Hodo

But you are failing to factor in the FAR jet engine nerf of 50% thrust on all air breathing engines with a reworked thrust curve. This means before in stock KSP you can take a turbojet and a LV-1N and do a SSTO to Duna if you wanted to.

The next craft I tested is the Mu_Shuttle. -Take off and Atmospheric flight, 4. This being the only stock craft in the bunch this one also has the most problems I have seen as of yet. The Center of Thrust is well below the Center of Mass causing the craft to pitch up when under full power. Take off is long for a craft this small, the lack of real lift is a problem and the landing gear position leads to a very narrow yet surprisingly stable base. You end up using most of the runway if not all of it to get off the ground. This is fine for normal atmospheric flight but it nearly makes the craft uncontrollable at altitude. Much like other craft that rely on the RAPIER or SABER engines for power, they lack a real way to keep the electrical system charged until the rocket engine kicks in. This is a major problem on this craft because it uses so much electricity just trying to counter the engine force to keep the nose pointed where you wanted and not pinwheeling through the sky. This is extremely bad when you switch over to closed cycle on the RAPIERs and the LV-1N engine to do your orbital climb and burn. The pitch up causes an nearly instant stall situation that no amount of fighting overcomes. You basically use brute force to get the craft to space. Once it is there it doesn't get much better. -Orbital Handling, 3. In space you no longer have the atmosphere to give you added control for the craft to counter the lower CoT. This means the RCS thrusters are working overtime just to keep your craft mostly pointed the right way, and don't even think about using the RAPIER engines with the LV-1N while in space, it will just cartwheel out of control. The burn times on the LV-1N was pretty decent on the other hand, and it handled marginally well on just RCS thrusters. -Re-Entry and Landing, 7. Re-entry is where this craft actually shines, it handles pretty well as a re-entry vessel, it is easy to handle with the engines off, and if the batteries are fully charged thanks to the solar panels it does quite well. It can almost glide all the way back to KSC from an orbital re-entry from half way around the world. Landing is also pretty easy, it has a much lower then take off landing speed, and with the added spoilers and flaps it is quite stable at low speeds but its stopping distance is a bit long but nothing to horrible. Side note- It has VTOL engines on it but they do not work on Kerbin, as the gravity is to high, I did not test them anywhere else to see how they would work, but by my calculations they would be plenty strong enough for a landing on Minimus or maybe the Mun. Overall score-4.67 The design could be improved on a great deal, while I respect the use of stock parts, there are better designs that are easier to handle and control.

So I am doing my independent reviews of the FAR capable craft. My rating system is going to be simple 3 areas of rating from 1-10. 10 being Excellent. The first one is in. ACSP -Take off and ascent performance- 7 The take off performance of the ACSP was very good, but it was hampered by the needed training wheels in the back, it actually took off faster with them raised. The high take off speed of over 200knts was a bit of a surprise for a craft of this size. But the biggest shock to me was actually its agility, it is a quite agile craft. The wings could use with a bit of strutting to stiffen them up a bit more, but they weren't horrible. It did lack some yaw stability at lower speeds but I will get to that on part 3 of the review. The 2 SABRE-M engines provide a great deal of power while in air breathing mode and more then enough when in closed cycle. The action grouping is a bit confusing if it was changed up so the SABRE-Ms and LV-1N were not on the same action group. But overall it is a breeze to fly. -Orbital performance 5 This is where this craft suffers unfortunately. The single LV-1N just does not provide enough thrust to keep the burn times at a reasonable level, the orbital burn to achieve a 100km x 100km orbit (my test orbit for all craft including my own) was over 3minutes. This was cut down to a 8 second burn with the SABRE-Ms in closed cycle, but this greatly reduces the delta/V available to the craft and is horribly inefficient. Unfortunately I couldn't give it more than a 5 because of this. -Re-entry and landing 6. If it were not for TAC fuel balancer I think I may have lost control of this craft on re-entry and landing. I ended up coming the atmosphere with less than 50% of the fuel on board. I did quite a bit of testing in space and dumped a fair amount of fuel just to see how it performs when low on fuel. The CoM shifts back quite a ways and actually puts the CoL infront of the the CoM. This makes the craft very nose light and nearly uncontrollable. The landing was quite scary at first then I shifted fuel to the forward tank and it flew fine. Its landing speed was actually quite good, and was able to land and stop in under half of the runway. The training wheels in the back actually came in handy there as they kept the engines from striking but an experienced pilot wouldn't have this problem. I gave it a 6 because of the lack of balance when the fuel drains. Overall it earns a solid 6 out of 10. Not a bad craft, but could use some improvements. I like it, it reminds me of some of my early designs.

