Nightwraith

Almost got it up there. Fell about 20m/s short of a 80k orbit. Nearly lost it around 30k though, I think a little too much lift on the nose. Did everything I could to keep the nose down and it kept climbing. Had to kill the turbines way before I wanted to. Going to try some smaller stub wings and try again.

Appreciate your help. Yeah, MechJeb is nice for the info it provides. I don't like it to fly for me though, makes the game kinda lame.

That's an awesome SSTO. Balance not bad, eh? Feels good in flight, going to see if I can get it into orbit.

Thanks, I'll give it a go. Just hope I have enough oxidizer on board to get me to orbit.

I wondered if it was something happening while 'trans-sonic'. So the canards shouldn't be providing any pitch or roll authority? Why is that? (trying to learn)

I am using FAR, speed was around 400m/s.

Yeah, I orginally had the bottom pair on top of the wing, but that was causing the nose to pitch down -really- strongly around 13,000 meters. Couldn't reliably climb any higher than that until I moved two of them down. I'll try the light thing, should help get everything fine tuned.

Dang you guys are quick. I never thought to just remove the engines to get a look at CoT. Here is what I'm dealing with. Never really gave ASAS modules a thought. I might try that. Also good points with adding ballast, I worked pretty hard to get the thrust from those turbines balanced.

So I've been tweaking this design since I last asked for help. This is what I currently have. It flies in atmosphere wonderfully. The transition to the rocket engines is killing me so far. I think I have the problem narrowed down, my center of thrust (rocket engines only) is ever so slightly above my center of mass. Its nosing the plane down. RCS is strong enough to counter act the rotation, but its really, really, really hard to control when in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. I hacked gravity and turned infinite fuel on just to see what it would be like in total vacuum and its not as bad. I would still be range limited by rocket fuel, not RCS...so thats good, haha. I would still like to get it balanced though. Any ideas on getting that accomplished? The CoT indicator doesn't really work for me in the SPH because its taking the turbines into account as well....All the RCS tanks on back section there are mostly to attempt to shift CoM up a little bit. It helps some. Not enough though.

I ran into that very problem today. Added a lot to the design.....and two more nukes. I'm out of time to play for now, but I've gotten this thing to 20k meters screaming along around 1500m/s without the rocket engines. I haven't yet fired up all 3 nukes at the same time, it might not be enough...I may be better served by one LVT-45 - but I would like to be able to take this thing to Duna. Pretty happy with it right now, you guys were a lot of help. I changed the AoA of the high elevator in the rear to tweak the natural lift/dive. Canards help too. Getting past the 13-15k barrier is rough. Need to stop climbing around 10k to pick up speed else there just isnt enough lift.

Thanks for the tips guys, I'll give it a shot this afternoon when I get some time.

So today I've been working on building a ssto space plane. The ultimate goal is to have something that can take some payload, whatever can fit in the 6m long S2 cargo bay from B9, to other planets. Speaking of, using B9 and FAR. That's it. As of right now, I cannot get anything off the runway. I started off with a much more complex design, and have distilled it down to this. If I can get it to go straight down the runway without it veering off, it just nosedives into the ground, well before I ever get to the water. I can't imagine I need more lift. And those two turbojets have me well above 120m/s at that point. I can make a viable plane with the smaller parts, but they obviously have their limitations. Any ideas?