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SSTOs! Post your pictures here~


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The Skylony. Costs only 88k VF.

https://imgur.com/a/AFKp5Uq

Copy and paste into CRAFT file this.

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(Includes Tantares antennas. Remove them from the CRAFT file if you don't have the mod)

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  • 2 weeks later...

It is the first craft ever I post on the forums ! Full stock !

The vessel is a large and carefully optimised SSTA : the only SOI she can't leave is Eve's. She was built with FAR (I also just tested it with stock aerodynamics, just on Kerbin, and it -predictably- remained very easy to fly). But I'm missing the point :

She was built with a purpose : to be able to clamp horizontally to, and then lift my other stock SSTO Aurora (or another vessel) high enough for the latest to leave Eve, in a fully reusable fashion. The plane-shape, horizontal docking and take-off features thus eliminating the need of infrastructure on an alien world.

She is -very- heat resistant. After extensive searching at the Kerbal Patents Office, it seems that I even (may) have invented an use of wheels and rover that no one ever registered before ! :0.0:

I present you... The Eve Lifter !

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I have spent quite some time on this vessel, so to present a real finished product ^^ She is very stable and agile both full and empty. Actually she flies like a fighter when she is empty... Her center of mass is inside of it's cargo bay. Vernier thrusters are also very well balanced using RCS Build Aid. It shouldn't be too diffucult to make a VTOL out of this SSTO if you are willing to.

She flies and land like a plane in both Kerbin (or Laythe or Tylo) and Eve's atmosphere (it should be able to make a rocket landing on lower gravity planets like Duna or smaller celestial bodies, but I was so focused on Eve that I forgot to test).
She doesn't have enough wing area for a sea landing on Kerbin, but on Eve she is capable of it. However, as needing to refuel the empty beast in the middle of a lake is a daunting task : I wouldn't recommend to do it !

With her Rover attached, she is capable of science and refueling (and taxi on electric wheels). More on that in the following user's guide ^^

The vessel have a DV of 6100 without cargo, and 5700 with 25 t in the cargo bay. As she is in the SPH (loaded with the Rover and fully loaded with liquid fuel in the wings), she is capable to reach Eve directly from KSC.

Once she have landed, fuelled only with LfOx, without the Rover and the Atomic engine, it has a max DV of 5100 inside Eve's atmosphere (it will diminish the closer to sea level).

When my Aurora SSTO used her as the first stage to leave Eve, it could reach stable orbit from an altitude of 1000 m (tested) and had a lot of spare dv, it must be able to do so from 0 m (yet to be tested).

Between two duties, she remains a nice plane and moving base for refuelling, science and exploring on Eve.

OGD9y3c.png


Cargo bay :

Inside there is a Rover with a science lab and a big Convert'Otron with 4 mining drills.
When the cargo bay doors are closed, the Rover and the wheels are perfetly protected from reentry heat, from any angle.

With the rover still attached to the vessel (by clampOtron senior so it can be re-attached), the cargo bay can be opened and the landing gears retracted, allowing the whole vessel to roll on electric power and maneuver with great precision, which is handy to clamp to the Aurora SSTO (or another vessel if the height is right) on the ground.

The non-patented trick I was talking about was to use sideway rotated mk3 parts and a mk3 cargo bay facing downward to have the electric wheels touching the ground (where the mk3 parts are flat), yet still be protected from heat when the cargo bay is closed. Having them detachable from the vessel as a mining rover is also a bonus ^^ My first attempts used a vessel flying on its back during reentry to protect the heat sensitive wheels located under it, which was quite elegant in most atmospheres but too delicate for Eve reentry, where the vessel needs to move too much to spread the heat on different parts...

The craft is balanced on its cargo bay, and so it can sit balanced on the opened cargo bay doors. Then the opening limit of the cargo bay doors can be used to adjust precisely the height of the whole vessel (and the Clamp'O Trons) for ground docking.

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When attempting to leave Eve, the Rover should be detached and rolled away to gain a lot of precious weight and DV.


Advice 1 : It is recommended to assign specific keys to the forward and turn movements while on electric wheels propulsion so the vessel won't also try to pitch/yaw at the same time.

Advice 2 : Before attempting to land on Eve, the atomic engine should be detached to gain precious weight. It is staged on the last stage before the fairing (the fairing should never be staged), or maybe attached by a clampOtron depending on the version of the craft I'll be uploading, not sure for this one... It won't be needed anymore as the Lifter will only run on LfOx inside Eve's atmosphere from now on.

Advice 3 : When aerobraking inside Eve's hot atmosphere, you should be able to resist the heat by pointing "radial" with rcs on until you have blown enough speed for flying her normally. Given you have well chosen your course and (almost) emptied the fuel tanks before attempting the last and final capture of your reentry.

Advice 4 : If you're not flying her with FAR, you'd have to assign yourself the control surface's deployment to the "braking" action group for prograde slowing down in atmosphere (with a balance between normal direction and reverse, otherwise you'll pitch too much when braking. Althrough a -little- pitching up when braking is not too bad of a thing). The flaps settings for FAR should already be tuned. The only wings I had to reinforce with FAR were the small strakes attached at the very back of the main wings, where the stress could be -sometimes- too important when pitching up in the lowest layers of Eve's atmosphere, due to the way FAR is increasing the stress on the most external lifting surfaces.

