Radam

At 30km up, just when air is running out? Thats probably becouse of asymetric thrust when air is running out. Read up on intake flow rules here:http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92752-How-to-exploit-intake-air-flow-logic-for-profit

Either you used alot less fuel than you had, didnt have your tanks full or something more funny. As even rocket tanks on your wings hold 12 t of fuel, or 1320 units of oxidiser. Compared to 650 you said to have used. Liquid fuel wise, assuming all center tanks hold only that, you had 2560 units of LF. So in the end you should still have more than half of fuel left, but the picture before landing shows engines with a few slivers of fuel. Seems interesting to me.

Nice! I have action groups set for manual switching of the engines. So that not all engines switch to rocket mode at once. As for air hogging, stock Aeris 4 has 1 ram intake and 2 radial air intakes per engine. Which amounts to 0.022 intake area per engine. As structural intakes you are using only have 0.0025 intake area each, aeris 4 would need like 16 of them... I think the site you are using to upload crafts counts parts wrongly. I counted 60 structural intakes on Jupitec 10, site says 49... Anyway that amounts to 0.015 intake area per engine. Significantly less than Aeris 4. Tell that to whoever asks Thing with liquid tanks was that you have to have a balanced mix of rocket fuel in orbit. Ratio is 1.2, like divide the amount of oxidiser left in orbit with 1.2 and if the result is more than you have liquid fuel, then you need more LF. If the craft flips on landing, the parachutes are too low. If parachutes break the craft, then there are too many on one single part. Jupitec 10 has all parachutes just below the command pod. Try putting 2 of them high on the pod itself. The rest slightly lower so that they attach to the fuel tank and not to the battery. Maybe even tweak their deploy attitude so that they dont deploy all at once.

Speaks for itself. Only modifications I did were swapping the upper small tank with 3 liquid fuel tanks, and some action groups. I actually need more liquid fuel... From 10km to until air runs out im keeping my vertical speed at 90m/s with lowering or increasing curve % in mechjeb. Im bad at mun landings, specially in the dark.

I dont think you mentioned the weight at launch?

Well i was staging the engine mode switching aswell. Craft was following mechjeb ascent curve. Which started from 25% dropping back down to even 7% level while keeping vertical speed at about 100m/s. When air becomes too thin for all engines, i switch first set of them and set the curve back up. Btw, try loading the craft at about 8t per rapier. I would still detach the cockpit and use a nerva engine for munar trip. Could still dock back and land with atmospheric engines. Edit: im sorry but version 10 has less Dv than 7. Main problems: -not enough fuel, aim for 12m/s2 acceleration from the pad, v10 has like 15 -not enough intakes. The ones you are using have area about 0.0025 m2 while regular ram intakes have 0.01m2. So your craft has in the end just over one ram intake worth per engine. My designs usually have about 2 to 3. Basically try 8 fold simetry, shock cone intakes with some more of those high speed ones. Aim for 64t craft and avoid heavy parts without fuel in them.

I guess it is time to include this http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92752-How-to-exploit-intake-air-flow-logic-for-profit into the designs...

I found that if you are building so wide it collides with the walls, temporary rotate the craft sideways... So the side is on top

You could always fiddle with the curve manually while in flight. Like after turning over at 10km, you have had set the curve to be 25%, when vertical velocity gets over 100, you reduce it. When rapiers switch over, you turn back upwards. Edit: My first attempt at flying this into orbit with mechjeb... 2607m/s left over. Ive built launchers with rapiers since like 2 years ago, before that it was turbos and spikes... Anyway, my latest iteration has 15 rapiers, weighs 120t on launchpad and lifts 60t to LKO. I did actually try your Jupitec version 10. IMO its a bit light, could be about 80t and still get into orbit. But i did get into orbit with 2100 m/s left over.

Strip away the wings, and cargo bay, drag it to VAB and put it on the pad. 76t at launch 40t cargo with a reasonable amount of fuel left for a return. I switched rapiers at 1300ms, left turbos on all the way. Well sure its not a plane.

