SSTO is now much, much easier

[EndOfTheEarth]

Ingredients:

1 Jumbo parachute

1 3-man capsule

1 Rockomax decoupler

1 Large ASAS

1 Kerbodyne ADTP-2-3

1 Kerbodyne S3-14400 tank

1 KR-2L Engine

I just got into an 80km/73km orbit, without decoupling anything, with fuel to spare, on my first attempt, with seven parts.

In the last version, trying to build a SSTO with stock parts involved a lot of trial and error for me. I am not a SSTO expert by any means; usually I avoid them because I prefer seat-of-my-pants-ing it to doing the math work. Once I saw the update, I was curious about the power of the KR-2L vs the 14400 tank, so I slapped this thing together and this happened.

Does the strength of the new parts negate the challenge of building a vanilla SSTO rocket? I'm inclined to think so, but I'm curious to hear other opinions.

[cantab]

Tbh a SSTO rocket wasn't that difficult before. If you have a light payload such as just a pod, a sensible engine, and enough fuel that it *barely* lifts off, and you fly a good ascent path, you'll usually make orbit. (EDIT: Unless you lose control or disintegrate, mind you.)

If you want to get a decent size-ship up there, though, then having just one rocket stage on your launcher will really balloon its mass.

Edited April 2, 2014 by cantab

[Jouni]

It was possible to build SSTO rockets with 10% payload fraction using the 48-7S engine in 0.23. All new liquid fuel engines in 0.23.5 have better TWR and similar or better ISP than the 48-7S, making them useful in building SSTO rockets with reasonable payloads.

[NERVAfan]

You could do SSTOs pretty easily with an aerospike too. I had like a 4 part SSTO consisting of a Stayputnik + two 1.25m tanks + an aerospike (of course, it ran out of power quickly after getting to orbit, but that wasn't the point).

EDIT: well, 6 parts with the launch clamps, but...

[Jouni]

With the new engines, we can build single-stage-to-Minmus rockets.