Evolution of the Tunguska Advanced Prototype Auxilary Transport SSTO

[Killenger]

My greatest work is finally nearing completion, I'm taking a break from testing her to share.

It weighs almost 140 tons loaded/fueled and I have been testing it transporting a 18 ton rockomax fuel tank shown on its large docking port below.

This build has been very troublesome as it is the largest SSTO I have yet to make and its center of mass is so far towards the back. I started working on it last Sunday I believe and have worked on it every day since.

She currently only climbs to about 22 km before wipe-out, working on getting it to 25-26ish before I consider it final.

So you may be asking yourself, WHY?!?!?!? After all, its massive, clunky, not fun to work with, and has resulted in enough fatalities to justify unmaned testing (application denied)

Well it all started with a bit of excessive atmospheric thrust -

It worked.... reasonably well - it was one of my first attempts and I had no idea that I already had more turbofans than I needed.

So I continued on in this fashion -

That worked even better, I pressed on.

This is where I hit a breaking point, excessive thrust led to excessive mass/drag and eventually, excessive fail. Sure was fast on Kerbin though.

I hit the thrust wall like a thousand part craft smacking into Eves atmosphere and if I wanted to get any real Kerbal space science done I would need a more economical craft. The only thing this was good for was going way way too fast to land, exiting Kerbins atmosphere way way to hot, and being way way to heavy to get more than a Kerbal into orbit.

And so it was born Eureka!.... a breakthrough! It showed more promise than anything beforehand, not a bad looker either, it lacked the excessive weight of its predecessors, but still something was missing...

It had become obvious, I had to go fully nuclear. and so the success of the Eureka was short lived, and a new race to a fully nuclear SSTO had began.

Many proof of concept tests were performed to find things like efficient TWR's, etc...

and I decided that a fully nuclear SSTO would not be all, she had to be a monument. Why have spent all this time making something if it was not going to be magnificent!

After my testing I discovered that a final TWR of between 0.5-0.6 was the minimum to get yourself into orbit during a vertical burn above 20 km.

Early Tunguska, it took hours to get the wings large enough to get it off the ground -

I'll update this with the final build and the docking array that will be designed for it. It will dock from the rear and the array/ship will look similar to a clothespin hanging on a clothesline

UPDATE:

Success! Almost 27km before killing turbofans and I'm in orbit. (It got a bit airhoggy, I hid the massive number of intakes)

Edited June 15, 2013 by Killenger