Wings on a lander?

[gutza1]

I was thinking about doing an Eve return mission when the thought struck me. "if Eve's atmosphere is an obstacle, why can't it be a bonus as well?" Basically, my idea is to put wings on my lander and using Eve's 5 bar atmosphere to significantly decrease both the dV required and the Jebiness:( * as well. If I will use mods, I might consider putting Hooligan Labs's balloons onto my lander as well.

Tl;dr: Are wings on an Eve lander a good idea?

*Poor Jeb, he really wanted something crazy.

Edited November 29, 2013 by gutza1
Cleaned up the OP a bit.

[RocketPilot573]

Last I checked, due to the lack of functioning jet engines on Eve, aircraft are actually far worse then plain old rockets. Though if you do want to use mods, hooligan lab balloon would indeed be a very good idea, but a little cheaty in my opinion.

[r4pt0r]

are you then landing horizontally like an airplane? or are the wings to help you take off?

>wings are a great idea. i love using them when i can

[gutza1]

are you then landing horizontally like an airplane? or are the wings to help you take off?

>wings are a great idea. i love using them when i can

The wings are to help me take off. (I'm still a newb at interplanetary transfers, so the lander won't land like an airplane. I don't want to have to carry landing gear to the purple planet:D.)

[zxczxczbfg]

I think horizontal wings would be a problem when nearing the surface (i.e. landing sideways accidentally), but using the standard rocket fins (the pivoting ones) might work: Use the roll keys to tilt the fins, increasing drag, and on the way up just keep the fins vertical for minimum drag.

[gutza1]

BTW, I'm launching a (sandbox) probe to Eve at this moment. Sadly, I can't see jack on the Purple Planet's surface with the Clouds and City Lights mod. My ship is also having teething troubles (AKA Giant-KW-Rocketry-Boosters-Smashing-My-Main-Engine-When-They-Seperate-Troubles:D), and I keep forgetting to quicksave after warping to the transfer window (if it wasn't for Kerbal Alarm Clock's transfer window timer, I would have given up by now.) However I use Mechjeb to do the tedious ascent to orbit so I can watch Yogscast videos and post on the Forums.

[I_Killed_Jeb]

i have often wondered if a rocket powered spaceplane would require less dv to achieve orbit on eve than a vertical lifter

[Vanamonde]

Wings will slow your Eve descent and give you a degree of control over where you land, but on ascent, the atmosphere is so thick that drag is a bigger detriment than lift is a benefit. Especially because jets do not work on Eve. You're better of blasting straight up out of that tar-like atmosphere.

[Skyler4856]

Do you have kethane installed? If so land an SSTO type craft using the kethane jets.

[numerobis]

i have often wondered if a rocket powered spaceplane would require less dv to achieve orbit on eve than a vertical lifter

It wouldn't (short of infiniglide bug usage). It might be able to use less thrust, which means you can fly with fewer engines, but I haven't seen a demonstration of this being useful. nhnifong in another thread was just showing off an ion-powered first stage, using wings, which would hopefully lift a rocket up to 10km or more, greatly reducing the cost to reach orbit.

Using jets to leave Kerbin uses a lot more dV than rockets, but jets' effective Isp (6,000s on liftoff, around 20,000s at the peak, about 9,000s when you approach orbital velocities) more than makes up for it.

Edited November 30, 2013 by numerobis

[snowLimit]

I could see using them to help with you decent. You would get some better control and maybe even get enough lift to glide yourself to some land. Another place this could help would be Laythe, since there's so little land to aim for and if you haven't gotten down how to come down to a point you want quite yet then some type of wings could really pay off.

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

Using jets to leave Kerbin uses a lot more dV than rockets, but jets' effective Isp (6,000s on liftoff, around 20,000s at the peak, about 9,000s when you approach orbital velocities) more than makes up for it.

Uhhh no, at 1atm jet engines have an ISP of 1200, at 10km they are around 2000 and above that they slowly drop down to 700

[Ralathon]

Uhhh no, at 1atm jet engines have an ISP of 1200, at 10km they are around 2000 and above that they slowly drop down to 700

Yea, but they burn 14 parts air (which is free) to 1 part liquid fuel. So they are vastly more efficient in terms of actually used fuel.

[numerobis]

On the surface, Isp is 800. But you only get half thrust, so really it's 400. But 15:16th of the propellant is air, so in terms of stuff you're carrying it's 6000. Similar calculations for peak thrust (1km/s, typically when Isp is around 1400 on my planes) and near-orbit (2km/s is half thrust, 1200 Isp) get you the numbers I quoted.

Point is, the savings due to a plane on Kerbin are due to the extremely high efficiency of the engine, not the wings. On Eve, you can't use that engine, so you don't win.

There are some efficient engines modded out there; you could use a propeller, for example, powered by solar panels, to get you to a high elevation, then ditch the plane and launch its attached rocket.

[magnemoe]

On the surface, Isp is 800. But you only get half thrust, so really it's 400. But 15:16th of the propellant is air, so in terms of stuff you're carrying it's 6000. Similar calculations for peak thrust (1km/s, typically when Isp is around 1400 on my planes) and near-orbit (2km/s is half thrust, 1200 Isp) get you the numbers I quoted.

Point is, the savings due to a plane on Kerbin are due to the extremely high efficiency of the engine, not the wings. On Eve, you can't use that engine, so you don't win.

There are some efficient engines modded out there; you could use a propeller, for example, powered by solar panels, to get you to a high elevation, then ditch the plane and launch its attached rocket.

Yes, benefits of wings is that you can keep TWR below 1, no problem making smaller rockets with an jet based first stage, does not scale up as you would need a lot of engines and intakes.

And yes firespitter electrical propellers would be very useful at Eve. First you could select your landing site even move around easily like going from sea level to an 6km mountain to recharge before going to orbit.

Main issue is that you would still need an decent rocket as upper stage estimate 4-5 km/s.

Edited November 30, 2013 by magnemoe

[panzerknoef]

Actually if you use enough fins, you could make and infiniglider that could escape out of eve again without using any fuel, seems fair to me!