Get a spaceplane into orbit

[amore555]

Ok this is the one thing i haven't managed!

I can now land on the moon and minmus, I've even developed a rocket capable of doing both on the same voyage!.

But for the life of me I cannot develop a spaceplane that can make it into orbit!

If I give it enough fuel, it's too heavy and won't get high enough.

Any tips on this would be greatly appreciated

[vexx32]

I would suggest not trying to make an SSTO style spaceplane. There are some excellent examples of these in the Spacecraft exchange, but they are harder to build. Try getting up to about 20,000m on jet engines, then jettisoning the engines and empty fuel tanks. Then, use rocket engines to ascend as vertically as you can manage until you get to about 40km, and start to pitch over (did I mention have either RCS or vectoring engines? ).

From there, continue as with a normal rocket. If you need examples, there are a few in the Spacecraft Exchange to work with.

[EndlessWaves]

Build it lightweight. Heavy spaceplanes of 200-300 tons are fiendishly difficult to make. Also, make it efficient - too much thrust and it'll waste a lot of fuel on air drag.

[Serratus]

The guys are right. Don't try to start with SSTO. It's terribly annoying, and at best You will be on edge with fuel budget. SPLs are much easier. Basically You build rocket, add wings to it, and drop-jet engines.

[Markus Reese]

For straight up space plane. The lifter technique is one of the better ones. What you want to do is build your spaceplace for your orbital and whichever space task you wish to perform. You want this light. For me it often consists of twin jet engines and four half tanks mounted close to the fuselage with the efficient engines. To get to space, I will make large lifting wings and put more jet engines on it as well as my orbital engines. The staging is as follows when I run this design. Use the jet engines and wings to get thrust up to the 15km usual max altitude. Jettison these engines and engage your orbital fuel assembly. You will want to get a steep upwards bank at this point and then fly it up and around just like any other rocket. SSTO with the new fuel changes tend to be a pain. They still can be done, but that is mostly for the challenge.

There there is the way I love to do it. Currently, it does mean moving your ship file outside of the game, but it does make spaceplace builds alot more fun. First stage is design whatever space plane structure you wish in the space plane hangar. I do this so I can have my re-entry space plane and also set it up for VTOL on the muns. Test out your spaceplane, if you have the jettisonable VTOL engines, test your balance out. You want to do the testing lots because making changes after can result in the loss of alot of work. Now, what you can do at this point is rotate the plane so it points vertically and build your rocket setup to have it take off vertical from the runway. What I do is I minimize KSP, and copy the plane from the ship SPH folder to the VAB folder. You now have your spaceplane in your vertical assembly building. Just build up a vertical takeoff assembly and you are in space.

I really like doing the copy and paste myself since it allows for the increased symetry options. At this point in my KSP gaming, this is the way majority of my rockets are now built just because I like the style and looks of spaceplanes landed on mun.

[Fuzzy Dunlop]

If you want to build a SSTO (single stage to orbit) I recommend building on this skeleton: 5 normal fuel tanks + 1 areospike + 2 Mk1 fuselage + 2 turbojets. Fly that up to 12,000m on the jets alone then fire the areospike. You can turn the jets off after 20,000m.

[Suzaku]

spaceplanes Ftw you need to adjust angle of attack during takeoff and build a skeleton for the rest of the tanks to be built around.

[bsalis]

Building an SSTO is hard. An order of magnitude more difficult than a rocket or simple plane. You are juggling all sorts of balances and forces. Then you have to make it work in several modes of operation, from takeoff to ascent, to orbital operations to re-entry and flight again.

My suggestion like others have said is just put a little plane on top of a big rocket to get a taste for it and an get an easy win under your belt. eg.

Then move onto the real fun with an SSTO. Note that there is something about an SSTO that I don't know why it took me so long to figure out, since I should have known better. Bigger SSTOs don't necessarily give you more Delta-V. This is critical to understand, since the normal reaction to having a craft not get to orbit is the feeling you need to go bigger. The only way to improve the Delta-V is to a) increase the full:dry mass ratio, use more efficient engines - always use airospikes, and c) reduce your gravity loss and drag loss through better design.

To increase the full:dry mass ratio you need to be ruthless with weight. If you double the fluel and engine mass, but also double the weight of landing gear and wings, the Delta-V will be.... exactly the same! This is why this...

... actually has LESS Delta-V than this...

Also note that if you are not intending to fly under jet power pre-orbit, you do not need much in the way of wings, since all your doing is getting the nose up to go balastic. You only need enough wings fly upon return, which is very little, as you can see here in this...

[amore555]

Hey guys,

thanks to your advice I was finally able to do this today.

My plane had two atmospheric engines with one fuel tank each, which took me up to 6km. From there they were jettisoned and it was aerospike all the way.

I've included pics of the plane, the orbit, and a wing walk in space for your pleasure!

[vexx32]

Allow me to be the first to say "Well done!"

[Cooly568]

I made one a long time ago back in 0.15

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/13342-Frowler-Video-Craft-File-Passenger-Plane-To-The-Mun-%28Or-Minmus%29-And-Back?highlight=frowler