Did physics change in .24.2? I think it didnt much, so let me get my craft from a year ago: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/41094-The-100-recoverable-lifter-Megathread?p=615850#post615850 Basically delivering 27t to low orbit with about 2500 in fuel costs, basically a ratio of about 92/t. I did recently mess with rapiers and so far Ive got them to down to about 125/t. With FAR, my experience was that its actually easier. And the craft also doesnt disintegrate on descent. EDIT: My entry into this is a Rapier Pineapple Lifter. Starts very slow, but delivers 41t to 71km orbit, then landing, in all using 2690LF/2660LOX. Calculated cost is 61√/t. http://imgur.com/a/dEY3o In this instance I have only FAR and MechJeb installed. With FAR, what ends up helping so much is lower drag and lifting body effect. Only problem with this approach is that it takes a third of the tech tree to unlock all needed parts. But I guess if you shoestring your scientific research around kerbin then there might be enough. And then go into interplanetary space.

tiffid, you use part clipping? Or overlap any intakes or toggle surface attachment with editor extensions? As it worked perfectly for me before I tried latest build which used some shortcuts... Actually, it seems it doesnt figure out how to toggle intakes that are built out in this way: Some radial intakes on an external tank then coply the whole part a few times. MJ will not toggle intakes that are copied with Alt-click...

http://imgur.com/a/LT3Wk#0 This is a better example, still not the latest. Also if a plane has wings to take off at 100ms at ground level, at 23km those wings do 1% of the initial lift, ok multiplied by velocity so maybe 10% at 1000ms. Look a page back when I did the comparison between a winged plane and stripped of wings. Same fuel consumption...

I built a thing with about a hundred intakes. Problem is that manager doesnt seem to manage them all. As at launch I dont get enough air to the engines. Is it either that its limited to max intake air it can manage, max intakes that it can manage or some intakes arent working right?

Actually no, they do almost nothing. I thought they would help at stability, but they lock sideways when landing so that makes a fiery explosion... I have 2.2 ram intakes per engine and they stop working at 23km at 1200ms.

Ittiz, check my creation from few weeks ago. http://imgur.com/a/bH6nu Basically for the amount of turbojets you have I can bring 40 tons of cargo. But I dont use nukes.

So I took Dartmouse SSTO from spaceport, someone made it, the name is there. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/kerbalife-aa-21e-dartmouse-stock/ Turbojet placement was bad, I think one of the engines didnt make any thrust as it was behind the other one. so I made the plane a little lighter by switching nuclear out for turbos. Its in the picture. Then I took it off the runway, climbed high, and got to speed at 30 km. It has lots of intakes, dont know how many. Speed was 1840ms. Then I took ALL of its wing surfaces off completely. That maybe reduced the weight by a ton maybe. So it was 20 instead of 21t. Flipped it vertically so it sat on the nuclear engine and used mechjeb ascent module to get it up and to speed. As you see its about 1800ms at 32km. But the point of this whole thing is: How much fuel was used at both instances? The SAME amount! So for a person not concerned with looks and too lazy to stabilize wing surfaces, Turbojet powered vertical ascent works just as good. Someone even made a heavy launcher with these: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/cactus-flower-mk4-lifter/ 80t to orbit with 220t at launch...

I think its vertical, as its lift. I dont think programmer wanted to complicate that much. Lift and drag are calculated separate. And drag acts a brake... Also it would be possible to make a Lift/Drag versus AoA graph. Question tho, How to get from Lift to force in ksp? Any factor missing in my calculations above?

Ive been messing with infernal robotics, and, Well strusses dont like holding 25t in front like a frontloader. Ok, 10 meters out in front

What is that black part Sparker? I see you have rocket engines so that would exclude the chance of that being intakes...

The condition was if you werent able to recover...

Guys, how would you go about putting the payload into these crafts if you couldnt recover to SPH. Im guessing a crane.

By the way, did anyone see this: http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/news_updates.html

Well, sojourner, that wouldnt work on a big space station.

I dont want it to be counted, its just theoretical comparison between 2 categories. As I shown, if you put a Rockomax 16 in orbit, thats 720 units of fuel. But if you put 9 Mk2 fuselages, that is 720 units more in orbit and also 720 units more at start...