Silverchain

Yes, just tried it and got it to orbit fine, and without danger of the battery running out. I think your video shows a baby Kraken stretching its tiny tentacles to you... a grown up one would have propelled the ship out of the solar system but it settled for flinging it into the sky. ^^ I've now launched at least one of every working submission (*groans* except the new one that's just been submitted) , but have only completed orbital rendezvous and then landing of about a third of them so it'll still be a while. And I've ended up with a few stranded or low on fuel, so keep spamming more planes to refuel them. Slow but fun!

At least one won't even leave the runway or make enough speed to fly on its turbojets, and I can't imagine what flight profile its creator uses.

That's about the size of it, though it's not deliberate! Because the BSC challenge flights I'm working on and testing are mostly happening in real time and fast orbits around Kerbin, the fleet is still crawling across space towards Jool. In the meantime I've taken the opportunity to test some equipment on the Mun. The Munar Escape Safety System, or MESS. A small personal spacecraft which can take a single terrified passenger up to orbit, or alternatively be used to fly short hops around the surface. This very light craft can be attached unfueled to the side of a lander, and if the main craft suffers damage, fuel can be transferred from it to the ROUND-8 tank and the MESS can be used to escape. The whole thing is very light unfueled so for minimal extra mass you get a whole backup ascent stage. I've always been a little sceptical about the external command seats being used on landers (as opposed to rovers) and hadn't realised there was a plan to do something similar on the Apollo missions. I had constructed a small base on top of this canyon on the Mun. Dorie Kerman fell the whole way down it in slow motion, and somehow survived. It's very steep-sided, but that's not going to stop Kerbals... this rover was able to drive down, pick up Dorie and drive straight back up the near vertical canyon wall. (It's even steeper than it looks from the picture!) It's funny that in KSP rovers often perform better going up steep slopes, where the wheels bite securely, than they do on shallow slopes.

I liked it, very straightforward, sensible and simple design. I didn't try it with extra fuel, only took it up with the default fuel load and sat in 100x100 LKO. I have takeoff marked as "alright" (not "good") but don't remember what the trouble was; I think the first time I tried a launch it wobbled a bit on the runway and when in flight it was marked as still being "on the runway" which is a bug I've seen happen occasionally on rough takeoffs. Ascent flight was good, reentry and descent flight was good and it made a good landing on rough ground.

My testing regime is to launch each plane to the highest reachable Kerbin orbit, dock with a station (or rendezvous if the craft doesn't have docking ports), undock and return to Kerbin for a landing. It's taking quite the little while, and there's only so much chap-hop one human being can listen to before going irredeemably insane ou, pire! pushing it onto friends... I've been unable to download tigik's "spaceplane" and JABUSCUS' "SSTO 1." 1revenger1's "Reacher" turned out to be missing large parts of the craft (compared to the posted pics), though I managed to coax the thing to orbit. I haven't checked on those recently, though. There's also newer ones of some of the craft I have tried, so I'll have to fly those again. Here's a relaxing picture - a Spike, Aeris 4a-11, Gecko and Mallard watch the world go by. And here's the wings falling off (for no identifiable reason!) a plane as it reenters Kerbin's atmosphere.

Ceremonial-class spaceplane Physician's Fuss finding takeoff difficult.

I've update my entry with a new model, the Ceremonial Go.

Lots of flights and debris decreases performance. Part count on those objects doesn't as far as I know.

I liked the general look of the plane (except for the RCS tanks clipped into the wings), although I wondered what all those solar panels are for! Takeoff was good and it handled well during the ascent. I didn't make an orbital rendezvous as it was quite low on fuel, but it seems to have good control on RCS for the two docking ports. Flight during reentry was generally quite good. Unfortunately I didn't time the reentry right and ran out of fuel a short distance before the coast. The plane glided in slowly over the water and splashed down, which largely destroyed it except for the command pod. Looked like it would have no trouble landing elsewhere as it was steady and slow. The central fuel tank is full of oxidiser - as it is a shared tank you could tweak the amount of oxidiser down by a third or even by half and get better performance all round. The thrust from the rockets was low for the weight of the craft, so it would help with that, too, or you could add an extra pair of radial rockets. In general terms the 24-77s are outclassed by the new 48-7S but I like the unusual layout you're using.

Redundancy. They can be fragile creatures. Which are much less durable, have less torque, less monoprop storage, and are a different form factor which may be an issue in mating them to a rocket. Also, the mass you're carrying down and back doesn't matter so much on the smaller moons. With everything in KSP it pays to look at every aspect of a part's performance and also its physical shape and attachment points.

