Spaceplanes only + Stock engines only + F.A.R.

[Virindi]

Spaceplanes in KSP are fun. Farram Aerospace makes them harder, except that people always seem to use the SABRE engines when building spaceplanes with mods. I have personally found that building planes without SABREs but with FAR is quite a difficult (and fun) challenge. It may sound easy, but launching (and returning!) cargo in this manner is tricky. Rather than just slapping some engines on whatever (or spamming a ton of wings and intakes in stock KSP), you have to carefully balance lift, jet thrust, rocket thrust, and pitch surfaces. So I decided to create a game with the following rules:

-Farram Aerospace plugin installed.

-Spaceplanes only. No staging of expended parts. Everything must be completely reusable: all parts that go up, must come back down for a nice landing. Spaceplanes can separate into multiple smaller spaceplanes as long as they all make it home and land aircraft-style on Kerbin.

-No parachutes for descent. It would be fine to use them to slow down once you have landed though.

-Only stock engines and intakes.

-No unrealistically placed intakes. No piles of intakes clipped inside each other, intakes facing backwards, or intakes inside an enclosed craft.

-I'm using the B9 fuselage parts and wings, anything other than engines and intakes are fine. Or airships. Airships would ruin it.

-If you are doing interplanetary missions, kethane might make it more fun. Or, you can just 'stage' by having a series of different sized planes stacked on top of each other, as long as each one can safely return home. Or, you could send a bunch of missions to refuel one large spaceplane.

To get this started, Thompdan Kerman lands and returns from the Mun aboard the Mosquito spaceplane lander:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited November 7, 2013 by Virindi

[Hodo]

I have one of those...

I will post better pictures of it when I load up the game.

[Virindi]

That looks a lot like my first lifter. I kept having problems with pwings not making enough lift when I made them that big though. They seem to be inefficient in a delta configuration?

[Hodo]

That looks a lot like my first lifter. I kept having problems with pwings not making enough lift when I made them that big though. They seem to be inefficient in a delta configuration?

They took a bit of fiddling with to get to work right, but once I did they were fine. They provide a decent amount of lift, if not to much in some cases. I have to be careful on the designs not to make the body of the craft to heavy when using Pwing. I also use "hidden" struts to make sure they stay flat, which a lot of people neglect to do with pwings.

That design is one of my less efficient designs. I have some of my older SP lines that were pretty good and didn't use SABREs. And one of my SVO designs doesn't use SABREs, but uses the B9 VS VTOL rocket engines. Which are quite honestly underwhelming when compared to other rockets.

I had a great VSO design that had very small wings and used the VS+VA VTOL engines and the stock nuke engines, it was great. But lost it when I had a plugin bug that caused a me to have to reload the game and lose quite a few crafts.

[Virindi]

I had a great VSO design that had very small wings and used the VS+VA VTOL engines and the stock nuke engines, it was great. But lost it when I had a plugin bug that caused a me to have to reload the game and lose quite a few crafts.

I honestly have trouble building large lifters using my rules without LVNs to do the 28km to orbit push. I did make one design that used aerospikes, but maneuvering once in orbit was pretty limited. It barely had enough delta-v to rendezvous with a station or other plane while carrying any cargo. And that's not with wasteful orbital maneuvering; if I were to use mechjeb, it would run out of fuel halfway to the target.

By the way, how do you find the balance of the B9 intakes? I started off using some of the large ones, and they seemed pretty ineffective. Even if I put a bunch of them on and shut down jets as I got higher, I didn't get much about 26km. Using a 4 or 5 to 1 intake to jet ratio the stock ram intakes can easily get me above 28km, and the difference in top speed between those two altitudes is quite significant.

[Hodo]

I honestly have trouble building large lifters using my rules without LVNs to do the 28km to orbit push. I did make one design that used aerospikes, but maneuvering once in orbit was pretty limited. It barely had enough delta-v to rendezvous with a station or other plane while carrying any cargo. And that's not with wasteful orbital maneuvering; if I were to use mechjeb, it would run out of fuel halfway to the target.

By the way, how do you find the balance of the B9 intakes? I started off using some of the large ones, and they seemed pretty ineffective. Even if I put a bunch of them on and shut down jets as I got higher, I didn't get much about 26km. Using a 4 or 5 to 1 intake to jet ratio the stock ram intakes can easily get me above 28km, and the difference in top speed between those two altitudes is quite significant.

Most of my designs now rely on speed and brute force to get to orbit. I use the turbojets from the stock KSP for most of my air breathing jet engine use, they provide the most power the longest before I am going to fast for them to be useful. That is when I am not using a SABRE. While I like SABRE engines, they do weigh quite a bit and are not the most efficient engine choice out there. And I rarely use Aerospikes for anything anymore, unless I am using on the bottom of something for a VTOL engine.

Most of my designs have between 3:1 and 4:1 intake to jet engine ratio. Rarely do I go higher than that. And I can get them to 30km sometime 32-33km before I need to switch over to rockets. My goal is to hit Mach 5+ before I hit 30km, with the supersonic large intake or the divertless intakes I can achieve that goal without spamming intakes all over my craft or clipping them. One of my most fun designs is an accident. It is the SVO-11 and SVO-12. They have a 2:1 intake to engine ratio and they MORE than meet the goals I set for my SSTO space planes and they are also VTOLs which make them so much more fun.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

And here is those better pictures of the SP-314

Javascript is disabled. View full album