Ittiz

As soon as I started career mode I went to the vehicle assembly building, built this simple SSTO and launched it into orbit. Without studying anything

I found many rocket engines seem to have an SSTO sweet spot in the engine to fuel ratio. That is how many tanks you need per rocket to get your ship into orbit. I'm not talking about space planes here, just pure rockets. I checked it out for each engine and made a list: Main Sail: 4 & 64s per engine Skipper: 1 & 2/3rds 64s per engine LVT-30: 1 & 1/11ths 32s per engine LVT-45: 1 32 per engine Aerospike: 1 & 3/4ths 16s per engine LV-909: 1 800 per engine 48-72: 1 & 1/2 200s per engine The Poodle, 24-77, LV-1, LV-1R, 55-R and LV-N are all no good due to their poor ISP at ground level. That doesn't mean they're no good at all, just not good to be used alone for SSTO from Kerbin. For instance I have found ways using a combination of jet engines and LV-Ns to do SSTO. Also the LV-N is one of the best engines in low gravity fields. It needs the least fuel for a given delta V of any rocket engine in a vacuum. None of the solid boosters cut the mustard for SSTO. All of them have too much thrust to fuel.

This is just proof KSP is super easy compared to real life. Jool has almost exactly the same physical characteristics as Venus IRL and today we launch from a planet even bigger than that (Earth). Here are the stats: Jool | Venus Diameter: 6,000km | 6,051.8km Mass: 4.2332635×10^24 kg | 4.8676×10^24 kg Gravity: 7.85 m/s^2 | 8.87 m/s^2 Escape V: 9,704.43 m/s | 10,360 m/s Density: 4,678.7834 kg/m^3 | 5,243 kg/m^3 Surface P: 15 atm | 92 atm Sources are KSP wiki and Wikipedia. The bottom line is if you can't launch from Jool you couldn't launch from Earth either. Hence why getting into space is such a challenge.

Like other people mentioned "MOAR STRUTS" the first massive ship I built exploded on the pad. Then the next one broke at the staging seem, but I didn't know. So it became completely uncontrollable. I found the solution was MOAR STRUTS! Then I found I needed way more RCS and monopropellant to keep the big beasts going where I wanted them to.

Well yep my first Mun landing went quite well, until after I was landed anyway. The first ship I sent was rover which I had only tested on Kerbin. So after I landed I got my Kerbal into the first car wreck on the Mun too because I didn't realize you couldn't just gun it like I had done on Kerbin. I had to send another rover, with which I was able to finish the mission and return the Kerbal.

I've mentioned what we need is different systems that you can play depending on difficulty level. The Kerbol system would be the "Easy" setting. The way the game is set up right now is really for pure beginners in rocket science. There should be more advancement. With the current system there is tons of room to make fudges and correct them.

90km if I recall. I've done missions with a Laser Catalyzed Fusion drive I modded into the game, never with conventional stuff.

Due to the inclinations being 0 degrees eclipses are very common. The only eclipse I've seen so far was when I landed a lander on a peak of eternal light on the south pole of the Mun. Although the light wasn't quite eternal because Kerbin would eclipse the sun once a Mun day.

I did come up with a ship design I called the hanging fruit basket design that required no parachute no nothing to land as long as you were going 120kps or less. Too bad the thing was so unstable the design was used often to save the Kerbals upon a launch disaster. Usually the only part that came out intact was the pod holding the kerbals.

That one is cool, what's with all the RCS?

They do have lifting stats though. I'd be curious to see how well the rocket does without it. Also what the big white tank thing you have on top. A big cheat would be something that had a next to nil empty tank weight. Which is the main reason we don't have modern SSTOs. The tank weight is still too high when empty to work. Your craft also looks like it's just a lifter, my was supposed to be more of a lander design. This thing could take off from Laythe with ease for instance as long as it refuled before making the decsent. Now an SSTO would be a huge challenge from Eve.

Those "fins" (canards) generate lift. Once your going horizontal they probably help you a lot. I wanted no lifting structures what so ever besides the engines.

I noticed almost everyone on here who make SSTO's make planes. Well I decided to do a VTOL rocket that takes off from the pad as an SSTO since I didn't see any on here that had absolutely no lifting structure parts or didn't drop at least some weight. This is what I came up with. It does have one modded part on it but it's not magical or anything. Just modded some of the small rocket tanks to have only liquid fuel. They weigh the same and have the same amount of total fuel weight so it doesn't give an advantage. Just more convenient. First it uses jet engines to launch, which have an ISP of about 800 on the ground. At about 20k I use an action group to switch off the jets and turn on the NERVAs (which have a vacuum ISP of 800) simultaneously. If I'm just a few seconds too late the jet engines choking will cause the ships to tailspin. Because of the low trust to weight ratio of the NERVAs I trust all the way to orbit. No shutting down then doing an orbital burn. The ship in orbit, notice there is still enough fuel left to maneuver. Randevu with the space station. If it were going to go on an interplanetary mission I could fuel up and continue on. Since this was just a dry run I decided to land the ship after. Our favorite Kerbalnaught after a successful landing. I found that using the jet engines for a vertical landing was more weight efficient than parachutes, since the on orbit weight of this thing was so high that the number of parachutes needed to land it safely make it difficult to achieve orbit. Landing is a bit of challenge since since jet engines react a bit slowly in a VTOL situation.

Yeah using KAS is realistic if you're assuming the cables are nano tubes. However to make the game easier Squad increased all the planet densities by an order of magnitude. Making them much tinier and causing them to have a much smaller SOI. A good example of this is Jool is a gas planet in the game but has almost exactly the same size and density characteristics as the planet Venus IRL. So a space elevator could probably be built from the surface of Kerbin without using any fancy nano tubes. Also what I was doing was a test. If the test had succeeded what I was going to do was attach cables to the ground at the KSC. Then have two ships attached to the cable in space. A smaller one below geostationary and a larger one beyond it, maybe a third one geostationary. When something was going to be hauled into space, the smaller one closer to Kerbin would release a cable which would descend to Kerbin. There would be a few cables attaching the stations together. One of which would actually be two cables attached to some kind of carrier with two winches attached to each station. That way objects could be ferried from one to the other. So the load could be transferred to the ferry and pulled up the rest of the cable by the station beyond geostationary. If you wanted to release it at geostationary you would just have to stop the winch at that point and release the cargo. On the other hand my accidental sky hook did work around Minmus. Although I didn't use it to make any low energy orbital transfers. The gravity at Minmus is already so low anyway you could reach escape velocity with a sneeze just about.

Well I didn't use any hacks (per se, I only modded KAS to have a cable length as long as I wanted (Well I also turned down the springyness since the backlash on a 5km cable can tear a ship in two)). Some invincible tower that drops your ship right in to LKO is a little ridicules and unrealistic. I think the physics of the game are pretty solid (talking about orbital mechanics and not drag models), but loading and unloading of parts and ships from memory at a certain distance is the issue.