Aphenine's WIP and Random Whitterings Thread

[aphenine]

I have a lot of weird designs I'm playing around with. None of them are really polished enough to post and go "oh, look at my shiny craft" with the exception of the Entente Heavy SpaceLifter. But some of them are a little exciting and I want to show them off. Plus there are things I've built and played around with and learnt from. So, if no one minds, I feel like posting some of the designs I'm working on and some of the ones that got me to where I am. Feel free to comment.

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Contains descriptions and all the images plus extra ones of the designs in flight.

SkyLifter (Mk4 Chassis)

Craft File

This is the first spaceplane I built that ever flew all the way into orbit. I was building it at about the same time as the SpaceLifter (next one). I was having trouble getting anything up into orbit and I was playing with HL chassis spaceplanes that somehow kept losing control or not going into orbit. One of the things I learnt with this design is that less can be more. Because the Mk4 chassis doesn't have any engine mounts at the rear, I had to use engine mounts on the wings. So I used lots of small SABRE engines mounted above and below the wing with a Eurofighter-style delta wing-plan. This worked better than mounting fewer SABRE M engines nearer the rear. Once I learnt this lesson, I went back and redesigned the SpaceLifter.

I did transport cargo to orbit successfully with this, but the awkward loading bay at the rear caused an explosion in the Munar module (the Command module was fine) when somehow it interpenetrated with one of the sections. I think it was a bug. A reload later and the module blew up in the cargo hold. The SkyLifter didn't notice, though. At the time, I remember how it handled the weight beautifully and was a joy to fly. I've since revisited it and it's not nearly as good as I remember: getting it off the runway requires several attempts and it still has bad low altitude handling. I've never landed it successfully, as the explosion did take out the battery packs and it was a remote-guided test flight. Once I switched off the engines, it lost power and did the whole re-entry unguided. It was still flying when it spiralled gently into the ocean many minutes later, so a good design. But it would have been nice to land it.

SpaceLifter (HL Chassis)

Craft File

Bizarrely, every time I flew this in a mission, the rear SABRE M blew up partway through the flight. Not only did this not affect the flight, it flew better, which again taught me a lot more about spaceplanes and how whacking more engines doesn't always generate more lift. I used this lifter to construct my prototype station and to work out how to attach cargo inside spaceplanes.

Dart (S2 Personnel)

My first personnel transport. In a test flight, I flew it up and docked it with my space station. I was really pleased with this design, but when I came back to it, it did flips of death on the runway every time it tried to take off. By this stage, I was confident enough of what I was doing that I went back and redesigned it to create the next spaceplane.

Undine and Undine Plus (S2 Personnel)

Craft File (Released Version)

The Undine (don't ask me what led to the name, I don't really know, although I think I was playing lots of water-based people in League of Legends) was pretty much a redesign of the Dart and, because I vaguely know what I'm doing now and can look at the FAR derivatives and vaguely understand what they're telling me, it pretty much flew first time, after some landing gear adjustments. Hodo took me to task over the Entente's landing gear and, well, he had a point. This has beautiful landing gear layout. So there The only thing I didn't get right was yaw stability under sideslip. This I fixed by canting the wing-tips a little. This is the best craft that I've ever made in terms of handling and stability.

Of course, the Undine is wonderful but its lack any range to actually get into any orbit greater than 80km. So I went and added an extra S2 fuel tank. By now I was starting to be very aware that changing one small thing can lead to an almost completely different design, which makes redesigning from scratch imperative sometimes. The Undine Plus was an example of this. It handles slightly worse than the Undine in nearly every single way and is prone to transsonic instability. It's still a good craft and it gets to 366km where my space-station is, so I'm happy, but I have the feeling that if I redesigned it completely, it would have been an impovement.

Blended Wing Proto 2

This one I'm really proud of, although it hasn't got a name yet. I'm thinking of taking this to a release level and replacing the SpaceLifter as my small Heavy Lifter. It's completely experimental and came from being inspired by the NASA X-48B design and seeing that the B9 inspired procedural wing had an option to change the thickness. The idea of a blended wing is to mix the wing and the body so the body produces lift. In spaceplanes, which are pretty heavy, and in which the weight is concentrated in the middle, this can be exceptionally useful and can take a lot of strain off the wing-body junction as well as maximise lift.

