SSTOs! Post your pictures here~

[pa1983]

Dou you fly vericaly or horizontaly after take 0ff. I could not keep the nose up past 13km and lost altitude.

I tryed 45 degree nose up after runway like I normaly do the first 15-16km of climbing.

Edit: I both throttle and shut them down. Usually I have 2/3 of them on one action group and the rest on two groups. Gives good balance off control.

Edited August 29, 2013 by pa1983

[KissSh0t]

Dou you fly vericaly or horizontaly after take 0ff. I could not keep the nose up past 13km and lost altitude.

I tryed 45 degree nose up after runway like I normaly do the first 15-16km of climbing.

Edit: I both throttle and shut them down. Usually I have 2/3 of them on one action group and the rest on two groups. Gives good balance off control.

I've always just flown pretty much vertical after takeoff to just about 20 thousand then level out..

[pa1983]

Okay I will try that. Just figuring out a ascent profile for it.

[KissSh0t]

Okay I will try that. Just figuring out a ascent profile for it.

Because it sometimes takes so long to get up there I just put auto pilot on and walk away and make a cup of tea or something.. xD

Once I come back and an aircraft had gone up so fast that it had spun itself to pieces after running out of air and there were parts flying everywhere.. ahaha..

It can definitely get into orbit, I guess for you it's like when I tried Exo's new SSTO out and I couldn't get it up to orbit, not because it was poorly designed but I didn't know how to fly it : I

[pa1983]

Well I would not say I dont know how to fly it. But I have not built an ssto like this since my Falcon IV Transport. Im use to aircraft like ascent profiles rather then vertical once with gravity turn since it requires half the number off engines.

I shall give it one more try then I need a smoke

[KissSh0t]

Well I would not say I dont know how to fly it. But I have not built an ssto like this since my Falcon IV Transport. Im use to aircraft like ascent profiles rather then vertical once with gravity turn since it requires half the number off engines.

I shall give it one more try then I need a smoke

Because lets face it.. Smoking AND Flying an Aircraft is Dangerous...

xD

[pa1983]

Well im in orbit. Gona circularize next. Used NV-1 only

EDIT: Gonna upload some pics here now.

Edited August 30, 2013 by pa1983

[KissSh0t]

Well im in orbit. Gona circularize next. Used NV-1 only

Wow......

I've never gotten into orbit using just the nuclear engines. That means you have lots of fuel... That is just wow ( •_•)>âŒÂâ– -â– 

[pa1983]

Well lots and lots..... I used 384L of the 11/9 ratio of LOX and fuel so the craft would need 400L more Jet fuel or Less LOX. Thing is its a LOT more efficient using Jets. There Practical ISP is like 20000 yes 4 zeros due to the fact that they get there oxidizer from the atmo and not carrying it with it and also the added air moved by jets, about 3/4 of air is cooling air and not used for burning fuel gives jets there efficiency. Turbofans are even more efficient sens they have a fan moving air. So yea I would suggest more fuel less lox. And if you dont need the two LV-30 there is your budget for more jet fuel

I can give you more advice one improving efficiency but some people take offense if you do that with out asking them first.

But lets just say flying it reminded me of my Old Falcon 1 to Falcon 4 crafts tough my crafts where very inefficient sens I didn't use intake staking so they rarely went faster then 1000m/s on jets and rockets had to be started at 24km altitude. So my old crafts of similar style used a LOT of rocket propellant

Btw I added a real wheel and a rear center control surface so I and ASAS could get along

Any way here are my pictures and to make it clear to others this is my flight with KissSh0t's SSTO spaceplane.

Edited August 30, 2013 by pa1983

[KissSh0t]

Ohh my goodness you seriously have so much fuel left over!! xDDDD

Next time I go to fly my shuttle I'm going to try flying it like you did : >

It was actually your early SSTO's that made me interested in SSTO's in the first place, so seeing you fly mine is kinda really cool... I am happy that you did, it put a really big smile on my face//

I don't mind advice, never hurts to improve... You did what I didn't even know could be done with this craft... getting orbital with just Nuclear xD

Edited August 30, 2013 by KissSh0t
Spelling

[pa1983]

I had to go vertical until 15K then turn and I leveled of at 34K, about 2K to high but I got up to 2040kms I think surface speed. Then I went 25-30 degree nose up and throttled down accordingly until I hit 44km and basically had them running on idle.

