Improving a spaceplane

[king of nowhere]

I've been unable to get the plane to have low drag during engine ignition. Probably it's the Mk2 fault, mostly. The big wings certainly don't help, too. Unfortunately, the characteristics that make a good rocket spaceplane and those that make a good explorer propeller plane are often mutually exclusive. add in the need to add radiation shielding, food, redundant life support; of course performance is going to take a hit there.

Anyway, this means that the best way to launch is, after getting as high as possible with propellers, to point mostly upwards. A good spaceplane accelerates mostly in the atmosphere, this one cannot.

The bad news is that I need all four darts for this. as i mentioned, under kerbalism engines can have mechanical failures; I'm not going to risk the mission of the chance of mechanical failure if i can help it, therefore i added two engines. they are unnecessary, redundant, they reduce performance overall. but they are my guarantee if an engine breaks. I considered putting an extra dart into a seq container, but they are too heavy to be handled on a surface. Anyway, they are necessary. So here is the final look of the plane

it needs a bit higer speed to land and take off, but i tested it on laythe and it works. it has fairly good manueverability with propellers, though not as much as i'd like. Its predecessor could land obliquely on the side of a hill, i'm not sure this one can. it is very stable, though.

it is pretty poor as spaceplane, but it still reaches laythe orbit easily with 4 engines. i haven't tried it on tekto, i haven't yet installed the outer planet because i'm afrait it will mess up with my current missions, but tekto has lower gravity and thicker atmosphere, should be even easier.

i failed to bring it in kerbin's orbit, but that's not a required mission parameter.

the cargo bay is quite crowded with science and life support. You can see why i wanted to use the Mk2. the bigger rtg are from near future electrics, they provide adequate power. it has food and air for 100 days.

there is also an ion engine, one of those tanks has 350 kg of xenon. it's worth 700 m/s in orbit. it's too low a thrust to finish circularization, but i can use it for some orbital manuevers to rejoin the mothership. and the whole setup is less than 600 kg

the rover arm is fully functional.

 

i'm not 100% happy about this plane. at best, it's a jack of all trades. but i reached the point where i mostly gave up on improving it. it is adequate on all mission requirements, and touching anything is likely to screw up some other characteristic.

 

As for Eve, i am coming to believe it's best to use a regular rocket. while this plane could work as a last stage, it weights 50 tons for 3000 m/s of vacuum deltaV. To bring this to eve's orbit, i'd need at least 2000 extra m/s, even assuming a good flight capability. and that would require a very heavy ascent stage. a smaller rocket for orbit, together with a small, lightweight, disposable plane for exploring the surface (i recently used one that was just 2.5 tons) is probably going to be cheaper.

It's quite the paradox: i started the project with the mk2 because i needed the heat tolerance for eve, i ended up with a functional project, and then i decided to not use it at eve after all. but i'm still keeping the design, especially the despised Mk2, for reasons of cargo bay and crew comfort.

I want to also use it as rover on tylo and slate (because i'm not carrying around 50 tons of spaceplane without trying to reuse it as much as possible); but that requires rover wheels, which have bad aerodinamics and bad heat tolerance. i can install them with eva construction before the aforementoned landings, and remove them afterwards.

 

[king of nowhere]

in fact, considering i can make a comfortable laythe rocket with 15 tons, it may be just cheaper to send disposable stuff everywhere

[Single stage to ocean]

Your plane is draggy b/c mk2 parts must point dead prograde or drag will be insane. And you could make a 1 ton rocket that can leave laythe, serious. In kerbalism, eva commands seats have two hours of life support. This is enough to go up and down, plant a flag, and dilly dally.

[king of nowhere]

if i wanted to go up and down, plant a flag, and dilly dally, i could use a command seat. which i refuse to do anyway, because i want to keep up at least some pretence of realism.

what i actually want is to go down with multiple crew members, spend multiple days traveling around the place conducting science, then go up, and then reuse the whole system.

Edited May 17, 2021 by king of nowhere

[Single stage to ocean]

It is realistic, the nasa spacesuits have 7 hours o.f ls