Hodo

Do you have a picture of the craft? You may not have enough wing surface to actually generate lift, or you have to much wing and you are generating far more lift then you need. Either way flaps and spoilers.

Not possible in FAR. And the OP is using FAR.

The other issue you are having is to much POWER! In FAR with rockets ideally you want a TWR of 1.2-1.4:1 anything higher than that and you will accelerate way to fast.

This is natural, in the real world if something is dropped from orbit it will continue to pick up speed till it hits terminal velocity or the ground which ever happens first. So the answer is come in shallower perform some energy burning maneuvers like the space shuttle had to do on re-entry, and or add some air brakes to the craft from B9 or Firespitter and or set some control surfaces as spoilers. Flaps are not the right answer as they generate lift and drag, you want to generate drag more than lift at the point of wanting to slow down. And flaps may shear off at high speeds so also not a good choice. As seen here, the thing sticking up in the center of the craft is an air brake from B9 mounted directly above the CoM as to not upset the crafts stability when in use.

Not saying it is a bad design, but there are designs in this challenge that would not fly in FAR, let alone reach space and come back. While your design looked cool, it was as practical as mine.

Air brakes are in Firespitter, and in B9.

I wouldn't suggest using flaps to slow down on re-entry, they may come off your craft due to the dynamic pressures at those speeds once you hit the lower atmosphere where you would encounter most of the drag needed to slow down. I suggest using spoilers and air brakes.

I think a solid set of categories for a challenge or contest like this is a must. The range on this one was to broad to really feel like there was more than one winner. While I am sure the O-Doc design is nice, but I will never experience it or others who have FAR, as it most likely will fly like a lawn dart in FAR. But with that aside, if I were judging based on utility I would have picked someones craft that could do more then just reach orbit. Or if it was about cost vs use, or any number of factors. I loved this challenge it is one of the best ones posted in a good while I think it would could be improved. But I am also nitpicking, it has been one of them days. EDIT-I left out "more than", don't type when asleep.

You shouldn't need flaps at higher speeds. All of my flaps are fully raised by 450kts and don't come down again till well below that.

Congrats, never flew it but it wouldn't work well in FAR looks good though. Wanderfound, congrats on winning the FAR category, you really have an amazing craft there.

I am aware of that, I am showing you don't need a whole lot of intakes to achieve the same goal in FAR. At most you shouldnt need more than 1.5-2:1 intake to air breathing engine ratio.

+1. When he is right he is right on!

I pretty sure I know what the problem is. It looks like from your pictures your fuel tanks may drain from differently, top to bottom then you would like. Your CoM is then moving up putting your CoT below your CoM, and causing your pitch issues in zero atmosphere. This isn't noticed as much in atmosphere because your wings and control surfaces are able to counter that force with increased control input. You have a couple of options confirm this and fix it. -Download TAC Fuel Balancer, it lets you balance out the fuel tanks so your CoM stays pretty much in place. Or download PYB auto balance, does the samething just newer. -Check the fuel flow of your tanks, and see if you can get them to drain all of the tanks evenly or feed to a centralized tank to keep your CoM pretty close to where you started. - redesign the whole thing and start over with a single wing design, bi-plane wings are bad. Ask Ferram if you want more information on that, he is far more tactful then I would be talking about it.

You shouldn't need to adjust things everytime you launch a different craft. I have made some pretty odd looking aircraft that have worked... some better then others, but they have worked and I never adjusted anything in FAR or with the craft settings. But perhaps I am not understanding what adjustments you are talking about?

The trick with placing flaps on aircraft is simple. Place them as inline with the CoM as possible. It is hard to tell in these pictures but here is a couple of my craft that have flaps on them. This one is the easiest to see them on, but it is also a swing wing design. This one you can see where the flaps are but they are not deployed, the airbrake is though and it is right over the CoM of the craft. This one you can't see them in this picture but that is because I mounted them under the wings inline with the CoM. Most delta wing aircraft wont have flaps. This craft from my RO install is not an SSTO but it is a very nimble fighter, it uses leading edge slats instead of flaps. And here is a picture of my Cessna in my RO install. it has its flaps in a traditional possition. Hope I helped a bit more.

Oh and you may want to get FAR, because last I checked B9 does not support stock with its parts.

But overall great job on your fleet.

If I could give you a bit of advice for FAR. You don't need as many intakes in FAR, a 1:1 ratio of intake to airbreathing engine is fine. And it looks better, or use the radial attachment intakes they will look better and look less "air hog" like. Here is an example of one of my current medium lift SSTO space planes. It only has 1 intake per air breathing engine. And it achieves orbit quite easily with up to 50 tons in its cargo bay.

Like this That is like this... [ imgur ] K7Stf [ / imgur ] No spaces Hope that helps.

AJE does to air breathing jet engines what FAR does to the atmosphere. It makes them behave in a realistic manner not in some fantasy fashion. KIDS just rescales all the ISPs of everything to be more in line with the scale of Kerbin vs Earth.

I just went into the B9 cfg files for the biggest offenders, and changed the temp gain to half of what it is normally. I think the SABRE-S is 450 I set it to 225. They still get hot, but not like now, they start to get hot around mach 3.5-4.5.

Actually not offended at all, I found your post to be quite well writen. I loved it actually. But I am a bit thicker skinned then some people on these forums.

I think it would be better with aero failures on.

I have an capsule eject system designed into 90% of my functioning SSTO space plane fleet.

I prefer FAR, but I have only used FAR, never even bothered with the stock system. Honestly I rarely have aerodynamic failures, and if you are plagued by them then you are the fault not the plugin. Try designing more structurally sound craft, use struts in places they actually do something, if you are losing control surfaces you should look at the speeds you are going at which altitudes, and avoid going that fast and doing major control surface usage, or just hit the DSA button on the FAR tab. Honestly FAR is one of the simplest things to understand, far more than stock or even NEAR. It at least has some base in reality, which means if you are unsure about how something should fly, look it up or just make a paper airplane.