Experiment : LF Only SSTO - 3.4 units of wing area, vs 11.4 units of wing area

[AeroGav]

I built this one first.   Only a single Big S wing strake as our wing,  though the canards and elevons add a snitch more.

Now,  that spaceplane has three mk1 liquid tanks.   Each holds the same volume as four big S strakes.   So,  i went about replacing two of the mk1 tanks with more wing strakes,  while doing my best to change as little about the airplane as possible.  After a lot of jiggery pokery,  the CoM , dry and wet, and CoL, ended up in about the same place.   The effort was to change as little as possible so if this looks like a kludge, that's because it is !

 

So the question is,  do you think they'll perform or handle any different ?

 

 

 

[AeroGav]

Here is the Kerbal Wind Tunnel excess thrust plot for both versions of the airplane when on jet power.    The tiny wing airplane's flight envelope is on the left,   the one with the larger wing is on the right :

...and this is how things look on Stage 2,  NERV power.    Again,  the small wing version is on the LHS.

 

[AeroGav]

screengrabs from their maiden flights - i tried to take them at the same speed each time  :

Spoiler

The small wing version took only 3 minutes 25 seconds to hit 1466 m/s.

The large wing airplane needed 5 min 38 seconds,  but you could probably shave time off both with a more aggressive profile.   Especially the latter as i was trying hard to stay subsonic low down.

The NERV burn lasted 1 minute and 50 seconds on the small wing airplane,  was 9 seconds shorter on the big wing airplane, for what that's worth.