Spearhead Mini SSTO

[Broco]

I always wanted to make a very small but still good looking SSTO with docking and decent manouvering capabilities...

Finally it's done, thanks to Rapier engine :-P

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Craft-File if you want to test it:

Spearhead.craft

Part-count: 42 parts.

Instructions:

Action-keys: 2 to toggle engine, 3 to toggle intakes (on my normal planes 2 is for the air-breathing engines and 1 is for rocket-engines, so I didn't want to mess it up for me).

- activate SAS (T), activate engines (2) and throttle up completely, gain some speed (~50m/s) and pull up

- gears up (G)

- fly upwards at an 45° angle (upwards, not sideways) as soon as you lift off (the prograde marker is the indicator here, not where your nose is pointing), keep it that way until you reach ~20.000 m

- flatten your angle to about 5°-10°

- gain speed and altitude

- you should be at about 1500 m/s and above 30.000 m when your air intakes cannot provide enough air for the RAPIER anymore so you may have to adjust your angle to 0° sometime

- wait for rocket engine to fire and close intakes (3)

- lift up slightly again to gain some more altitude

- once you are able to reach an apoapsis above 70.000 m cut the engines (X), though you can reach an apoapsis at above 300.000 meters, too

- put up a manouver node to cirularize your orbit

- Voilá you've successfully orbited

- to go back, burn retrograde until your periapsis is below 40.000 m

- activated your air-intakes again (3)

- when landing, don't forget the gears (G)

Edited February 25, 2014 by Broco

[FlandersNed]

How much Delta-V does this thing have once it is in orbit?

[Broco]

Uhm, I don't know since I don't use any mods and I'm pretty bad at math.

You got enought to deorbit (guess here only the oxidizer counts) and the full load of RCS-fuel, which is enough to dock to anything in Kerbin orbit.

In my testflight where I took the pictures I had 85 units (out of 440) of oxidizer left and the whole 47,5 RCS-fuel.

And once you deorbited there was still plenty of liquid fuel to reach the spaceport even if you messed up your trajectory.

Edited February 25, 2014 by Broco