Vertical SSTOs anyone?

[FlyingPete]

Spaceplane SSTOs are all well and good if you like them, but personally I find them somewhat tedious to get into orbit effectively. In the old aero model I managed to build a couple of short, fat jet-assisted rockets that were 100% reusable. I'm not sure whether it's design, piloting or a bit of both, but I can't seem to get this sort of thing to work in 1.0.

Anyone had success with reusable rockets?

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

My Saturn SSTO 30 ton lifter and Saturn SSTO Triplet, 100 ton lifter are about to go into the Craft exchange.

so, yes.

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Edit they're not jet assisted. but I am working on a Turbojet/Nuclear VTOL spaceplane. For Laythe.

[KerikBalm]

I've made various jet assisted vertical launch rocket designs... its not so hard... take a SSTO rocket, strap some turboramjets on the side, throttle them up before releaseing the clamps, do a gravity turn steeper/earlier, and use one center engine to throttle with a thrust limiter (or action groups to pulse the engines) so that the turboramjets do most of the work after reaching ~mach2, and before their thrust drops off.

Then use the engines again to make the parachute assisted landing nice and soft (Can also use them for extra breaking if you find yourself overshooting/ under 26 km and experiencing too much atmospheric heating).

[SpaceplaneAddict]

I built a rocket SSTO with mining gear, fully refueled with 4.5km of deltav.

-SPAddict

SSTO spaceplanes are fun with excess TWR

[cantab]

Short and fat is your problem. Rockets now need to be rocket-shaped.

Here's a simple VTVL rocket I knocked up, worked fine, though no jets involved: https://flic.kr/p/zdfffU

With jets, the thing is that there's usually a tradeoff between fuel efficiency and time. You want to reach a good speed on the jets for best efficiency, which means spending time accelerating near-horizontally around 20 km or so. If you fly a jet-engined craft like a rocket the jets will flame out at a rather lower speed because you get too high.

[Hodo]

My last SSTO tail lander, used aerospikes and 4 of the smaller ant engines for directional control along with RCS. It worked quite well, sent it to Minmus without to much drama. Then returned it back to KSC and landed it just north of the launch pad. May revive that program and see if I can improve on it.

[GoSlash27]

FlyingPete,

You can make SSTOs out of most of the engines in the game.

Anything that doesn't have horrible Isp at sea level will do it. If you don't want to do the math, just pile on fuel until it's t/w is down to 1.4 at launch and go. Whatever fuel mass is left when you reach orbit is how much payload it can handle.

The reason for SSTOs is cheap operating cost due to recovery of the vehicle, so if that's gonna be an issue it's better to just go with a disposable 2 stager.

Best,

-Slashy

[Snark]

For a while I had some fun with a vertical TSTO ... that is, two-stage-to-orbit, with a fully recoverable 1st stage.

1st stage: short and squat, a bunch of Whiplash engines mounted radially (each with 2-ton LF tank and shock cone intake), central Skipper on an 8-ton tank.

2nd stage: payload, on a 2.5m stack with a Poodle

The 1st stage took it on an ascent profile a bit lower than a typical conventional rocket, but higher than an airbreathing SSTO. Ran out of fuel fairly soon after the jet engines conked out (doesn't take a Skipper long to go through 8 tons of fuel), at which point it was on an ascending trajectory with an Ap either slightly out of atmosphere or else close to it (don't remember, this was a while ago).

Upon separation, 2nd stage would burn for a bit to raise Ap up to something comfortable. This gives me a few minutes to wait until Ap. So I switch back to the 1st stage to babysit it back to earth, where it would land on parachutes in the ocean. As soon as it's landed, recover and switch back to the 2nd stage, which at that point is getting close to Ap and it's about time to make its circularization burn.

Worked pretty well, got the best of both worlds (high Isp of jet engines in air, without having to lug them all the way to orbit), delivered a decent payload.

[Alshain]

Here is one I made a while back. It lifts 5 tons. Kept meaning to go back and make a more useful one but haven't done it yet.

[fourfa]

I've been using Warouz's Cygnus launchers:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/123195-Cygnus-Recoverable-SSTO-Rockets-(15-to-600-tons)

Couldn't be simpler and sometimes I just want to spend my time on the payload design, not boosters.

[Pecan]

I use SSTO rockets nearly all the time. So much effort has been put into making Kerbal Flight Simulator nice for spaceplane fans that single-stage rockets are easy, cheap and much better able to handle wide or awkward payloads. Do you have any specific questions?