Return from Eve

[Vanamonde]

While the thicker atmosphere on Eve will give you much more lift, it will also give you much more drag. Isn't that going to be an awfully long engine burn, to drive a plane from the surface to high altitude, in that soup, at a shallow angle?

[Temstar]

While the thicker atmosphere on Eve will give you much more lift, it will also give you much more drag. Isn't that going to be an awfully long engine burn, to drive a plane from the surface to high altitude, in that soup, at a shallow angle?

Drag is mostly to do with the speed you fly through the atmosphere rather than time. Take an extreme example: if there were magical floating steps in the sky and you are climbing up at a walking pace then all of the energy you expand in your legs would be used to fight against gravity and almost none of it would be because of drag.

Or another way to look at it:

On a celestrial body with no atmosphere, pure rockets always beat spaceplanes because wings are deadweight

On a 1G / 1 atm body like Kerbin, rockets and hybrid rocket/spaceplane have similiar performance as shows in my experiment. Wings give you lift which allows you to left off with more weight but they also impose weight penalty on your ship.

It follows that on a 1.7G but 5 atm body like Eve, spaceplanes would have a significant advantage over pure rockets in the lower atmosphere. Hybrid rocket/spaceplane should have a significant advantage over pure rocket power.