How do you fly into orbit (and back)?

[randomness5555]

Put simply, I have been having spaceplane troubles. Building them-fine, I can build some pretty good jets. My problem comes with orbital spaceplanes-ssto or msto, either way, my problem is in flying them into orbit. How do you do that? If I have a fully rapier powered jet I tend to run out of fuel before orbit, and also, what type of flight path do I take? Just point up at about 45% and burn for a while? I know people have probably asked this before, but I could do with some help. Also, what do you do for re-entry? Testing using hyper-edit to get one of the jets into orbit ended in a horrible series of flips followed by even worse explosions.

So to sumerise-building one that could reach orbit, no problem. Getting them there and back-help me please.

(Oh geez-I posted this in the wrong place! Moderaters, could you move this to gameplay questions please? Thanks!)

Edited May 24, 2014 by randomness5555
accidentally posted in the wrong place

[Scarecrow88]

A lot of people will design a SSTO with two engine types - jet for atmospheric flight and rocket for non-atmospheric. The advantage of doing it this way is that the jet engines use way less fuel than the rocket engines. Flight profile for a SSTO designed this way would typically mean flying at about 45 degrees to 10,000m or so, and then reducing the climb angle to around 20 degrees or maybe a bit less. The reason for this is to build up speed while still on air breathing jet engines. Climbing gently whilst picking up speed like this will eventually put you at a point when the air becomes so thin that you have to swap to rocket engines, but you are going quite quick that you only need the rocket engines for a relatively short time for the last spurt to actually put you in orbit.

[Starwhip]

One thing that is desperately important is that your wings generate enough lift to keep your prograde marker where you're pointing. If you've done that, you're good to continue. Otherwise, there are three options:

1 - larger/more wings

2 - MOAR THRUST!

3 - less weight. Basically the same as 2.

Once that's done, here's my flight path:

45 degrees to about 15,000 meters

Pitch over to 35 degrees.

35 degrees to 17,000 meters

Pitch over to 25 degrees.

25 degrees to 20,000 meters

Pitch over to between 5 and 10 degrees. The closer you can get to 10 m/s vertical speed, as displayed by the little dial by the altimeter, the better.

Continue at 10 m/s vertical speed until jets conk out. (You can prolong the amount of time the jets stay operational by keeping their thrusts aligned. Alt-click on both of them (if you have 2, otherwise, select all of them that have some kind of symmetry). Watch the thrust readout; when one begins to drop, slide the other's thrust limiter down a bit to even them out. Continue this until you are no longer accelerating.)

I am generally at around 35,000 meters to 42-ish thousand meters by this time. My apoapsis is almost out of the atmosphere: I just give a little kick with the rockets to push that just a little farther.

At apoapsis, circularize with rockets.

Reentry requires that your jet/spaceplane/rocket thingymabob have a center of lift behind its center of mass; otherwise you will spin out of control. In the SPH/VAB, right-click on your fuel tanks and drain them. If, when they are all empty, the CoM is still in front of the CoL, you're good to go.

I hope I've helped you a little. Here's one of my SSTO's:

It's landed at the archipelago crater, in Kerbin's northern hemisphere. It got to space, flew around a bit, then came back down there.

[randomness5555]

Ok, thanks guys. Basically the idea is-Reach about 15000 meters, gradually level out while building up speed and then manouver as normal in space on whichever engines are chosen to run on in space. Also have lots of lift, and have it behing the COM. No time to test this tonight, but thanks for the tips, I'll probably post some pics tommorow to show how the efforts panned out.