Rocket vs Spaceplane poll

[SpaceplaneAddict]

29 minutes ago, MarvinKitFox said:

Spaceplanes are sexy.

That is their biggest, first, and ONLY merit.

You sir, are very inconsiderate. Don't please

 

ANNYYYYWAAAAYYYYY, I don't think I posted my rant yet!

Spaceplanes. Practical, but so are rockets. Elegant, most of the time . Rockets brute they way to space, and spaceplanes fly into space. I'll admit, the odds of me building a real, useful, and practical rocket are astronomical (lol), and the odds of all of that from me in space plane are damn well high.

Flight path? Tell me, WHEN did you see any rocket plot up 90 degrees, and make a sudden over 30 degree turn? Yeah, that's old, never mind. BUT, many times, rockets need just as much precision as a space plane. Either kind of craft can have a larger margin of error because of the way it is built, and flown. And realism... may I ask about your asparagus staging?

[gilflo]

In reality, asparagus staging as we use in KSP is not used as much because of complexity. In KSP it's the only way to send huge loads to orbit.

About spaceplanes, in reality, the X 51 Waverider is trying to reach Mach 6, (he reached Mach 5) with technology of scramjet engine and the technology to reach mach 22 is tested through the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon.

Speed to reach orbit in KSP is around Mach 7 and for earth it's around Mach 25!

We can say we have on Earth the technology for KSP SSTO but not for asparagus rockets!

 

[SR]

On ‎04‎/‎02‎/‎2016 at 6:28 AM, kotomikun said:

SSTOs are currently impossible in reality.

 

no lots of rocket stages can do ssto - i.e. Falcon 9 upper stage.

However this is with no payload.

On ‎04‎/‎02‎/‎2016 at 0:49 AM, Temstar said:

If you haven't noticed, we get far more questions on the forum from people asking about spaceplane aerodynamic problems than people asking about rocket aerodynamic problems.

Plane spend a lot more time in the atmosphere than rockets so aero dynamics is less important.

[theend3r]

Once you go cargo SSTO, you can't go back. Unless you need to lift a space station.

[KerikBalm]

Rockets can have an elegance all of their own. They are much more realistic... as we know cross feeding designs are being made now, and with the new aerodynamics, asparagus staging has been reduced a lot to much more reasonable levels of cross feed.

The spaceplanes are extremely unrealistic.... getting to within 800 m/s of orbital velocity in airbreathing mode? or put another way. 65% of the way to orbital velocity... yea, thats not going to happen with spaceplanes on Earth. 3200 Isp? not going to happen.

Rockets are very mass efficient. IRL, the dead weight of engines after about mach 5 (being generous here) would cost more that one would gain in an airbreathing single stage design. There is a lot of elegant math and optimization that produces those rocket designs. Rockets are both elegant and powerful. In KSP, the equation swings the other way because of the small size of Kerbin and OP airbreathing parts.

Which allows for sloppy designs... is this really elegant?

 

21 minutes ago, theend3r said:

Once you go cargo SSTO, you can't go back. Unless you need to lift a space station.

Except I can... for reasons of real life time and a slow computer. (although I have tried VTOL SSTOs as a compromise)

And Lifting a space station works with SSTOs:

Involved orbital assembly, but SSTO'd in 3 launches:

two launches.... its a complete moho mission, including a moho space station:

But if you want to get back from Eve, you need to have rockets. A spaceplane may get you to duna and back in a single stage (though I haven't done this as I stop at LKO, or stage something at LKO. I did have one ssto go to Duna, but it had to be refueled after aerocapture... not enough to reorbit from duna and then get back to kerbin.) You may even be able to pull off a mission to the surface of laythe and back in a single stage (I think this is nearly impossible now, but I'm not sure). But Moho? Eve? Tylo? you need to ditch the deadweight. Turboramjets are dead weight, Rapiers are basically deadweight because of their poor TWR and Isp, wings are dead weight and sources of drag on Eve. Ditch all of it.. and forget about single staging it...

 

 

[Kadrush]

For me Rocket os Spaceplane is a question of time. I tried to make some SSTOs and found them time and economic useless. You expend a lot in a 3.5m SSTO to take 2.5m light cargo into orbit, try to land close to KSP to get more from the recover and the differente between price and recover is usually higher than make a 2.5m common rocket and discard during take off. Also you expend a lot of real life time bringing back your SSTO into a safe landing and, sadly, i dont have a lot of time for gamming anymore.

Same goes for spaceplanes, you expend a lot of time taking off, climbing and struggling to get into orbit and another huge ammount of time bringing the plane back to runway.

Same goes for rovers in this game, you make a few times for fun, but is simplier faster to fly to other biomes than drive to them.

KSP is a game made for rockets.

[gilflo]

But there's a big part of dream as you can imagine SSTO and rockets that would not be real on Earth, that's the funny and fiction part of KSP and it's as interesting to build and imagine all kind of rockets or SSTO as trying to fly them....

Realism, dream and fiction, realism mods and fiction mods, melted or not melted,  that's all what make KSP a unique game...

[Umlüx]

spaceplanes are fun to play with, but i use rockets to get excrements done!

they are much faster and i dont have to spend 10 minutes, carefully climbing in the upper atmosphere.

[severedsolo]

3 minutes ago, Umlüx said:

spaceplanes are fun to play with, but i use rockets to get excrements done!

they are much faster and i dont have to spend 10 minutes, carefully climbing in the upper atmosphere.