Advice 5 : Bring an Engineer !! Sometimes an electric wheel can pop off under the weight of the vessel, and you WANT to be able to repair it. You will refuel faster. While the vessel can be unmanned, you will also not depend on communication relays to control it, nor have reduced options during the burning Eve's aerobraking plasma blackout.

 

Download :

https://kerbalx.com/Bla-Bla/Eve-Lifter

 

Controls :

(the actions groups start at [6] so not to interfere with those of the propelled vessel : usually [1], [2], [3] etc.)

[5] : activate/deactivate the Atomic engine (it will be jettisoned during Eve aerocapture)

[6] : activate/deactivate the Aerospike

[7] : activate/deactivate Vector engines

Rover :
[8] : Activate/deactivate Antenna and Solar pannels

[9] : activate/deactivate Scanner and stability landing gears (as the Rover have enough electric wheels to move the whole vessel, full, on its own it will accelerate quite fast to 50 m/s, turning should only be attempted under 30 m/s and be gentle, otherwise it may start bouncing. Even then however it should be able to recover most of the time, the weak spot to avoid seeming to be landing on the clampOtron sr from ~ 45° angle)

[0] : Activate/desactivate Mining drills, LfOx Converter and Ladders

 

Edited by Bla Bla
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  On 1/14/2019 at 4:45 PM, Bla Bla said:

Previous post now edited with the kerbalX download link. :D

(Vanamonde, Yakuzi and AeroGav, thank you for the likes !)

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No worries mate, welcome to the forums, quite the entrance with an SSTA! I checked it out on KerbalX and it looks good! I did notice however that it's not marked as "stock" due to FAR... Since many peeps look for stock craft on KerbalX, you might want to consider (if you can be bothered) saving your craft in stock KSP and reuploading.

 

On my end, I finished a series of stock SSTO spaceplanes for LKO after being away from KSP and the forums for quite a bit. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to tinker around in the SPH and optimise craft you'd never thought would reach orbit. Anyhow, below a couple of pics of the fruit of my labor, the "Slingshot" and "Slingshot Pro" class spaceplanes, full albums here and here, respectively. If you want to take them for a spin around Kerbin grab them from my KerbalX page here (they're a breeze to fly, flight instructions in the craft descriptions, aviation lights not included :P).

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Left: Slingshot Pro     Right: Slingshot

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Slingshot

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Slingshot

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Slingshot

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Slingshot Pro

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Slingshot Pro

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Slingshot Pro

Edited by Yakuzi
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Mm you are right I should make a stock save of my Lifter (althrough this one is already usable in stock)... I hadn't because I didn't want to loose the flaps' settings for FAR...

Beautiful SSTOs and superb pictures !

Which mod do you use ? visual enhancements ? The wing shape definetly reminds me that of the Rafale (except for the double tail), so I guess these planes fly extremely well ^^

How did you get a door on the side of the ogive shaped mk1 tank ? is that a mk1 cockpit clipped inside ?

If you manage to fit a docking port at the back between the engines, space planes of this size (and even a little more) will definetly be able to escape from Eve using my Eve Lifter, given they have enough dv in high atmo without air-breathing ! That's the whole point of the Lifter to do exactly that :)

I personally use a central RAPIER with a shielded docking port (slightly clipped) and two NERV (as a rule of thumb twr should be around 0.4/0.46 -kerbin value- with the NERVs after the oxidizer is consumed to accelerate efficiently from high Eve atmosphere to orbit).

Edited by Bla Bla
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Search of career ability extending. Pure stock mid-career 2-seat SSTO, based on 2 panther engines and done without of nuke engines.

hRNXa7B.png

2pan

LKO dV=2078 m/s. Excess for Minmus visiter, but not enouch for Mun and Back. Thou this enouch for arrive to Laythe. :)

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Time to crash the all-stock SSTO plane party again.

This, inspired by "CFASTT-1" can take 30 tons to 300km in 2.5x. The nose cone is a mod but its custom texture is disabled due to Squad's revamp work. It's there to survive 2700K of heat. The engine stacks are mine.

Each SABR3 engine is equal to 7 RAPIERs with a little less of their garbage performance configuration.

This plane is not simply slapped together. It uses angles of incidence in a few of its wing pieces to help it nose-up easier and it can touchdown very gently at 92m/s.

Honeyview_screenshot23.jpg

Honeyview_screenshot38.jpg

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Dolphin Mk V Mini SSTO

3.87t with Kerbal,  3.757 m/s dV (vac),  150 m/s dV in a 70x70km orbit.

BQ3ctH9.jpg

https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/Dolphin-Mk-V
No landing gear or parachutes. Lands after a glide phase via suicide burn.
No solar panels or RTG, battery only. Can work far out in the solar system as well.
Basic science experiments and an experiment storage unit.

