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SSTOs! Post your pictures here~


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I haven't been playing much the past year or so, but I picked the game up again recently and built some pretty impressive spaceplanes. I came up with (probably not the first to do so) a way to shield all my engines in a fairing while still having the bottom of the fairing open and the result has been noticeably higher performance, it reminds me of the ridiculous SSTOs that were possible in the old aero model. These planes are just the tip of the iceberg I think. I could do a lot more with this than just hiding rapiers inside. Hopefully I formatted this post right. Let me know what you think.

Spoiler

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SP-9 Poleaxe An interplanetary cargo spaceplane that comes with a refueling truck. Infinite range, you know the drill. Never thought I'd see one this small though, much less be the one to build it.

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SP-8x Naginata A crew transfer SSTO with over 3000m/s on orbit. Maybe more if you're a less lazy pilot than me. I think with some lucky Tylo encounters it could make a Laythe return journey without refueling.0bi7FOR.png

SP-38 Starwhale Still in development. Hauls a full cargo bay of ore into orbit with enough dV to escape Kerbin. I have no idea how far it will take an actual payload, especially once I'm done tweaking it. for reference the SP-9 only gets about 700m/s with its bay full of ore, and that's half as much ore.

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On 8/29/2020 at 7:48 AM, purpleivan said:

Until fairly recently, in my contracts free career game I played as a challenge entry, I'd rarely used SSTO's. Until then I'd had a handful of spaceplanes, that could just about make orbit, carrying minimal payloads.

My first working spaceplane

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... and then my second, overshooting the KSC quite a bit on re-entry.

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Those were a couple of years or so ago, but these below were made in the last year.

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More recently reusability became a necessaity for my entry to the The No Contract Career Challenge, which had the goal of unlocking the tech tree and and fully upgrading all buildings, without using contracts in a career game.

That meant getting into space cheaply as soon as possibly, so I came up with the "Reuso" series of SSTO vertical launchers.

Reuso 1 - Good for putting 5 tons into an 80km orbit, before safely returning to the launch site (or close to it anyway).

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Reuso 2 - This provided launches for kerballed missions to Kerbin's moons. Allowing Val to enjoy the delights of "walking" on Minmus.

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Reuso 3 - with a much improved lifting capability (about 30 tons to orbit), it provided cheap interplanetary travel for the first time, including a way for one plucky kerbal to make it to Jool and back.

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Reuso 4 - the big workhorse of the latter stages of my challenge entry, with it's capability of putting 50 tons into a 90km orbit. This lofted landers for Dres, Eeloo, Gilly, Laythe, Tylo, Val, Bop and Pol.

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It even sent this SSTO spaceplane to Laythe.

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Edited September 7, 2020 by purpleivan

I've noticed that you, and many other people, have a mod which seems to improve the lighting of parts. I can't find the name (if it is even a mod). Could you tell me what it is?

I'm impressed by your SSTOs by the way.

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5 hours ago, LHACK4142 said:

I've noticed that you, and many other people, have a mod which seems to improve the lighting of parts. I can't find the name (if it is even a mod). Could you tell me what it is?

I'm impressed by your SSTOs by the way.

The mod I use is KS3P  which unfortunately is no longer maintained (as far as I can tell) by the creator of it. However it works fine for me in version 1.11.2.

There is another similar post processing effects mode called TUFX but when I tried it out a year or so ago, I didn't get quite the visuals I likes, so kept with KS3P. That does mean however that I'm using a version of that mod which a year old.

KS3P does take a bit of work to setup, unless you like the default settings, in which case it's simple.

The most recent version was posted by c1usta can be found here.

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15 hours ago, purpleivan said:

The mod I use is KS3P  which unfortunately is no longer maintained (as far as I can tell) by the creator of it. However it works fine for me in version 1.11.2.

There is another similar post processing effects mode called TUFX but when I tried it out a year or so ago, I didn't get quite the visuals I likes, so kept with KS3P. That does mean however that I'm using a version of that mod which a year old.

KS3P does take a bit of work to setup, unless you like the default settings, in which case it's simple.

The most recent version was posted by c1usta can be found here.

Thanks!

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/2/2013 at 9:58 PM, ZigZagJoe said:

Latest and most favorite SSTO: Tubby X Cargo Spaceplane - Stock, 86 parts, 28 tons without payload, lifts up to 9 tons of cargo unaided with dV to spare for docking. Payload capacity dimensions roughly that of an orange tank.

Not much of a looker, but very useful. Mechjeb is optional but useful solely for the flameout prevention feature - it can be sort of really hairy managing the zoom climb unaided. Doable, but hard, especially with cargos near payload max.

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Freshly deployed station core.

More pictures: http://imgur.com/a/cVKUh

Craft files (6): http://ridetheclown.com/downloads/TubbyX.zip

First spaceplane: Stubby X. Stock, 48 parts. VTOL capability - hence the two tiny rockets up front. It's been superseded as a SSTO, but retains a place in my heart. Originally based on a little VTOL atmospheric runabout design, just banged on two lv909 pods + extra tank and called it good.

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Stublonger VI: first nuclear spaceplane. Stock, 50 parts.

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Little Pig II: minimalistic spaceplane. 37 parts. Non-nuclear - two LV909s.

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What is the mod you are you using? I am a newbie so I am trying to find some good mods.

