Jet Engine Landing

[TheDarkOne]

Most people can land on Kerbin or any of it\'s moons, but most use normal thrusters and parachutes (on Kerbin). However, jet engines should work too. What is the smallest craft you can land from orbit that uses only jet engines?.

RULES:

You can use anything you want to get into orbit (periapsis >= 70 KM, anything allowed to get here). Just flying up is not allowed.

Once in orbit, you can\'t use anything besides stock (including MechJeb), and use only jet engines for thrust (except RCS to deorbit)

The goal is to get the least parts in the landing craft (anything you use to deorbit and land, so too many RCS thrusters are bad.)

Pictures/videos are required (should be unneccessary to say this, though)

Leaderboard:

Knyght: 15 parts from deorbit

[keptin]

So, this is a 'smallest spaceplane' challenge?

[semininja]

It\'s impossible to get out of orbit on a jet engine; they don\'t work if there\'s no air.

[Majiir]

My entry is uploading to YouTube. I just launched up to high altitude and fell back, but I think you\'ll agree my descent wasn\'t very different from an orbital reentry. (I had reached terminal velocity before throttling up.)

[EDIT] Here it is (skip to 2:00 for landing):

[TheDarkOne]

I just realized that I forgot about a rule. Spaceplanes are relatively easy to land, so no wings or other airplane parts, and you have to land vertically (like you do with a rocket when you have no parachute).

Edit: You have to get in a full 70000m orbit, and to get out, you are allowed to use RCS.

Edit 2: Once you hit the atmosphere, no RCS.

[keptin]

Wouldn\'t it be better to try to land the biggest ship with jet thrust? Clearly, making the smallest ship isn\'t much of a challenge. Also, update your OP with the new rules.

[Fendleton]

Wouldn\'t it be better to try to land the biggest ship with jet thrust? Clearly, making the smallest ship isn\'t much of a challenge. Also, update your OP with the new rules.

Actually with stock jet engines, landing a very small ship can be *very* hard...because the stock jets shut down at about 20% power or so. If you\'re using multiple engines (which makes pure VTOL craft easier and lets you carry more fuel), it becomes very difficult once you\'re low enough on fuel that the engine cuts out before reaching a nice safe descent-power setting. Not so much an issue with this (just have a big enough tank to provide ballast, or a single engine with enough weight), but it can be an issue on some craft. You can work around it with good timing though.

[Knyght]

I went with a simple design. All stock parts. Asparagus inspired staging, with 8 tanks to get us into orbit and make our de-orbit burn. Then it\'s a half tank with landing legs. I feared that the turbojet would be too big for the legs to get past, and I didn\'t want to add more parts, so used the regular jet engine. I\'m hoping that when you say you can use RCS to de-orbit, that you don\'t mind me using the last of my rocket fuel to do it, since I don\'t want to add RCS, that\'s too easy.

Here we are on the launch pad:

And launching:

Staging:

Orbiting:

De-orbit burn:

Firing that jet engine:

Finally, landed:

Ahem, yes, well, as you can see, we had quite a safe landing. Unfortunately the landing legs glitched into the surface and destroyed the jet engine, otherwise it would have made it.

Still, pretty successful. Was pretty twitchy without ASAS but I don\'t need no autopilots. Those Kerbals have a long walk home though...

But yes, you could easy do this with three landing legs instead of four, but it looked cooler with 4. You could also land without legs at all which should work fine but I\'m pretty sure the jet engine will explode unless you\'re really featherlike, which is difficult with the jet engines since they cut out at low throttle.