Attaching jet engines onto small payloads!

[MrZayas1]

I just wanted to know, I do realize that this may not be important with the fact that there is no money or resource gathering in kerbal space program, but how many, or if any of you, use the turbojet engines in order to lift yourself out of the thicker parts of the atmosphere, I recently used this in one of my small payloads to fly a kerbol exploration probe out into space.

http://i.imgur.com/qdqyHob.png' alt='qdqyHob.png'>

It worked pretty well and used hardly any fuel, even though they have almost as much thrust as the LV-T45 engine, and you can use them up to around 27-35km in the atmosphere!

Edited June 2, 2014 by MrZayas1

[Pursuedtank]

I can't see your image, however a lot of people,myself included, have used jet engines to make vertically launched SSTO's. It is a fairly common thing to do.

[Franklin]

It's been talked to death, but without budgets and present balancing the jet engines are far too desirable as a first-stage lifter. If my payload isn't too large, I'll strap a dozen tiny FL-Ts with some jets beneath em and just slowly lift myself out of the soup like a launch pad with an elevator. It's far too easy.

If you thought your asparagus lifter was efficient before, try not starting your ascent until 15,000m.

[katateochi]

OP if you click on your image in imgur it will give you the correct tags to just paste in here, choose either BBCode or Linked BBCode and select the image size below that and it does the rest for you.

But yeah, you're basically talking about something similar to an SSTO, although it looks like you drop your jet engines so that's not an SSTO, but still a valid approach.

With a small payload you can get yourself into a pretty wide sub orbital trajectory on jet engines if you gain enough horizontal speed while in the atmo. Then you only need a very small amount of rocket power to complete the orbit. But if you have a large payload then the SSTO approach becomes much much harder to pull off and for really big payloads its almost impossibly impractical.

[ammonia_ocean]

I used to do this, but for some reason using multiple jets on a lifter started to give me massive lag. Has anyone else seen this?

[LaytheAerospace]

I could see this being fun to build as a curiosity, but that's it. If you're doing this to launch your payloads, why don't you just go ahead and use HyperEdit? I see little difference, except that getting there this way probably feels less like cheating (though both techniques do basically the same thing, making the launch trivial).

It's not like building a heavy lifter is hard, and you only have to do it once.

[LordFjord]

@LaytheAerospace:

So you say he's cheating just cause he is playing the game in a different way than you?

Its just as much a valid way to get things in orbit as with a huge badass lifter (which is now waaaay easier to build than before ).

Aint this diversity the beauty of this game? To not be forced into a single playstyle?

[peter.watson]

All my sstos' keep fliping when I land I can't land a craft with more than 15-20 parts

[Jarin]

@LaytheAerospace:

So you say he's cheating just cause he is playing the game in a different way than you?

Its just as much a valid way to get things in orbit as with a huge badass lifter (which is now waaaay easier to build than before ).

Aint this diversity the beauty of this game? To not be forced into a single playstyle?

Seconded. Balance is something that will happen much later in game dev, I suspect. As it stands, people can play how they want. Some people swear off using the ARM parts entirely for the same reasons. That doesn't mean that using them as they are in the game is somehow wrong or cheating; something to be looked down on for others.

[magnemoe]

Yes it can be done, however an normal first stage works just as well or better and the jet engines don't scale up well but they are practical for small SSTO rockets.

[rhoark]

I tried it a few times. TWR was low, and with low TWR you can't get very high before the engines are starved for oxygen.

[ripvanlemon]

I tried it one time before I had any idea how jets work in KSP.

Success!

[Duke23]

Tried it a few times but gave up for some reason. Oh yeah, because of asymmetrical flameout sending me for a tumble every other launch. I should know better I guess. Need to do some more experimentation.

[Franklin]

Tried it a few times but gave up for some reason. Oh yeah, because of asymmetrical flameout sending me for a tumble every other launch. I should know better I guess. Need to do some more experimentation.

Just gotta keep one eye on the intake and preemptively kill jets/stage. Letting your jets rise until they flame out is always gonna make for a bad time.

[LaytheAerospace]

@LaytheAerospace:

So you say he's cheating just cause he is playing the game in a different way than you?

No, I say it's cheating because it's playing the game in a grossly unrealistic way in order to remove essentially all the challenge associated with a task, inflating the effectiveness of the ship far beyond normal levels. That said, I'm not interested in a philosophical debate about whether or not exploitation of broken game mechanics should be considered cheating.

And I don't care if he does it, I'm just curious why. Play how you want. I'm genuinely curious as to why people intentionally remove the difficulty from games they play. Seems to me as though things would get boring pretty quickly.

[Duke23]

Just gotta keep one eye on the intake and preemptively kill jets/stage. Letting your jets rise until they flame out is always gonna make for a bad time.

Yes I figured that out after a while of messing with jets, I was always a rocket guy. It was like "Holy crap look how fast it's going--" *poof* lol

[Jarin]

No, I say it's cheating because it's playing the game in a grossly unrealistic way in order to remove essentially all the challenge associated with a task, inflating the effectiveness of the ship far beyond normal levels. That said, I'm not interested in a philosophical debate about whether or not exploitation of broken game mechanics should be considered cheating.

And I don't care if he does it, I'm just curious why. Play how you want. I'm genuinely curious as to why people intentionally remove the difficulty from games they play. Seems to me as though things would get boring pretty quickly.

I've always found the conventional rockets to be MUCH easier to deal with than jet stages, so the only time I mess with them is to add a bit of variety. Claiming they remove all difficulty is... well, maybe it's accurate for you (and congratulations on mastering the weird mechanic) but that's far from universal.

[Red Iron Crown]

If anything, jet assisted boosters are more difficult to pilot than pure rockets, they require a trickier flight path and more management of different engines, and they add the risk of potentially mission-ending asymmetric flame-out. They're also more difficult to construct properly. So I don't see it as cheating at all, any more than making a jet/rocket SSTO is.

I wonder how the pricing in 0.24 will balance jet-assist versus conventional rockets.

Edited June 6, 2014 by Red Iron Crown
Grammar

[rosenkranz]

"grossly unrealistic" when we're talking about a game about silly little green men (i'm looking at you jeb!) launching rockets from an impossibly dense planet orbiting an impossibly small star...

Sorry, that just brought a tear of laughter to my eye.

[J4CKAL2014]

If anything, jet assisted boosters are more difficult to pilot than pure rockets, they require a trickier flight path and more management of different engines, and they add the risk of potentially mission-ending asymmetric flame-out. They're also more difficult to construct properly. So I don't see it as cheating at all, any more than making a jet/rocket SSTO is.

I wonder how the pricing in 0.24 will balance jet-assist versus conventional rockets.

Agreed. I find rockets way easier to use.

As for pricing, I would imagine that jets would be favoured, mainly from a logic standpoint. Chemical rocket engines employ jet technology + other stuff (as in: they normally use a combustion turbine to drive the pumps which mixes the fuel and oxidizer. I'm sure many people on here can explain it much better, I'm not an engineer!) So from that point of view, rockets + their fuel consumption will = more monies (which sucks for me cos I don't use jets much :/)