Some of the challenge planes (an Airial, Kaeris, Ceremonial and Aeris 4a Improved B) docked in 1000km x 1000km Kerbin orbit. After flying so many spaceplanes of late, Kerbin's equatorial belt is starting to seem horribly familiar, especially the approach over the desert towards KSC. I'm not sure where I'm going with my entry at the moment - I'm keen to make my spaceplanes rovers, so that's the direction I've developed the design in. But it feels like I'm straying from the task of building a better Aeris, and because the rover wheels pose an interesting problem when balancing the vacuum thrust from the 48-7S engines (especially as the wheels are attached to the massless landing gear) it's not as simple as removing them to offer a non-rover model. A newer model Ceremonial landed on one of those little rocky islands out in the bay. I was pleased with my mad landing skills until I broke a wing off driving over the top of the hill and trashed it. I'm interested in people's impressions of the Ceremonial's air intakes. There's a lot of them, but they aren't clipped, all have a reasonably unobstructed forward field and all feed into the central fuel tank that the engine is attached to; it's essentially a giant radial intake around the sides of the fuselage. It certainly doesn't need so many, but it makes flying to orbit much easier...

According to my scrawled notes (well, ok, it's a spreadsheet) there was a lack of electric charge storage and while the launch was good and the flight characteristics alright I wasn't able to get it to orbit. Attempting to land, the plane went into an impressive flat spin (I looked at it and thought, more or less verbatim, "wow, that's a real flat spin like they talk about!") but I was able to recover it and bring it to a good landing in moderately hilly terrain. I think there's RCS stored, but no thrusters, or something like that. You could either add thrusters or tweak the stored monoprop out. I noted the good safety features, but a trial of the eject button during a test launch didn't work out too well as while the cockpit separated the chutes on it didn't work properly for some reason. I marked it "some clipping" but it's only aesthetic, not functional-cheaty, so cool with me. I marked it in bright highlighted orange meaning "try this one again and make orbit this time."

I didn't have any problems with the .craft file, but the plane did fall over backwards on the runway... After that it was cool though.

I haven't. When I do it, I'll do it the hard way.

It's only single stage to orbit, there isn't a requirement to keep everything attached once you're up there. All a craft needs to do to qualify as an SSTO is to make an ascent to orbit in a single stage, and what happens before or after that doesn't matter... For instance the Apollo lunar module's ascent stages were SSTO, despite being launched only after multiple earlier staging and not being reusable.

I've been distracted by the current Better Stock Craft challenge, which is looking at replacements for the Aeris 4a spaceplane. My entry for the challenge is a considerably altered version of the Ceremonial class, and I'm planning to bring several of them out to replace the ones I just crashed on Laythe. Kerbin orbit is getting silly (I'm trying every design submitted), so I'm going to have an awful lot of housework to do clearing it, especially as a few of the planes inconveniently ran out of fuel. Ironic that I'd just managed to get it clean again by sending the remaining spaceplanes I had there on the Jool flotilla which is still in transit! Ceremonial Myriad Buxtehude sightseeing on Kerbin shortly before taking off to orbit. Second Stage Guild Turbine ran out of fuel attempting to return from Munar orbit (nearly made it - not bad range for such a small plane, only one FLT-400, couple of Oscar-Bs and some additional jet fuel) and is seen refueling from the Foppish Man-Bird. I'm pondering bringing all these planes out to Laythe, but it'd be a mammoth undertaking and I ought to get on touring. I'll maybe bring a couple of my favourites.

I thought I was going to lose a wing...

I've also added an updated version of my Ceremonial class to my original post, featuring increased performance and easier docking.

You can say that again... crawling around the world at 35km building up speed before flipping the whole craft on end and switching control location ain't simple! Good dv, though.

Entirely legit so far as I'm concerned, but if you borrow major elements of an uncommon design you should acknowledge that it isn't your own idea until you modify and develop it so far that it's a new thing.

I reckon about 5 units on a small craft - I tend to add one of the small white radial monoprop tanks if I intend to dock a spaceplane more than once. I'm about a third of the way through flight testing the entries submitted so far, 'cause I'm serious about trying them all even if I do only have one measly vote. So much clipping abuse doesn't seem like good stock replacement. There's a great range of performance from the ones I've tried. I'm building up a couple of parking rings around Kerbin. Was pleased by the Cormorant - I think I did something wrong during the ascent, but anyway, it didn't make the 500kmx500km orbit ring I was aiming at and I ended up landing on the side of a mountain in the dark. I'm getting a locked parts message on tigik's plane.

I think players would be much better served with stock craft that worked well. Show what works and say "beat this!"

I intend to take voting seriously and assess designs on their merits. Meanwhile in LKO...

I have been working on a utility to manage debris (SADOR, selective automatic debris object removal) but it's not quite ready for prime time. The (Windows 64-bit) build linked won't work for debris around Jool and its moons or for Eeloo (I'll sort that soon, didn't have the planet numbers to hand when I wrote it) and doesn't do multiple locations at once easily (unless you want to get rid of all debris) but you can tell it "remove all debris orbiting Kerbin" or "remove all debris splashed down on Eve" or "remove all debris from the vicinity of KSC" (which last is slightly wrong because of inconvenient lat-long). I'd back up your save file before trying, but I've been using it on my own without mishap. Point it at your save game folder (e.g. G:\ksp\ksp_win\saves\kay career), wait for a minute or so and it'll say how much debris it's found and prompt you for which debris to remove. (ETA source code is included inside the zip; it's Python and relies on easygui. You may possibly recognise the quality coding style of my (now outdated) Sir, You are Being Hunted mods.)

Nice flag.