The trick to an Efficient SSTO space plane is flying it like a plane not a rocket. Going Vertically Requires over 1:1 trust to weight ratio and aircraft dont have that. Also the jets in KSP dont realy give full trust until 27-28km altitude. So what you want is less then 1:1 ratio and to be able to fly you need wings. Lots of wings.

Going Verticaly means you have more trust then you need later on so its not a good thing needing to lower the trust before you hit your target speed say 2000ms because you cant feed them with air. Also more engines means you burne more fuel in space hulling them around. If I would use the same principal on my latest crafts that would mean 24 jet engines and thats 1.2T per engine. That would mean going to Laythe with that craft would completely remove the ability to hull a payload there.

You should aim for a 45 degree angle of attack when climbing the first 15-16km and you should have a smoke trail going 35 degree or more fallowing the aircraft the first few km of climbing. If your climbing to slow and the smoke trail is to flat you need more wings not more engines. The smoke trail will drop of closer to 10 degrees around 10Km+ so it looks a bit ridiculous when the craft is pointing 45 degrees up but later at about 15-16km if you have enough lift and right engine trust you will see climb rates increase when engines pick up power and then you should drop of to 35 degree angle of attack at 16km+ altitude and when hitting 20km it should be more like 30 degrees. By now your vertical speed should be quite good, maybe close to a 100m/s. Then at 24km I go 20 degrees and then at 30km you would go 15 degrees and finally 10 degrees or less at 32km to level off and keep climb at about 5-10ms. Thats just a rough ascent profile, etch craft is unique but thats a good design target from my experience when you build the craft. Some math geeks might have better suggestions, mine are from try and error.

But you basically want to efficiently climb to 32-33km and level of there because at that altitude you have low drag but still enough air to power all engines at full trust with the right balance of intakes. Pick up as much speed as you can on jets, 1900ms is good more is better. I try to hit 2000ms, 2050ms if possible then I pitch up to 20-30 degrees slowly not to flame out. Then you will soon get 100ms vertical speed, throttle down and if you can shut down engine pares as you go that gives better control on the remaining engines throttle and you can then throttle them up to compensate. Once you get to 40-44km altitude go Nukes and if theres air to power 1-2 or more jets at full trust do that. I even run 1 jet asymmetrically on my big crafts since its close enough to the center of mass. But dont go to much nose up when you run rockets and jets because that reduces the time you can run jets. Try to get periapsis up to a few km to.

You can then offset the drag by running 1-2 jets on low trust, 10-2kN etch to avoid losing to much altitude on apoapsis as you are costing up in to space and orbit.

You can also run nukes at partial trust if your jets still provide decent trust since they are more efficient on fuel use.

A good tip is that the same engine will always flame out so first time you fly, you flame out intentionally to find out what engine that is. If that engine is in the first action group of jets you shut down you do the same for remaining engine groups in your action groups. What you then do in your real flight attempt is to right lick that engine and watch the engine status to see if it flames out. You can predict flame outs by watching the value in resources that is with in the parentheses of intakeair. Positive number means more air is taken in then used. 0.0 means you use as much as you take in. Negative number means your using more then you take in so the small buffer you have will soon run out and you will flame out. So to fly safe you can throttle down if you see it going to 0.0 or to -0.01 so you get up to a positive or at least neutral value (0.0).

if your like me and wants to cut it close you can wait until you get en engine flame out message on the engine status and throttle down then and engage RCS if needed to stop the spin.

This few tips will save you a ton off fuel that can be used for payloads.

But yea the big thing is to realize jets are MUCH more efficient, more then there numbers indicate in SPH. Second important thing to realize is that lots of wings is the trick to get efficiency with those jets.They go hand in hand and the right balance will give you a tone off new capability. Big payloads or just more efficient interplanetary crafts. You want lift the first 30km or so after that its more or less ballistic. But you get a lot of wings for one engine in terms of weight. Downside is high part count but engines in KSP is not very nice performance wise for your PC either, smoke takes a lot of computer power with many engines. But its still less costly to hull dead wings around then dead engines.

If one prefers Vertical climb and Gravity turns wings are pretty useless realy. Basically good for landing but even that would take little fuel to do vertically so its better to either go vertically and no wings or all the way in with wings and a good ascent profile on jets that is based on horizontal flying with wings.

It took me a few months to get to that conclusion but thats the way it seems to be.