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This is a bit off topic, but it looks like you're mostly here to find mods. For starters look at spacedock.info, it's a community run site that has pretty much all the mods and you can browse through them there. There's a modding subforum here where the more popular and up-to-date mods tend to stay on the first few pages. I think they each have a stickied topic for helping you to find stuff too. We also have CKAN, which is basically a package manager for KSP mods. It makes trying stuff out incredibly easy. If you want a specific recommendation, it's hard to go wrong with Restock.

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10 hours ago, KSP King said:

Hm... Thanks. I am still interested if any of you have some good mods or textures for me to try.

I can't remember many part mods, but if you want some added realism, you could try Ferram Aerospace Research (FAR). It makes the aerodynamics much more realistic and adds some extra difficulty.

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  • 3 weeks later...

JIZXgZs.jpg

A little plane I made called Phoenix. It may not look like much, but it can get 5 Kerbals into Kerbin orbit and back all on its own! In this picture it had descended from a high orbit of Laythe, where I currently have a large space station.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've been playing a lot with drag optimizations.  I found you can shield whole RAPIER engine nacelles from drag with a fairing, hide the ugly fairing bases inside nesting fairings, hide a rear vacuum engine from drag, hide attitude control thrusters from drag, hide landing gear from drag...

The most interesting to me was making an ultra-high temperature SSTO nose, from a heat shield and service bay.  Heat shields with open attach nodes have *absurd* drag, to help capsules reenter.  Make sure something is attached to the front node, then hide that thing in the service bay, and it becomes practically frictionless.  Nose temp has always been my limiting factor for air-breathing SSTO speed - this has 3300K front-most tolerance on the heatshield, then 2900K on the service bay, then 2700K on the cockpit.  This is temp-limited by the wings and V-tail at 2400K, not much more you can do about that...!  Max airbreathing speed 1650+m/s with its max 45T/4U payload.  It's by far the fastest cargo SSTO I've ever made, which means the rest of the burn to orbit can be done with significantly less propellant.

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https://kerbalx.com/fourfa/Sundiver-SSTO

Edited by fourfa
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  • 2 weeks later...
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For  putting a  llittle over 70T into orbit.

I've been trying to build one like this for a long, long time.

Flown carefully, it will make orbit -just.  It's remarkably stable on the way down but you need to use the RCS during re-entry to get the nose up enough to bleed off speed.

The RCS is also used to slide the whole craft up off the cargo once it's released.

It even has parachutes for braking purposes. 

 

https://kerbalx.com/Fellow314/Cargo-3

 

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Edited by Fellow314
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Does stealing a design off KerbalX and making some minor changes count?

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A few choice part swaps (mostly adding that NERV instead of a central Panther jet) turned the Kronus low-tech 20 ton SSTO into a slightly less low-tech 30 ton SSTO, which has become my workhorse orbital launch system.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I don't know if modded is out of the question, but here's one that I made. Basically a multi purpose heavy SSTO, with nuclear engines capable of providing thrust in any atmosphere, and a large LH2 capacity making round trip travel possible from any celestial body. 

I call it the broadsword. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello everyone!
Do you classify your SSTOs? Because I surely do. It is just easier to orientate in the "SPH" folder with it - and it makes craft's name a little bit cooler. The problem is just that other people dont usually understand the weird symbols I put in front of my crafts' names, and I believe that I'm not the only one with such issue.

So I've been thinking about creating a universal classification system for plane SSTOs lately: imo it would make describing what you want, what you made or what are you trying to make much easier for community of KSP1 and, probably, KSP2 later. So far I came up with this - what are your thoughts and ideas?
UWkVnO9gaUY.jpg?size=2493x989&quality=96&sign=72d5515fc20192cc71da0f9b448989c7&type=album

 

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1 hour ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Looks interesting, but brings this to mind:

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Well... I just hope that if this will become a community-wide thing, most people will eventually find some compromise of indices, classes and acronyms that everyone would agree to use. Maybe not though. Why dont we try? :)

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59 minutes ago, vanlaukaus said:

Well... I just hope that if this will become a community-wide thing, most people will eventually find some compromise of indices, classes and acronyms that everyone would agree to use. Maybe not though. Why dont we try? :)

Well, because it's been suggested many times before.  Good luck, though.

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On 10/17/2021 at 9:29 PM, Andrew2070 said:

I don't know if modded is out of the question, but here's one that I made. Basically a multi purpose heavy SSTO, with nuclear engines capable of providing thrust in any atmosphere, and a large LH2 capacity making round trip travel possible from any celestial body. 

I call it the broadsword. 

Nice plane, but would be helpful to list the mods that are you used

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49 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Nice plane, but would be helpful to list the mods that are you used

Thank you,

For some reason I can't find the CKAN script (haven't updated mods in months), but a rough idea of the mods used in this space plane:

OPT, MK4 space plane, Near Future (all of their mods), and BDArmory. The first 3 account for about ~95% of the spaceplane, fuselage/body from OPT/MK4 and engines from Near Future. I'll pull up the entire list and edit it in at some point.

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19 minutes ago, Andrew2070 said:

Thank you,

For some reason I can't find the CKAN script (haven't updated mods in months), but a rough idea of the mods used in this space plane:

OPT, MK4 space plane, Near Future (all of their mods), and BDArmory. The first 3 account for about ~95% of the spaceplane, fuselage/body from OPT/MK4 and engines from Near Future. I'll pull up the entire list and edit it in at some point.

If you uploaded the plane to KerbalX, even if you don't save it, it will give you a list of the mods that it detects in the plane

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