This. In my last career game I decided as I got to the end of the tech-tree that I was going to try and move to a spaceplane only launch system. That lasted... oh I don't know 40 minutes? That was one launch (and return of the launch vehicle). On the other hand, I can blast a rocket up in 3-7 minutes, and use stage recovery to get most of my money back.

[Daveroski]

Apparently It is a good thing to be patriotic and so...

England gave the world the Jet Engine.

No we are working on the SABRE engine on which the RAPIER in KSP is based.

We are looking at Mach 5 on air-breathing alone.

Switching to Rocket mode makes orbital velocities achievable.

We are getting some help from Europe and we are borrowing some American facilities from time to time.

Testing is going well.

We should have a working spaceplane by the end of the decade.

Space planes are not only possible but will be arriving at your local international airport in due course.

 

I actually rather enjoyed waving the Union flag. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

 

[el_coyoto]

I had a few troubles with spaceplanes in 1.0.* because I was basically taking too little fuel with me (bad old aero habits), and thus kept using a lot of rockets in my careers before I lost interest (and a bit of frustration with SSTOs in 1.0.* too...)

Then I found an awesome post by @GoSlash27 with a few rules to quickly size a SSTO in 1.0.* depending on the payload, and oh boy, it did re-motivate me to play KSP a lot : since a few weeks, I've been launching spaceplanes like it's going out of style.

I still enjoy launching rockets though, they're so pointy and fast...

PS : thanks @GoSlash27 for reconciling me with KSP!

Edited February 15, 2016 by el_coyoto

[gilflo]

My spaceplanes take no more than 6 mn to climb to orbit.

Yes, KerikBalm, spaceplanes are extremely unrealistic.

But do you think an ascent Eve vehicle is more realistic?

is it realistic to be able to send such a vehicle to land on Eve, then be able to climb to orbit?

i plyed 2 years with only rockets, then i tried planes and it tooks me a lot of time to be able to design SSTO,

I tried FAR, then leave, then tried again, it never ends, it's so interesting....

I used to play carrier, and as i don't want to begins a new carrier each time the game update, i play sandbox now....

[KerikBalm]

Yes, its realistic that one could achieve orbit from a planet with 5 atmospheres of pressure.

Its realistic that if there was an earth twin without atmospheric O2, we could send a rocket to get people down to the surface and back...

The rockets in KSP are unrealistically small, but an Eve lander like what I showed is much bigger than a rocket needed to get to LKO.

That rocket is *the payload*. It doesn't launch, get to LKO, transfer to Eve, land, ascend, and return to kerbin.

It is a payload on the way to LKO. It is the payload for a tug to take it to eve, and it only makes it back up to eve orbit... where another ship will rendevous with it and the crew will transfer.

It would be unrealistic if that rocket, by itself, could make the trip from the surface of kerbin, to the surface of eve, and back to the surface of kerbin... it doesn't do that... its just the ascent vehicle part of a much larger assemblage of craft (thats not even the eve-lander... as that pic shows it after jettisoning the re-entry and landing equipment)

[GoSlash27]

11 hours ago, el_coyoto said:

PS : thanks @GoSlash27 for reconciling me with KSP!

el_coyoto,

 You're welcome. Glad you found it useful!

Best,
-Slashy

[Geschosskopf]

I'm a rocket guy.

The things I find most enjoyable in KSP are designing payloads to perform elaborate missions at distant planets, and then actually playing them out.  I therefore want to minimize the time and effort required to get my payloads to their destinations.  Thus, I might spend hours on a payload and 3 minutes slapping together the rocket to get it to its target.  Launch, transfer burn, warp warp warp, playtime.  IOW, I don't care much about the trip itself, and in fact seek to minimize it because it absorbs time that I could be spending mucking about on other planets.

This is why I'm not a huge spaceplane fan.  To me, they unnecessarily complicate and prolong the travel time of the payload.  Besides, most of my payloads won't fit in spaceplane cargo bays anyway.

However, I must confess that I find the whole spaceplane concept quite cool and it's a nice design challenge once in a while.  So now and again I build a spaceplane.  But all they do is lug large numbers of Kerbals to and from LKO, nothing more.  I don't have much use for them otherwise.

[Nich]

I have been working on the DERP challenge with only SSTOs and I have to say fitting everything into cargo bays is definitely challenging.  Even a simple science lab and lander just doesn't fit well in the MK3 bays.  It has definitely made spaceplanes interesting again.

 

[bewing]

I like to design my rockets with two stages. The bottom SRB stage is recoverable near KSC for almost full value.

The upper stage is a pure nuke rocket with just enough control surfaces and aerodynamic lift to get you back down from orbit to a landing on the KSC runway (the last thousand meters or so by parachute).

Solid fuel gives you 2/3rds the Isp, and costs about 2/3rds of equivalent liquid fuel.

Put all these things together, and you get the fact that this rocket design is "fully recoverable" except for the fuel -- so it gives you pretty much all the benefits (except for looking really cool) of an SSTO, and the upper stage that goes wandering around space isn't dragging around a lot of useless airbreathing engine mass.

Also, as said above, by the time I have the tech to make an SSTO, I'm not doing anything anywhere near Kerbin anymore anyway. I only need to ferry a few kerbonauts up and down from orbit on rare occasions.