My stock sstos FAIL....

[OgreMagi]

just came back to KPS after an a little time off , work life ect ect

Now I see my old stock ssto desing no longer function???

What has happened? I notice the atmosphere is much lower and the engine lost thrust even when they have air intake?

so what has changed?? I like my turboroamjet sstos , now my Jool reflight will have to be redone as my laythe sstos are suspect since I cannot get them into orbit.

any assistance is accepted thanks

[Dizzle]

New aerodynamics. Consequences will never be the same.

[SkyRender]

Under the new aerodynamics, you have to build your craft to actually be fairly aerodynamic. While you can feasibly get away with somewhat blocky design, the fact remains that you'll do far better if you buck up and build according to the new standard.

Here's a good baseline for the construction of a spaceplane under current aerodynamics. As for lift profile, for the most part you want to build up as much speed within the lower atmosphere (below 20KM) as you can before you switch over to rockets. This means angling up at 45 degrees for the early part of the launch (try to keep your speed at or below 250m/s for this part), switching to about 20 degrees at 10KM, and pushing to full throttle at that point too. (This is for Kerbin; Laythe will have a lower point, I haven't checked where it is just yet.)

[OgreMagi]

ok I play around with it and see,

I notice you test aircraft has quite a bit of air intake on it ? so the old Ram/shock cones do not work effectively?

have to build the wheel again...

[Alshain]

ok I play around with it and see,

I notice you test aircraft has quite a bit of air intake on it ? so the old Ram/shock cones do not work effectively?

have to build the wheel again...

On the contrary, "Air Hogging" is gone and the RAM intakes and Shock Cones work quite well. That too is more realistic, the bigger the intake area the more effective they are, so the little under-wing intakes that came with the Mk2 parts don't work quite as well anymore. On the flip side, thanks to the new drag system in the aerodynamics... the bigger the intake area, the more drag you will have so don't overdo it. As for his screenshot, it's a bit overbuilt.

Also new, Intakes will not cause asymmetric flameout due to declining air (i.e. higher altitudes), they will however cause asymmetric flame out if you don't have enough intakes feed the number of engines you have though.

[GoSlash27]

Engines now lose thrust with altitude as well as airspeed, and it's much lower and slower than before.

No more "turbojets until apoapsis, then a little puff to circularize". And as stated above, airhogging doesn't work anymore.

You also have transsonic drag, so you need to punch through Mach 1 at around 10km before continuing.

This makes SSTO spaceplanes harder to do and lowers their payload fraction, which is a good thing.

You might as well throw out your old spaceplanes and start over. There's lots of threads around regarding spaceplane design in the new system.

Good luck!

-Slashy

[cybersol]

You should first learn the new ascent profile for SSTOs because it has completely changed. Because of the way thrust decays with both altitude and speed, you can no longer linger to milk the air breathers for every last drop. Instead you have to get what you can get quickly and efficiently and then switch to rockets. I would recommend started out by piloting someone else's design so that you know it can make it to orbit if you just learn how. Also, GoSlash27 has a good tutorial in that section of the forums.

[Levelord]

I have some ongoing research threads dedicated to optimizing SSTO designs with the help of the KSP community. Recently I have managed to build a SSTM (Single Stage To Mun) capable craft based on the accumulated knowledge. I hope they may be a useful resource for you:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/122574-Radial-mounted-parts-on-atmospheric-flight-performance

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/122688-Something-doesn-t-seem-right-here?p=1978057&viewfull=1#post1978057

Edited June 2, 2015 by Levelord

[herbal space program]

I've been working on this fairly obsessively for the last few days after getting bored with my career game. Here's the best I've managed so far in terms of performance for a fully functional interplanetary SSTO:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

https://imgur.com/a/d1ZYq#0

It has landing legs, RCS, and a docking port, and can make orbit with about 3600 deltaV in the bank. Im still trying to land it on the Mun, but I'm convinced I'll succeed eventually. Touching that massive ship down gently with just that weeeak little engine is tricky! I dealt with my 4+1+1 symmetry problem by mounting the Nerva and the Turbo together in the middle on a bicoupler, with each engine canted outwards enough to (almost) offset it's off-center position. The thing flies poorly, but I'm pretty sure I will make Mun and back, which means Minmus should be a breeze and Duna is not out of the question. This is still a fair bit less than SSTOs could do in the previous game, but it's not hopeless!

Edited June 3, 2015 by herbal space program

[EtherDragon]

Everyone had to relearn how to launch - well almost everything, once KSP released the full version (1.0). There was some fine tuning done in subsequent patches (1.0.1, 1.0.2), but nothing super major.

I was looking for, and could not find, a concise list of updates that were released in 1.0?

[lincourtl]

Hmm.. my Imgur album does not seem to be displaying correctly. Any tips on that ? I stuck a regular link underneath it.

Just stick the album hash identifier (the last part of the URL) between the imgur tags.

Like this: [noparse]

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[/noparse]

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited June 2, 2015 by lincourtl

[herbal space program]

Just stick the album hash identifier (the last part of the URL) between the imgur tags.

Like this: [noparse]http://imgur.com/a/d1ZYq[/noparse]

http://imgur.com/a/d1ZYq

Thanks! I guess it was that last little bit with the image number that caused the problem

[OgreMagi]

well it seems the game make you have to build them bigger to get the same effect. looks like from what I have seen rapiers are the best design so far.

so much for a light ssto...

[Frank_G]

I just flew this dude into a circular 80 km orbit and back to the KSC with fuel to spare. I found out, that a proper ascend profile will save lots of fuel. Also using less intakes will result in less drag = more velocity before needing to switch to rocket mode.

[herbal space program]

well it seems the game make you have to build them bigger to get the same effect. looks like from what I have seen rapiers are the best design so far.

so much for a light ssto...

Those turbos just run out of steam too soon to get you high and fast enough on air. You end up having to burn all your bipropellant just to make orbit. Plus unlike the Mk1 parts the Mk2 parts give you a fair bit of lift along with their drag, which you just can't ignore if you're trying to make orbit with the least amount of deltaV possible. I'm scaling up my design now to see if I can get more out of it.