But any way your craft preformed very well and better then my crafts did back when I built the Falcon IV Transporter. I actually built a replica of the X-33 that took of vertically but landed horizontally that was what lead me in to the conclusion that horizontal take of with lots of wings and few jets where the best way to get efficiency.

This youtube video if you have not seen it shows how I do my ascent as I described above. I edited it in such a way that you can see etch change in pitch and also engine configuration most of the time.

http://youtu.be/KtFSIWnvfmk

The penalty of using brute force with engines will increases the further out in the system you want to go sens it reduces your delta V hulling dead wigth. So vertical take off makes some sens for LKO missions even with payload but going to Duna or Laythe its quite costly on the payload fraction I would say.

I hope this helps with your next Project. The last tip I have is to try one thing at a time and not all ideas at once. That way less will go wrong. It takes time to get all the features in to once idea of an ideal SSTO spaceplane. Thats why I build a lot of prototypes and new versions all the time. Trying to master all concepts at once is just to much. But your doing very good so you will do some awsome SSTO's Im sure of. Its all practice. I dont know how much time I spent building my crafts but its to much thats for sure

Edited August 30, 2013 by pa1983

[KissSh0t]

Woweee.. Thanks for all the tips : U

I try to keep my craft part count under 500 parts because my pc can't handle much more than that... I have a Phenom 955 running at 4GHz so it isn't the best cpu for this game xD

I'm curious actually.. what is your cpu and it's speed if you have overclocked it?

Also your tip about more liquid fuel... I agree, It does need more liquid fuel.

Edited August 30, 2013 by KissSh0t

[pa1983]

Well you can reduce part count by preferring delta wings. They have the most lift. Also less engines and need for fuel means less parts. I prefer as big and few tanks as possible.

Also changing Physics delta time to 0.03 in settings, the first page that comes up or edit the settings.cfg and search for 0.03 after you changed it in the settings menu and lower it to the lowest the game will except, 0.01 that is. Will significantly increase performance sens less physics frames are calculated. Devs seems to think 0.03 is the lowest reliable value. I have used 0.01 for 6 months easy and no difference in game stability etc just a lot better performance.

I run an i7 3930K @ 4Ghz on all cores via the bios. I tested KSP on an i7 3770 that runs at 3.4Ghz and up to 3.9Ghz with intels turbo boost and from my testing it could continuously run 3.7Ghz with turbo boost with all cores so I would assume it ran close or at 3.9Ghz stock with no Overclocking in KSP since KSP very rarely taxes more then two cores and windows 7 or newer should know to tax fewer cores if possible to keep frequency up in programs using few threads.

The i7 3930K @ 4Ghz used a GTX570 and 32Gb ram and ran 1920x1080 with most things on the highest and no AA and I rarely use reentry effects for my own playing because its to slow.

The i7 3770 that ran at its factory speeds of 3.4Ghz and up to 3.9Ghz with one core in use used the Intergrated HD4000 GPU and ran at 1366x768 with most but not all settings on the lowest. Took some fideling to find out what was GPU hogging and what was CPU hogging but I got it to the pint where the HD4000 was not a limiting factor but rater the CPU.

Both these CPU's benchmarked the same in KSP on my 1200+ part SSTO's. So basically any realy fast i5 would do. A 2500K would do just fine with its base clock of 3.2GHhz and it can easily be overclocked.

I have used a lot of AMD processors and realy didn't start using intel until the i7 came out, well I had a C2D E8400 @ 4Ghz for gaming but never realy used that rig so sold it.

But yea any modern i5 would do like 2500K, 3570K, 4670K would do. Older once can probably be found on ebay with MB and all. Theres no benefit from more then two cores atm so Hyper Treading (SMT technology) is also not useful. But there are no unlocked or realy fast dual cores from intel atm and there not much cheaper ithere counting the cost for motherboard, psu ram etc and they cant be overclocked.

I would avoid AMD FX processors. Not that they are bad there just not very good in programs requiring high IPC per core. Bulldozer and piledriver where suited for servers where IPC per thread is low so theres less need for high IPC per thread and integer performance is the important part thats whey they split that in to two separate cores. Can be argued if its two cores. I dont think so sens theres no duplicates of fetch,decode and other minimum parts required for a CPU to work. AMD will include duplicate Fetch and Decoder in the successor to Piledriver.