I have two installs of KSP, one Realism Overhaul install with all the required mods for that and a second install that is the stock KSP sized universe. Here are the mods I use on the second install. FAR DRE SP+ B9 Procedural Wing Procedural Parts Infernal Robotics MechJeb RCS Build Aide RPM Firespitter Touhou torpedo wheels and car engines and a few others by him Remote Tech2 ScanSat TAC Life Support BDArmorery B9 stock part retexture Kerbside and a few others that I would have to wait till I get home to find out.... don't remember what they are. But that is most of the ones I use on my base install of KSP. EDIT- additional mods that I run. EVE ATM Crewmanifest HullcamVDS Hyomoto KAS KAX KJR KSPX RealChute

This is one of those actions that would only make me mad at this point. I am fine with the 50% jet nerf, if people can't handle that tell them to get NEAR. Really if you take it out I will adapt, again, if you leave it in fine. But at this point I think I and many others would be happier if you just stuck to one or the other and kept fine tuning the existing code to add more depth and realistic simulation for us. Thank you Ferram4 for your work on one of my MUST HAVE plugins and one of 2 that I can't do without in KSP. Without FAR and DRE I would have quit KSP 11 months ago 30days after I bought it.

Can you sort them by FAR and non-FAR. I would hate to download and fly a craft that has no business in FAR. And thus bombing my review of it.

How does FAR make the challenge easier? 50% nerf to all air breathing engines. aerodynamic failures. with RSS you now have a properly scaled atmosphere it doesn't make anything easier if anything it balances it out.

BahamutoD, Did I ever send you the AIM-9X file that I worked out from a few weeks if not a month or so ago?

I can see some minor issues that would cause some problems and some other issues I would fix for purely looks. First it looks like you are not strutted enough, the body may flex from the side tanks causing some issues. The other issue I see is the control surfaces, I am not sure exactly how you have them setup but you may have to many winglets set to many things and you lack a real vertical stabilizer. For aesthetics I would dump the quad coupler of intakes and replace them with a single SABRE-M cone intake, that is about the same intake area as the 4 RAM intakes you have there. Also how is your fuel drainage, in otherwords what is your dry CoM vs your wet/loaded CoM?

It does? 108 tons in test cargo load in that one... I no longer have that craft file but I built it, it worked and worked EXTREMELY well, so well in fact I extended it another 4m and upped its cargo capacity to 120tons. But this will be the one I submit when I get around to taking pictures of take off and landings with cargo. It is my current career mode medium lifter. Uses FAR, DRE, P-wing, and B9 along with TAC Life Support.

Simple answer is this. Your landing speed is to high. 200m/s is still well over 400mph! I like to land around 70-120m/s depending on the craft. I try to keep my rate of decent around 5m/s to no more than 10m/s. If you are coming down faster than that you are going to slow or have to steep of a rate of decent. If you are coming in at a higher rate of speed then you need to burn some speed off either with airbrakes or spoilers. I generally line up 10km out and begin a gentle glide slope from there.

That is an old picture of that craft, does it still work in the current FAR version? I suggest you check your design before submitting, it maybe unflyable in the current FAR.

You are using B9 parts so you have access to the same engines I use most of the time for VTOLs. Or something like this.... good old fashioned Buck Rogers style SSTO.

