Albo-356

[Dr. Kerbal]

I want to make a craft to players that is easy to fly. A stop that flys on its own. I present you with the hypothetical craft: Albo-356. Alba-356 is an SSto is based off of the Albatross. You can find the craft in the game. The craft instead will have rapper engines and rocket fuel. And more evelons. I find that the Albatross’s design allowed it to fly with out any pitch. This was mind hogging and after playing I came up with the idea of making a Ssto just like the Albatross. I haven’t tested or made the craft yet but I plan to do so. You may ask we didn’t I use YouTubers sstos. Well. There hard to fly and there complicated. So I yet to design and image an Ssto to fly. The albatross helped me do it. 
 

If you would like to test the craft yourself make the Albatross and swap the file with rocket fuel, the engines with raipier engines, and put more evelons (or etc) on the main wing. Tell em if the craft works. If it doesn’t. Tell me improvements I could make on the idea.

Edited October 31, 2020 by Dr. Kerbal
Please don’t be offended YouTubers who play KSP. I just want to help other Kerbalnuats to biuld SSTO.

[IronMaiden]

What do you mean fly without any pitch? You mean that it takes off the runway without any input? That's because it has a built in pitch of 7° on the runway due to the placement of its landing gear and 4° wing incidence on top of that. So yeah, you're not going to need to pitch up when your wings already have an AoA of 11°. It still requires lots of pitch control once airborne.

The easiest way to get a plane to require barely any pitch control is to put the CoL right on the CoM and use wing incidence. And by CoL I mean true center of lift, not the one in game that only acknowledges wings and control surfaces.

The albatross is a poor model for an SSTO because it has way too much wing area. Yeah you can make it work, but you could make it so much better as an SSTO by using less wing and surface attachments.

[Dr. Kerbal]

Well the wing area is important to make the SSTO easier to fly. So. We could make them stubbier but big wing size.

Or when flying it you need to go in the way the air goes...

I just fly the plane at 1,098ms with Whichplash enegines. I then tried to brake from 1,000 to 200. It’s didn’t brake. But I’m not sure about atompheric retry.

[jimmymcgoochie]

If you’re making an SSTO, drag is BAD. Drag makes you waste fuel and wasting fuel makes you not go to space. Built-in angle of attack on wings adds lots of drag at high speed, so many SSTOs usually don’t use much/any wing angling and instead just use the angle of the landing gear (or running out of runway) to pitch up on takeoff and then push to gain speed as fast as possible to reduce the angle of attack needed to climb.

The Albatross is a subsonic, high lift seaplane and really not suited for converting into an SSTO. A better choice would be something like the Ravenspear Mk4 or later model Aeris jets (I think at least one of those is a spaceplane already but may require tweaking to be a usable SSTO) as it’s easier to make an already fast plane faster than a slow one.

If you want a useful, low tech and low cost SSTO, check this one out: https://kerbalx.com/Kronus_Aerospace/Kronus-LowTech-20-Ton-SSTO

It’s easy to fly, requires only level 2 buildings (very useful when a level 3 R&D upgrade to get the fancy ramjet and RAPIER costs over 4 million!) and has become the workhorse of my current career game due to its amazingly low cost per ton of payload to orbit- 20 tons to 100km for under 5k funds per flight with plenty of scope to carry bigger payloads and/or to higher altitudes.

[IronMaiden]

Don't get me wrong, wing area is very important, but the Albatross's is way overkill. In my experience, a wing area of about 1m^2 per 5-6t of plane and 5° of incidence seems to be a good start. The Albatross has 1m^2 per 1t, that's 5x more than you need! That's a whole lot of unnecessary drag and mass. If you're looking for an early game SSTO, here's an example of a Juno-Terrier design that doesn't require any building upgrades.