.

[Guest]

.

Edited December 13, 2016 by RevanCorana

[Yukon0009]

Neeeeat! But dat last picture......

[Guest]

Neeeeat! But dat last picture......

Thanks

What's up with the pic ?

I like it, It's aerobraking! xD

[SpaceXray]

I like the wings, but what's with the thousand clipped-in air intakes? Looks very ugly.

[Rune]

Yeah, with that amount of RAPIERs, and doing the air routing trick, you can make do with something much more reasonable like four, two per engine, and then you can hide them inside the engine pods. Clip them to the front node and move them backwards with the translation gizmo, and they won't mess with fuel flow, save parts, and look sleek-er.

Rune. I.e: My Skylon has only two shock cone and two circular intakes feeding two RAPIERs, yet I get 25% payload fraction to 100km with it.

[Guest]

I like the wings, but what's with the thousand clipped-in air intakes? Looks very ugly.

While in-game ram intake reflect the lights inside the Skylon at different angles, which I find cool and original, also it makes the Skylon more black, as it is meant to be.

All asymmetric pieces of the intakes are hidden, so it forms an interesting paintjob-like but with embossed pattern

As I said, it's not 100% replica.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah, with that amount of RAPIERs, and doing the air routing trick, you can make do with something much more reasonable like four, two per engine, and then you can hide them inside the engine pods. Clip them to the front node and move them backwards with the translation gizmo, and they won't mess with fuel flow, save parts, and look sleek-er.

Rune. I.e: My Skylon has only two shock cone and two circular intakes feeding two RAPIERs, yet I get 25% payload fraction to 100km with it.

I could have saved some parts here and there (a lot actually) but I don't care too much about part efficiency, because drag calculation will change soon enough (finally!)

It just make harder to gain speed inside the atmosphere, more challenging trajectories that's partly why I think all these intake help to reach orbit. There's plenty of liquid fuel for that. (230 exactly)

I may improve the design later on.

100km circularized? At what altitude/speed do you switch mode? Do you have enough fuel to get back? How much monoprop. do you carry with it.

---

I like both of your Skylon btw. But I have to say, There's 2 major complaints I have with them being tagged as "replica".

- The wings don't start in the middle of the cargo bay, but below it.

- The engines aren't straight alligned, they follow the overall shape of the spaceplane which is slightly curved outer down.

Those 2 I addressed with my craft.

So despite being rougher, it looks more real, at least to me.

Edited February 27, 2015 by RevanCorana

[Rune]

While in-game ram intake reflect the lights inside the Skylon at different angles, which I find cool and original, also it makes the Skylon more black, as it is meant to be.

All asymmetric pieces of the intakes are hidden, so it forms an interesting paintjob-like but with embossed pattern

As I said, it's not 100% replica.

- - - Updated - - -

I could have saved some parts here and there (a lot actually) but I don't care too much about part efficiency, because drag calculation will change soon enough (finally!)

It just make harder to gain speed inside the atmosphere, more challenging trajectories that's partly why I think all these intake help to reach orbit. There's plenty of liquid fuel for that. (230 exactly)

I may improve the design later on.

100km circularized? At what altitude/speed do you switch mode? Do you have enough fuel to get back? How much monoprop. do you carry with it.

---

I like both of your Skylon btw. But I have to say, There's 2 major complaints I have with them being tagged as "replica".

- The wings don't start in the middle of the cargo bay, but below it.

- The engines aren't straight alligned, they follow the overall shape of the spaceplane which is slightly curved outer down.

Those 2 I addressed with my craft.

So despite being rougher, it looks more real, at least to me.

This pic might explain all of that:

As to profile, I get to at least 20kms with an AoA of 45º, then pitch down as neccessary so I get to 25kms with about 50m/s vertical velocity. Then I give it time to reach at least 1,200m/s staying pretty much level, and from that point on I stick the heading to about 20º over the horizon and let it build vertical speed (and AoA, as kerbin curves below you) for the flameout and the switch to rocekt power. That usually happens somewhere around 30kms and 1,500m/s, but I can't recall the specifics for this design. It is, however, pretty similar for all SSTOs I build, because they have similar TWR and intake/engine ratios. Oh, and I inclined the intakes to get teh curved RAPIER look... CoM/CoL alignment issues precluded tilting the engines, but turns out I get a bit more air this way, and a thrust vector that helps in keeping the wing doing their lift thing at the highest AoA possible (stock aerodynamics stuff).

Rune. Hope that helps!

Edited February 27, 2015 by Rune

[Guest]

Interesting, thanks. I think mine had pretty similar results, I switched mode at around 28km with a speed of 1800m/s.

Speaking of stock aero, or rather not speaking of it, I linked an alternate download for a FAR version of the craft in the OP.

[Rune]

Interesting, thanks. I think mine had pretty similar results, I switched mode at around 28km with a speed of 1800m/s.

Speaking of stock aero, or rather not speaking of it, I linked an alternate download for a FAR version of the craft in the OP.

Yeah, 1,800m/s is not unheard of, when I nail a good ascent those last 5 kms, and especially when I set the RAPIERs on manual so I can milk them further as they run out of air and auto-throttle down. Of course, on the designs that allow that. Sometimes, in the ones with an odd number of engines and/or turboRAPIERs, I can keep using some air at 32kms and >1900m/s! Because even when you do the air routing thing, there is still some transient in the thrust. Anyhow, 300m/s up or down are not really all that much extra fuel, compared with, say, twice the amount of engines to get a high TWR, and it' always nice to pack some extra delta-v as margin for those ascents where you screw things up because you went web browsing or whatever. In fact, the Skylon is one of my highest TWR designs, which is why it gets nowhere near close to the highest payload fractions possible. My Dao gets 33% of GLOW into orbit... as payload safely stowed away in the bay . And that's not counting the crew of three kebals in their 4mT capsule, of course.

¿And with the upcoming changes to the lift model, scaling it with v^2? Well, that is going to be the final nail in the coffin for the guys that argue for high TWR in SSTOs: as soon as 1.0 comes out, I'm making a SSTO with TWR under 0.7, and we'll see what kind of insane payload fraction that gets. The only thing that stops me now is that over 15kms, wings are pretty much worthless in stock aero.

Rune. I challenge anyone to significantly (10%) improve on a MR of 1.5 for a Kerbin-LKO SSTO, with the stock game.

Edited February 27, 2015 by Rune

[Radam]

Rune. I challenge anyone to significantly (10%) improve on a MR of 1.5 for a Kerbin-LKO SSTO, with the stock game.

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.

[Lohan2008]

HAL: I am sorry Dave, I can't let you do that ,,,

[Guest]

Yup it's indeed (unrealistically) easy to get a good TWR and DeltaV in KSP anyway. And part count drag should hopefully be gone with 1.0