Ha. Spaceplane... or Submarine.

[Mic_n]

Just realised that the link got munged by the profanity filter there. Should be working now after a sanitising rename

[cephalo]

That's a nice ship Mic_n. I'm done with my mission, but I'm going to try yours out anyway to see how much dv I can bring to space that way. It seems impossibly minimalistic! Can it be done? Can it be done by me? One thing I will need on there is docking ports for tourists. I'll try it.

Here is my triumphant return from Duna mission!

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[cephalo]

Your example works great Mic_n. At first I was concerned about fragility, as the first attempt broke up on full tanks when physics started up, but it lands just fine on half fuel. I'm sure there is room for a couple of docking ports and maybe a couple of struts in case of a bumpy landing somewhere.

[Sidereus]

This is a rework of a design I was using in 1.0.2. Because of the RAPIER nerf, I had to add a few more engines (original design only used six), but it works pretty well:

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This will get 20 kerbals into a circular 75km orbit with 850 dV leftover, which is more than enough to do a rendezvous at 100km. Ditching the rearmost four engines in orbit (which are attached with a Docking Port Sr.) gives you an extra 200 or so dV, if you really need it. Replace them with four LV-N's, remove all the oxidizer and top off the liquid fuel completely and you can get ~10,000 dV out of it. And it practically jumps into space...not a whole lot of fancy maneuvering needed, just get to 10,000m and climb at around 10 degrees until you start losing speed, switch to closed cycle mode and power into space.