The awesomeness of this design is that it has really good handling characteristics at all altitude levels, from what I can tell. It has none of the problems of the Entente in that regard. The blended wing design also allows for easier attachment of landing gear in a manner that works sensibly, so this thing is the most stable thing I have ever put down a runway and takes off the best. But, despite all of this, it still has a 40m/s greater take-off speed than the Entente. Weird.

X-693 Super-heavy Tanker

Craft File (Non-released experimental version, so you can play, because who doesn't want to launch 500+ tons?)

Because it had to be done, I descided to try to build the biggest, heaviest reusable spaceplane to take the most fuel into space that I could. Behold the X-693 Super-heavy tanker. The picture maybe doesn't do it justice, but those are the 3.75m large tanks from KW Rocketry. The thing weighs 518tons on take-off and holds a staggering 40,000ish amounts of fuel, of which 3/4 seem to get into LKO. I haven't actually got a use for such a beast yet, as my space station doesnt have enough tanking capacity and, in fact, probably never will. Drat. But, still, if I want to create a fuel dump at some point, it would be worth having. I'm also interested how it'll handle in DREC once I install that. The ballistic coeeficient should be small, so I think it should handle it, but... *fingers crossed*

X-683a Piggyback Lifter

Designed to deliver piggyback loads into orbit, particularly in this variant, four 3.75m fuel tanks. Do not pull up sharply (the wings will rip off), do not put too much power (the engines will blow up) and so on and so forth. Not really sold on this design at all, but the high wings give some nice stability and maybe I could redesign it to work. With care, I have gotten into orbit.

Atmospheric Lander (Mk4 VTOL)

I'm still not sold on this design. It's designed to be a jack-of-all-trades lander. Designed to fly (a little), land on airless moons (a little) and carry lots of equipment for EVA (a lot), it's the engineering cludge of doom. Maybe I can tweak it but at the moment I feel it's probably not going anywhere, unless I can move the rear engines onto the tailspike.

Anyway, that concludes my tour of the random stuff I'm doing. If you read through that, hope you liked it and thank you.

Edited July 31, 2014 by aphenine
Fixed Imgur link

[HeXeCtiC]

NICE CRAFTS!!

pls give us the download link

[Voculus]

Those are really some very cleverly-designed ships. They're all cool, but the Undine is my favorite. Nice work!

[aphenine]

Thank you Voculus, I'm glad you liked the Undine.

And thank you HeXeCtiC. Um... I didn't know that anyone would want to have the craft files. I can put up the historical ones straight away (although they embarrass me). But would you mind waiting for the others? Some of them I want to release when they're ready. Some need things like ECLSS components stripped out of them. Is there any one in particular you wanted to try?

[HeXeCtiC]

I really like all of them

If you need the time to optimize your already great crafts -take you the time

Sorry for my bad English Im from Germany

Let us know when youre are ready to develop them

[aphenine]

Yey, I just went and visited Berlin for four days! I wish my German was as good as your English. At best I could say please and thank you. Berlin is... strange. Very traumatic, with all of its recent history. I liked it though. The Reichstag dome was amazing.

There is a release of the Undine, because, y'know, Voculus liked it. I decided that I wanted a cool company name for all the things I produced and in honour of the SABRE engine manufacturer, I picked Research Aerospace. Everything I make will have the form RA-XYZ, where X is the chassis number, Y is the series number and Z is the version number. It seems like a logical way to do it and, to be honest, my previous scheme wasn't working well. I've stripped ECLSS stuff out of these and also taken off MechJeb, as not everyone likes it. I think I'll create a release thread, maybe. Save spamming this forum if I do more releases. Everything will also have a name, because that's one of the most fun bits, IMHO.

Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mbt1vmucoezgvix/RA-302%20Undine%20%28Release%29.craft (also located above)

Also put up the Skylifter and the Spacelifter, because I think it would be nice for people to see some of my earlier stuff, so they can see that building a huge fully capable SSTO takes a lot of trial and error. These are preceded by AI in the version number, but using a similar code as the above. I might also post the ones that didn't work, maybe, or at least, screenshots, to give new designers a bit more confidence. These have whatever mods are used to make them fly. Probably no ECLSS, but no guarantees. Feel free to spot the design mistakes. Links are located above.

Finally, I also have posted the X-693. I think I will post a few more experimental designs because maybe I'm being too shy and silly about posting them. I'm sorry about that. However, the X in front of the version number means experimental. I take no responsibility in anything the craft does. I thought the X-693 might be fun because, well, it's 500 tons plus.

Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8930blpy0nt6m5x/X-693%20%28Public%29.craft