Intels single thread performance is just way above AMD atm and thats sad. I have used many AMD processors trough the years. K6, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon64, Athlon64 X2, Opteron etc.

I still use two Athlon II X2 240E processors with DDR3 ram so there about Phenom X2 performance at the same clock. 2.8Ghz that is.

But yea find this line in setttings.cfg in your KPS directory.

Defualt its 0.10 but I run 0.01 the lowest that the game accepts. Lower has no effect.

MAX_PHYSICS_DT_PER_FRAME = 0.01

should be 15-16 lines down from the top or so.

Should give you a nice boost if you dont have to high graphical settings for your GPU. If so lower those settings but I suppose you have already made sure your not GPU limited so should not be a problem. I could not run over 800 parts with out this.

Edited August 30, 2013 by pa1983

[KissSh0t]

Nice~

Thanks for all the tips!

Good tips for others as well : >

*edit*

Changed the Physics to the lowest setting in-game and that is seriously already much better..

*edit*

Quick little fix thanks to pa1983, Added landing gear rear of the main landing gear, helps with take off. That was a good tip pa1983

http://www./download/lanwcr7vi1pwbh2/SSTO+Shuttle+Mk1.craft

Edited August 30, 2013 by KissSh0t

[Exothermos]

Making Progress on my Duna Truck SSTO.

Tonight it made orbit fully loaded, so it is officially an SSTO, on kerban at least. (thanks for the physics / computer performance tips, they helped a ton!)

Javascript is disabled. View full album

I still have a huge amount of building to do here: optimizing the gear leg arrangement to spread the load evenly, moving most of the intakes behind the CoM to fix a minor tendency to want to fly backwards on re-entry, and some part reduction / strengthening (I tend to overbuild then par-down with testing).

This craft's mission profile is intended as follows:

1)Take off KSC, Achieve LKO

2)Refuel in orbit, omitting any extra Liquid fuel

3)Duna Transfer

4)Aero Braking

5)Land, Deliver Payload

6)Achieve Low Duna Orbit

7)Refuel??? (I have a mobile refueling station in orbit)

8)Kerban Transfer

9)Aero Brake and Land.

I'm not sure if I will need to refuel for the return trip or not, It's going to be close. I hope to avoid that if possible just because I would like to save some fuel in my Duna Gas Station. I tend to do my calculations by putting my finger in the air to test for wind, and then doing what seems ballpark, so it could all go terribly wrong.

[KissSh0t]

Making Progress on my Duna Truck SSTO.

Tonight it made orbit fully loaded, so it is officially an SSTO, on kerban at least. (thanks for the physics / computer performance tips, they helped a ton!)

Javascript is disabled. View full album

I still have a huge amount of building to do here: optimizing the gear leg arrangement to spread the load evenly, moving most of the intakes behind the CoM to fix a minor tendency to want to fly backwards on re-entry, and some part reduction / strengthening (I tend to overbuild then par-down with testing).

This craft's mission profile is intended as follows:

1)Take off KSC, Achieve LKO

2)Refuel in orbit, omitting any extra Liquid fuel

3)Duna Transfer

4)Aero Braking

5)Land, Deliver Payload

6)Achieve Low Duna Orbit

7)Refuel??? (I have a mobile refueling station in orbit)

8)Kerban Transfer

9)Aero Brake and Land.

I'm not sure if I will need to refuel for the return trip or not, It's going to be close. I hope to avoid that if possible just because I would like to save some fuel in my Duna Gas Station. I tend to do my calculations by putting my finger in the air to test for wind, and then doing what seems ballpark, so it could all go terribly wrong.

My goodness that is sexy.

How are you going to land on Duna with an SSTO? I've tried twice now and crashed twice.. xD

Edited August 30, 2013 by KissSh0t

[pa1983]

Yea I cant understand why people dont use that trick. First thing I do in a new game is test all the settings. But I guess Im old school back when you hade to do it in MS DOS Back then tuning your settings was key to even play a game. But later years now game settings seems fewer and fewer so people seems to run what ever the game sets for them. Even when I tell people about it most of the time they think Im nuts and cant find the setting or file or they tell me they run higher physics time because they like accurate physics. Not like physics get more realistic just more accuret in theory at least. Real world benefit in the game tough that can be discussed. Well I prefer if I can even play the game first. Cant say I noticed any accuracy problems but I dont try to dock with a relative speed of mach 1 any way so. Not useful slamming in to things.

