Building a giant fuel SSTO

[JebKeb]

How would I go about lifting an entire orange tank to orbit, SSTO, and then taking that stage back down to land and be recovered? I have no ideas for the landing system...

[Pecan]

Is SINGLE STAGE TO ORBIT (SSTO) your definition or do you require further that it is a spaceplane that can horizontally-land on a.runway?  If not the latter - pop parachutes once you get slow enough.

[Jarin]

There's some good designs in the Heavy SSTO Efficiency Challenge that can handle two orange tanks. Could look there for ideas. For general SSTO Spaceplane advice, I got some good pointers when asking a similar question not too long ago.

More specific to your question, what part of the design are you having trouble with? A rocket-style SSTO using a mammoth stack is your easiest answer. Just be careful about re-entry. Parachutes + water splashdown would be your best bet there. If you want horizontal landing and takeoff, what part of return is giving you trouble? There's a lot of potential points where things can go wrong, so generalized advice is difficult.

Edit: Getting my threads mixed up. Some fuel-tanker-specific design tweaking for one I built recently is covered here.

Edited June 20, 2016 by Jarin

[mk1980]

a mammoth engine should easily get a 40t payload to orbit SSTO, provided you get it into a somewhat decent gravity turn. the hardest part of the whole trip is probably the landing. it's easy to tip your rocket over and when it tips over, chances are that the upper parts will explode when hitting the ground.

the easy workaround /exploit is to hover over the "back to space center" button and as soon as the "recover" button pops up you click it, so the rocket is recovered before it can fall over and destroy itself.

design wise, i guess something like a dozen chutes, some airbrakes and a probe core with some batteries are all you really need. maybe an extra reaction wheel to have a bit more control.

the trip is simple, really. launch to orbit, depoly the tank in low oribt, wait/fast forward to the point where the deorbit burn gets you somewhere in the general area of KSC (for better recovery value). if you have airbrakes, use them to slow down quicker. make sure you don't overheat and expldoe them, though. wait until you're slow enough to open the chutes... and open the chutes. if you have some fuel remaining, keep it around for the last seconds before touchdown. a little "landing burn" can reduce your touchdown speed quite a lot.