Mephisto.
(Rarely flown, only crashed once.)

(and yes, I watched too many videos from Bradley W. and Turbo Pumped lately...)

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  On 1/18/2019 at 3:52 PM, eddiew said:

Would love to see some shots of this thing in action in situ :)  Seems remarkably compact for what it is ^^

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I have ruined my mainsave trying a workaround to get FAR working after 1.6... It became permanently "incompatible with this ksp version"... ;.;

But no worries, I'm redoing the mission for you !

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Edited by Bla Bla
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  On 1/15/2019 at 1:31 AM, Yakuzi said:

On my end, I finished a series of stock SSTO spaceplanes for LKO after being away from KSP and the forums for quite a bit. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to tinker around in the SPH and optimise craft you'd never thought would reach orbit. Anyhow, below a couple of pics of the fruit of my labor, the "Slingshot" and "Slingshot Pro" class spaceplanes, full albums here and here, respectively. If you want to take them for a spin around Kerbin grab them from my KerbalX page here (they're a breeze to fly, flight instructions in the craft descriptions, aviation lights not included :P).Xn3DFxL.png
Left: Slingshot Pro     Right: Slingshot

  Reveal hidden contents

 

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Wow! I can't decide if I like your craft or your screenshots better. Both are very sleek and stylish! :cool:

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  On 1/26/2019 at 8:46 PM, Aerospike said:

Wow! I can't decide if I like your craft or your screenshots better. Both are very sleek and stylish! :cool:

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Thanks mate, very much appreciated!

  On 1/15/2019 at 4:24 PM, Bla Bla said:

Beautiful SSTOs and superb pictures !

Which mod do you use ? visual enhancements ? The wing shape definetly reminds me that of the Rafale (except for the double tail), so I guess these planes fly extremely well ^^

How did you get a door on the side of the ogive shaped mk1 tank ? is that a mk1 cockpit clipped inside ?

Expand  

Happy you like them Bla Bla, I loosely based the Slingshot on the MiG 4.12 and the Slingshot Pro on the MiG 1.44 (both were demonstrator designs), they indeed have some similarities with the Rafale.

The door on the front end is from an upside-down Mk1 cockpit (on top of an upside-down Mk2 cockpit with the Slingshot Pro). I frequently use some degree of clipping for aesthetic purposes (and because KSP cheats with drag/aerodynamics :rolleyes:a), but not to physics defying extremes if I can help it.

Here's a list of visual mods I use:

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Edited by Yakuzi
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Another panther-based SSTO for various career missions. It has passenger cabin and short cargobay,  capable for Mun-and-back missions (LKO dV=2757 m/s).

Y6HLga7.png

Munracer-B1A

Parts: 64

Takeoff mass:  less 37 t

Payload to Mun:  up to 1 t cargo + 3 kerbals.

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Full album (37) -- https://imgur.com/a/tsboKxw

Edited by Aerospacer
add scrs
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I build a W.I.P 1260Ton spaceplane with 99 or 104 Rapier engines that can lift up to 1100Ton weighing 2360 Ton.

It can format 5m diameter tanks or 2 x 3.75m tanks next to each other or a 5m fairing with a max width of 6 meters, up to 7.7meters if I find a way to raise it further above the ground. Max cargo length is up to 70 meters and can support fuel tanks of that size across the total cargo format.

It currently consists out of 374 parts including the cargo but I'm confident I can modify the part count somewhat more.

Also comes with 2 small sidemounted MK 3 cargo bays to put smaller stuff in.

Fps is relatively ok with about 1 second per 1-3 fps on a 8700k

Dummy weight is 1040 Tons.

Pics:

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I probably put it on KerbalX once it is finished.

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First of all, I would like to thank @Matt Lowne for inspiring me to persist. In the past, I SUCKED at SSTOs. But now, thanks to him, I think I got a good design going.

Y0mjFU9.jpg

After so much blood (from SPH incidents), sweat (from the nose cone overheating during the initial ascent), and tears (from the widowed wives of the test pilots), I put this bad boy in LKO.

 

 

Call me a copycat if you may, but this is only my first SUCCESSFUL SSTO that I built from scratch. Besides, I installed a 2G direct antenna on this plane as well as a science bay and an RTG (in case the solar panel breaks off). I also put rocket tanks in front of the Rapier engines so that it will give the craft an extra boost on its way to LKO (I'm at 85 km right now) - they automatically switch, by the way. When the next transfer window opens, I shall blast this off to Duna - only it STAYS there.

  • It's objective is to get kerbals to and from places on Duna, since rovers are too slow.
    • Tbh, I haven't test-landed this. I spent a lot of time just trying to get it to LKO
  • It now has 2215 m/s of delta-V left at 85 km above Kerbin's surface.

 

I'm also designing a small refueling rover just for that plane - the rover I already have on Duna's too large, and a mini-bus is total crap when it comes to refueling. That way, I won't have to worry about running out of fuel while flying through Duna. Too bad Captain Red won't get it OR the plane before he leaves Duna, but at least the next wave of Duna colonists will. 

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