EDIT: Highst speed I landed on duna Was 60m/s but it took 4 attempts and I broke 4 of 8 engines when I landed. Lowest safe landing speed was 50m/s but I would say 40m/s or less is good. Lots of wings, rocket engines and chutes is required in some combo. You just dont have time enough to set down safely and break if your doing 80m/s.

90m/s was perfectly doable before 0.21 but is no longer unless you can find 1-2km of perfectly flat ground. So yes you need a plan for landing taken in to the design.

I prefer the STOL approach. Less cost in tonnage,fuel and parts.

Having the rear higher mounted landing gear in the rear also helps to save the engines from damage on Duna. So thats an added benefit. And dont be afraid of adding landing gears. They actually have no weight. Tough SPH/VAB will alter CoM as if they did so add landing gears LAST because CoM will be where it is with out them. If you add them to soon and adjust CoL accordingly you will not have CoM where you think it is relative to CoL.

So yea you can have 100 landing gears they wont slow you down since drag is proportional to weight and they have 0 weight so no added tonnage or drag.

I dont know if tonnage is added or not to the map view of the landing gear. I would believe they are not but I assume they are just in case

Edited August 30, 2013 by pa1983

[Exothermos]

"Yea I cant understand why people dont use that trick. First thing I do in a new game is test all the settings. But I guess Im old school back when you hade to do it in MS DOS"

I remember those days! I've never touched that setting because frankly I didn't understand what it really did, as I always tested it on smaller designs, and I didn't see any changes. But man, It's noticeable with these 400+ part monstrosities (at least on my computer).

Yeah, I was going for the whole combo approach as well. Tons of wing, and drogue chutes. I hadn't really considered doing a STOL design, but in retrospect it definitely has some advantages. Some sort of STOL feature would be easy to integrate in this case. Ill look into it. The gear are intentionally tall, and the rear of the plane even taller because I expect some hairy moments.

I had absolutely no idea about massless gear considering the CoM change in the SPH. That's fascinating, and I will gear spam the HECK out of this thing if it keeps me from balling it up!

That makes total sense now that I think about it because my silly little SSTOs perform way too well considering they SHOULD have 1.5 tons of gear hanging off of them.

Thanks for the tips!

Edited August 30, 2013 by Exothermos

[pa1983]

In a thread I read some one found out its a bug. Why SQUAD have not fixed it ever is well beyond me. When they do I hope it will be like 100Kg not 500Kg. Lets hope there will be medium and heavy landing gears to. I realy need taler once. Adding a belly sure looks cool but well its part heavy as any other work around so more landing gear options is needed. I cant extend my belly forward on my latest SSTO because CoL is to sensitive in the nose to such changes so I had to use the rover body as a spacer. Looks bad but was the only way. A medium twice as long landing gear would do wounders on many spaceplanes. Just look at real high speed crafts or SSTO spaceplane concepts. LONG landing gears.

From what I understand about the physics in KSP is that it works like frames. Just like you have a frame rate, number of still frames that you perceived as smooth motion assuming there is enough of them the physics works in frames to. At what number of frames per second I dont know but since I have seen no ill effect, like one part flying trough another with out collision detected I assume its enough. One could theorize that if to few physics frames where calculated very second parts could pass trough one and another with out the game detecting it. You could in theory the fly trough Kerbins ground. But since I never had things like that happen with 0.01 and cant see a difference in game behavior be it 0.03 or 0.10 I figure its a good trade off for better performance.

So unlike what some theorize that you cant reduce physics load because that would mean not all the physics is calculated. Well thats not true if physics is completed for etch frame but you just have less frames per second of physics for a total of calculations being less in total then default and more CPU time can be spent to get more frames of rendering instead giving higher real time rendering and better FPS. Makes more sense and since you apparently can change the physics load and stuff still works this makes more sense.

Edited August 30, 2013 by pa1983

[KissSh0t]

I flew to Duna... crashed into Duna... Quick Loaded my save of before crashing into Duna.. Tried to go back to Kerbal... run out of fuel... said screw it infinite fuel and I'm going to Laythe.. spent two hours trying to get an encounter with Laythe... finally got an encounter with Laythe... and then... and then..

*crying*

Why did I have to put all the good pilots in there :T

[pa1983]

Did you aim for Jool first? Jool should be at 3 o clock when kerbin is at 6 o clock if I recall. That should get you to Jool. Once you have en intercept with Jool and have left kerbin's SOI then try to adjust for laythe intercept.

