70 tons into orbit in its wide cargo bay, both of the fuel tanks used as cargo were 2m wide, but weighed in at 34 tons each. The SP-410 still had over 1000m/s delta/V left over which meant it could take the cargo higher if needed and still return to the KSC without refueling.