Ascending from Eve

[GwynJHawke]

I had a random thought hit me and I was curious. With how thick Eve's atmosphere is, would it be easier to try and reach orbit in a space plane rather than a rocket, using the atmosphere for lift?  This was a random passing thought, but who better to ask than some of you lovely people.

[Foxster]

In my experience - no. 

Eve's atmos is a soup and the more time you spend in the gloopy lower bit the more dV you waste.

My most efficient craft punch up through the lower atmos in as sleek and rapid way as possible. 

[Snark]

10 hours ago, GwynJHawke said:

I had a random thought hit me and I was curious. With how thick Eve's atmosphere is, would it be easier to try and reach orbit in a space plane rather than a rocket, using the atmosphere for lift?  This was a random passing thought, but who better to ask than some of you lovely people.

Basically, no.  The reason spaceplanes are so efficient on Kerbin is not because of their lift, it's because they can breathe air to get super-high Isp.

The fact is, you have to climb to a certain altitude and that's a bunch of energy.  Lift from wings doesn't add any energy to the vehicle.

It would mean you could have a shallower ascent angle, which means less gravity loss... but you're plowing through a lot more atmosphere.

I'm not saying "nobody could ever make such a thing work"-- but having tried it both ways, in my experience the best results are just to punch straight up until you get high enough to start tipping into a gravity turn (around 20 km is what I usually do).  Every winged, slanted-ascent attempt I've done has ended up performing quite a bit worse than a vertical-ascent rocket.

[AeroGav]

I did some experiments in 1.05 with hyperedit and a plane powered by an aerospike up to 20km , then a nerv.   It decoupled the Dart and the pair of underwing ft800 LF/O tanks feeding it.     Wings counteract gravity meaning you need less thrust therefore engine mass to overcome "gravity losses", but the savings are probably not that large.     The main issue would be getting it down to eve surface intact.  Re entry heat is brutal on eve, in my only attempt i came to the conclusion only a heatshield/capsule approach can do it.

[GwynJHawke]

Oh well. So much for random thoughts. Too bad the kerbals can't come up with a jet engine that can burn Eve's atmo.

[wumpus]

I'd guess that the ISP/vacuum nerfing pretty much killed this.  The only advantage using lift would give you is in using low thrust/weight engines (with hopefully higher ISPs).  Since most of these engines simply won't work in the "problem altitudes" of Eve, lift doesn't help.

Using lifting/gliding airplanes to move fuel from an ISRU location to a high altitude land/launch area might be another story.