But I find it harder to get back from laythe. Most efficient way I have found seems to be to have Jool at 6 o clock then Laythe at jools 3 o clock then slingshot around Jool by plotting the course from about 3-4 o clock on laythe. Saved me about 100m/s DeltaV compared to a direct burn for Kerbin. Kerbins optimal position is harder to predict since it rotates so much faster around the sun then Jool so one have to figure that out with the closest intercept and target position markers.

BTW do you have Scatter Dencity set high in settings? Dont know how much it will hit performance but it determents how many rocks, trees and stuff you will see randomly. I run 20% just to keep performance good just in case. Think it will mostly effect low end GPU's tough.

Edited August 30, 2013 by pa1983

[KissSh0t]

I did Aim for Jool... I actually had to google where Laythe was located.. hahaha//

I am not very good at getting to other planets... Duna and the Mun and the one just after the mun are the only ones I've gotten into orbit of properly . . . . . Only twice . . . so I would be what you call retarded at this aspect of the game _(ââ€Â「ε：)_

*edit*

My Scatter Density is set to 50%

Edited August 30, 2013 by KissSh0t

[pa1983]

Well I suck at navigating to I use pictures on the forum to get to laythe the first time. After that I took some screenshots of Duna intercepts. But I always manages to loss my pictures

But still it gets easier with time.

I spend so much time building stuff that I get so rusty navigating at times I have to check my notes

[speedboiae86]

Heavily influenced by the designs of CupcakesLanders, Spartan 300 Industries is proud to present, their first successful utility lifter class VTOL-SSTO, "The Bison" Mk. VI!!

After much trial & error, some research and development, and some inspiration from the designs of the SHERPA and the OX Utility VTOL's from CupcakesLanders, I finally managed to crack the formula for getting something like this into orbit. I went back to a design that more closely resembles the Mk. III. Docking ports on the top, bottom, and both nose ends of the ship allow it to lift heavy payloads into space. There's nothing the "Bison" can't lift, and if one "Bison" can't do the job, it possesses the ability to "daisy chain" with another "Bison" unit in a line, to multiply it's power. This design is capable of an 80km orbit with the help of a Rockomax X200-16 drop tank with a basic jet engine underneath it. Although, it takes everything it has on board. Every ounce of liquid fuel and oxidizer, and every breath of RCS.

Of course, running out of fuel is no problem, as it possesses the ability to dock with an orbital fuel station to refuel.

Craft file will be available as soon as I get around to uploading it. Version shown does have Mechjeb equipped, but I will be offering a "stock" version as well. I also highly recommend the Mk. 2 Cockpit Internals Replacement Mod, available here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/mk2cockpitinternals/

Craft file with Mechjeb is available here: http://www./download/6xm81ez1mcxvtog/Bison_Mk_VI_Proto.craft

Edited August 30, 2013 by speedboiae86
Adding the craft file.

[Cupcake...]

Heavily influenced by the designs of CupcakesLanders, Spartan 300 Industries is proud to present, their first successful utility lifter class VTOL-SSTO, "The Bison" Mk. VI!!

After much trial & error, some research and development, and some inspiration from the designs of the SHERPA and the OX Utility VTOL's from CupcakesLanders, I finally managed to crack the formula for getting something like this into orbit. I went back to a design that more closely resembles the Mk. III. Docking ports on the top, bottom, and both nose ends of the ship allow it to lift heavy payloads into space. There's nothing the "Bison" can't lift, and if one "Bison" can't do the job, it possesses the ability to "daisy chain" with another "Bison" unit in a line, to multiply it's power. This design is capable of an 80km orbit with the help of a Rockomax X200-16 drop tank with a basic jet engine underneath it. Although, it takes everything it has on board. Every ounce of liquid fuel and oxidizer, and every breath of RCS.

Of course, running out of fuel is no problem, as it possesses the ability to dock with an orbital fuel station to refuel.

Craft file will be available as soon as I get around to uploading it. Version shown does have Mechjeb equipped, but I will be offering a "stock" version as well. I also highly recommend the Mk. 2 Cockpit Internals Replacement Mod, available here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/mk2cockpitinternals/

Great job, I've always sidestepped the problem of getting my utility drop ships into orbit but you've attacked the problem head on and succeeded in style, well done!

Cupcake...