I think I should stay out of this contest, and let some new blood show what they have got. I may download a few of the FAR craft and test them out and give my 2 cents.

I am going to tell you what Ferram is going to say. Can't do anything without an Output.log.

I have a suggestion to help with your problem. You could try removing the front two fuel tanks and replace them with just structural parts, this would reduce the mass at the front of the craft moving the CoM further back. The other option is to move your wings forward, which would be ugly but would fix the problem. Delta wing designs tend to generate bulk of their lift towards the rear of the wing. Which I find odd, but what do I know.

Here is a quick wing construction tutorial for FAR that I whipped up in about 15minutes using Procedural Wings. I did this on a scratch built craft modeled after the Su-17, because it was the most interesting simple wing design I could come up with in a short amount of time. Hope this helps people.

I thought this was going to be a true VTOL craft, not a plane launched like a rocket. Not your fault all on me there. You have a pretty decent starting design there, with some refinements it could be a real nice SSTO space plane. Just lose the vertical launch system.

To true. I managed to do it in my RO install a while ago the craft still works, but it is a long way from being a SSTO space plane. I think it topped out at just over mach 4.

For me it is no more than a 3:1 ratio, but most of the time I am a 1:1 or at best a 2:1 intake to jet ratio. I personally can't stand those walls of intakes slapped on bicouplers and quadcouplers so they look like a wall of ram intakes just so they can get the craft to use its jet engine till 60km altitude. They are horrible to look at and worse to even attempt to fly in FAR.

You can do all of that in the Realism Overhaul mod. I have attempted most of that. I had one SSTO space plane, it was close to 300 tons sitting on the ground, and used Kerosene and LO2 just to get to a barely stable orbit of 180.1km x180.01km orbit. It had to use RCS to deorbit and glide back to the nearest landing site, which I think I landed in Texas after that mission. I have since been messing with Linear aerospike rocket engines as the primary engine instead of air breathers.

I would have to argue this. If you plan on returning with that craft or go to any planet with an atmosphere wings are useful. At the very least a lifting body design is a must. I have sent SSTO space planes to Duna, Ike, and even Moho. I have recovered all of them. And I can say the wings were useful, or more than useful on Duna and on recovering the craft back at the KSC. Were the wings useful on Ike or Moho, not really, but the craft was designed to land VTOL on most worlds anyway. The wings helped because I had the VTOL engines set out away from the centerline of the craft to give it a wider thrust base for stability. Wings are never useless unless you don't plan on bringing the craft back. In that case just slap your kerbals in a can and launch them on their one way mission to where ever they maybe headed. And argueing the point about SSTO rockets is a pretty moot point due to the fact that in real life most rockets are staged because of the large delta velocities required to achieve orbit. Kerbin-2.3km/s Earth-9.4km/s Kerbin-69.1km Earth-180km Atmosphere height While I build SSTO space planes and rockets in stock kerbin all the time, I am hard pressed to get one functional design in Realism Overhaul with the RSS correct scale Earth.

I have to agree with FCISuperGuy, I recently sent a mission to the Mun, it was a SSTO that was refueled in orbit by another SSTO that had a much higher cargo capacity. Once refueled it burned for the Mun achieved orbit, and deployed a lander, which landed and returned to the craft, barely I had a minor fuel calculation error on my part with the lander, burned way to much fuel on landing, and had 2m/s d/v to spare on docking with the mother ship. But the mission went perfectly, the SSTO returned to Kerbin, and landed at the KSC without much of an issue. I think total mission cost was the cost of 2 complete refuels and life support top off for the mun mission and 1 refuel for the tanker.

Here is one that is completely stock in FAR and uses a Turbojet it still manages orbit. And this is a VTOL version that I was testing some concepts out on, it manages to meet my test requirements of 100km orbit, barely.....

Is that a bad thing? And I think I have one design that currently uses jet engines with a rocket engine that can achieve orbit. I will have to load up and check.