SSTO Success in 1.0

[titus]

I just got my first SSTO to orbit in 1.0. (Been trying for a week).

What was the trick? I kid you not, I simply stuck heat discs directly in front of my air intakes. The extra drag created was easily offset by reaching ridiculous speeds starting at 15KM.

Working as intended?

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

Congrats titus.

Can you upload a pic, too?

[Foxster]

I'm curious too to see this. Were the heat shields to help with going up or down?

[eddiew]

Do you mean 1.0, or 1.0.2? (There's a huge difference.)

If the latter, then I suspect you're overcomplicating things for yourself, which is why you're struggling SSTOs really don't need any kind of shielding, they just need to go up a bit steeper, try to hit 1km/s at 20km altitude, and switch to rockets when their air runs out.

Your mention of 15km suggests to me that you're trying to level out and build up speed to mach 4-5, which generally isn't a good ascent profile under nuStock due - as you've found out - to punishing heat build up. Recommend checking out the newer posts on the SSTO Showcase thread to see what's practical these days

[Tada]

Dont know, in 1.0.2 dont see that huge difference from previous versions. I did my share of SSTO flights from .21 till 0.90... The biggest difference is that you need to catch the right moment and altitude to gain speed.

[Roflcopterkklol]

Dont know, in 1.0.2 dont see that huge difference from previous versions. I did my share of SSTO flights from .21 till 0.90... The biggest difference is that you need to catch the right moment and altitude to gain speed.

huge difference from previous versions, in 0.90 you could get to 2300m/s with jet engines working until 65km if you used enough air intakes.

[Borsek]

Honestly, going to 65km with a mostly intake plane was absolutely retarded, it's good that that was removed.

[Renegrade]

Honestly, going to 65km with a mostly intake plane was absolutely retarded, it's good that that was removed.

What? No it isn't! That's how NASA faked the Moon landings: they put a TON of air intakes on a flight of P-51D Mustangs and flew them to the Moon with a bunch of props. It cost about $3.2 million altogether in 60s money. A real Moon landing would have been $24 billion, and just lying about it would have been about $135 billion.

(As everybody knows, rockets don't work in space due to Newton's Third Law. There's nothing for them to push against!)

(this is a joke of course - bonus points for anybody who knows the second part's reference)

[Tobyz28]

I just got my first SSTO to orbit in 1.0. (Been trying for a week).

What was the trick? I kid you not, I simply stuck heat discs directly in front of my air intakes. The extra drag created was easily offset by reaching ridiculous speeds starting at 15KM.

Working as intended?

Has anyone done this on hard with full (100%) heating? I'm able to get some of my SSTO's working, but re-entry is usually very finicky, placing heat discs in-front of my inter-coolers has done wonders for me as well. I've also had a repeatable bug on rentry causing a game crash usually in the 8000-24000m range.

[Deutherius]

Has anyone done this on hard with full (100%) heating? I'm able to get some of my SSTO's working, but re-entry is usually very finicky, placing heat discs in-front of my inter-coolers has done wonders for me as well. I've also had a repeatable bug on rentry causing a game crash usually in the 8000-24000m range.

Do you have the heat gauges turned on (F10)? They have been known to cause massive memory leaks, crashing the game in certain situations.

(I say in certain situation, because when I turn them on and heat things up, the RAM consumption by KSP doesn't increase at all)

[AaronLS]

Has anyone done this on hard with full (100%) heating? I'm able to get some of my SSTO's working, but re-entry is usually very finicky, placing heat discs in-front of my inter-coolers has done wonders for me as well. I've also had a repeatable bug on rentry causing a game crash usually in the 8000-24000m range.

For re-entry, I keep my plane angled up at maybe 40 degrees. The idea is two-fold. 1) Even in thin air, you are decreasing your drop rate slightly, giving you more time before getting to thicker atmosphere 2) Being angled up means you are creating more drag and thus decreasing your speed faster. This way when you reach those very hot altitudes, you'll have less speed. I also use two air brakes on the top rear of my plane and deploy them to decrease speed and help keep the nose pitched up.

Secondly, when you burn retrograde, don't drop your periapsis very far. I would say no further than 60km. You want to spend as much time in the upper atmosphere slowing down. Burning retrograde to a very low periapsis means you are going to enter the atmosphere with alot more vertical drop rate, thus getting down to thick atmosphere wile you are still going very fast.

[SelectHalfling0]

I've been able to build successful spaceplanes from the start, but my planes intakes (RAM intakes) keep exploding due to heating on reentry. I thought they would have the same heat tolerance as other spaceplane parts.

[Tobyz28]

I've been able to build successful spaceplanes from the start, but my planes intakes (RAM intakes) keep exploding due to heating on reentry. I thought they would have the same heat tolerance as other spaceplane parts.

Yea, the top tier intake has a lot of friction and not a lot of mass . They basically heat up quickly and theres only one point behind it to transfer the heat to. If that point is also the same part thats attached to the engine, it'll be receiving heat on both ends during ascent, making things quite toasty.