Is a mach 10 aircraft possible with stock parts?

[kerbonaut101]

I am looking to build a plane that can go mach 10 (3,415m/s) for at least 30 seconds. Is this possible with stock parts? I'd appreciate any tips

[TechnicalK3rbal]

It's possible, but im pretty sure that at over Mach 10 stuff starts spontaneously disassembling....

[maccollo]

Turbo jets loose all thrust at 2400 m/s.

If you go high enough you can probably do it with rockets for a short bit before you fly all the way out to the mun.

More likely you will reach 3400 m/s at the edge of the atmosphere, and then you'll be escaping Kirbin unless you brake.

Edited October 30, 2013 by maccollo

[-ty-]

It's already been done. Search it on youtube. The guy basically had to point down just to stop himself from flinging himself away from kerbin

[Fooblack]

My favorite light hypersonic plane(stock except for the landing gear) with a single 225KN jet and 10 intakes can easily get over 2200 m/s, or about mach 6.5, at about 38KM before starting to run out of air. At this point, you hit two problems:

First, the engines themselves. The higher you go, the less their maximum thrust. The higher you go, the more you have to choke them back to keep them from flaming out. More intakes help, but only to a point- there is an upper limit in the .cfg file; Whether you have one of them or a thousand of them, they will be unable to push *any* ship more than iirc 2500 m/s or so.

Second, because Kerbin is so much smaller than Earth, even under mach 7, your craft is ballistic- if you do not constantly adjust your vector, you will sail right out of the atmosphere in a parabola.

So, without modifying some .cfg files(meaning not fully stock) or using rockets(meaning not fully an aircraft,) my designs couldn't do it, and even if they could, you would have to make a concerted effort to keep it from becoming a missile. Someone else has probably done it though, check youtube.

[Spica]

It's already been done. Search it on youtube. The guy basically had to point down just to stop himself from flinging himself away from kerbin

That is NOT possible in stock ksp, look at the CFG of the turbojet. He edited it to go faster.

Spica

[Kasuha]

Theoretically possible only if you mount some boosters on the plane and use them to reach higher speed. Another option would be to make it a spaceplane and airbrake when returning from interplanetary transfer, in that case you can exceed mach 10 easily for quite a while.

Edited October 30, 2013 by Kasuha

[numerobis]

As mentioned above, jets have zero thrust above 2400 m/s; on the Machingbird challenge, people get up to about 2340 m/s. These are surface speeds; if you fly eastward, orbit speed is 175 m/s higher. You're still quite a ways below your goal.

I did a trick of closing some intakes on lift-off and disabling their IntakeAir tanks, flying fast to get a high apoapsis, say 300km, then using that stored air at apoapsis to leave my periapsis at 40 km but have as high a speed as possible. I got a bit over 2500 m/s surface speed at periapsis. That's still just 2700 m/s orbit speed -- and that wasn't stock: I created a part with 1000x the mass and resource amount of the ram intake. You could do it stock, but it would be terribly tedious; you'd have to click a few thousand times.

[numerobis]

Actually, I'm curious what the optimal way is to fly long-distance off just jets, using IntakeAir tanks. Since thrust depends on speed, you'd want to do all your burns as close to 1 km/s surface speed as possible. That upends a lot of things we know about how to do the most efficient orbital maneuvers.

[Pds314]

Yes! If you exploit infiniglide, you can easily get a manned ship that fast, I got one to mach 12.5. I got an unmanned ship to mach 18 (6162 m/s)

[Deathsoul097]

Yeah. Infinigliding can send you interstellar.

[Gman_builder]

It is impossible to make a completely stock aircraft reach Mach 10. However I reached Mach 5.815 in my "Aurora" plane. Aircraft can go faster in a unsustainable attitude or phugoid motion.

[fourfa]

14 minutes ago, Gman_builder said:

It is impossible to make a completely stock aircraft reach Mach 10. However I reached Mach 5.815 in my "Aurora" plane. Aircraft can go faster in a unsustainable attitude or phugoid motion.

Let's see it?

[Gman_builder]

6 hours ago, fourfa said:

Let's see it?

[Stoney3K]

Wow. Great way to necro a thread that is at least 3 years old.

[swjr-swis]

 

@Gman_builder Using FAR when the question is about stock parts... somewhat of a workaround there.

 

1 hour ago, Stoney3K said:

Great way to necro a thread that is at least 3 years old.

In Gman's defense: this forum keeps stubbornly presenting years-old threads as if something 'recent' just happened in them by marking them bold in the index. Not sure what the purpose is of marking dead threads in bold even after I've marked an entire forum as read.

[Gman_builder]

9 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

 

@Gman_builder Using FAR when the question is about stock parts... somewhat of a workaround there.

 

In Gman's defense: this forum keeps stubbornly presenting years-old threads as if something 'recent' just happened in them by marking them bold in the index. Not sure what the purpose is of marking dead threads in bold even after I've marked an entire forum as read.

Ya I was just going through the forum and this was near the top so I clicked on it and decided to add some input. Given the same question is still applicable to 1.1. It's not really dead. But about FAR, I use it because it can give me different speed readout, like mp/h or Mach. Also, it replaces the stock part based drag model with a dynamic one. Meaning triangular shaped aircraft in FAR will have inherently lower drag than the same craft in stock aero. Making it achieve higher speed. I don't count this as cheating because it actually makes the game HARDER in some aspects and makes it more realistic. So a airplane of that design would theoretically work in real life. That's why it is based after the "Aurora."