Spaceplane for Eve

[Geschosskopf]

The potential benefit of wings comes from requiring less engine thrust, and thus less mass and drag from those engines. If you can replace a ton of engine with less than a ton of wing that's where your gains can come from. Whether that's enough to overcome the impact of staying lower for longer is another matter.

Actually, it's not that wings let you use lower thrust, it's that wings let you use engines with very high Isp, which also happen to have rather low thrust as a balance thing. To reach orbit, you need a certain combination of altitude and speed. To get the altitude, you have to fight gravity. Fighting gravity can either be done with thrust (a conventional rocket) or lift (an airplane). Because lift lets low-thrust but high-Isp engines stay in the air when they couldn't by themselves, these engines can concentrate on building up speed. Because they have high Isp, they can achieve this speed with relatively little fuel. That's where the mass savings comes in, not comparing wing and engine masses.

However, this only works where the engine has very high Isp, like in the range of jets. But stock jets don't work on Eve and the Kethane jet (which does) chokes at the high speeds needed to reach orbit. So unless you have KSPI jets (or maybe Karbonite jets, if they can manage it), you're stuck with using a conventional rocket on Eve. And in that case, wings are a bad idea. They add mass and drag without any corresponding benefit because rocket Isps are too low.

[smart013]

Yeah, I guess I knew that, I just never think about KSPI because I don't use it myself these days. I appreciate it as a fine example of the higher levels of the modding art but after giving it a fair trial, I decided it just doesn't suit my personal tastes. With KSPI, ever imaginable spacetravel feat eventually becomes not only possible but largely trivial. That outcome is of course the whole point of developing god-like powers, but I prefer to wrestle with difficulties.

So what I'm hoping for with Karbonite is that with some clever tinkering and careful flying, I can just barely beat Eve within certain limited parameters. If it turns out to be a trivial task, I'll be disappointed.

I understand where you come from, but if you are thinking researching the whole kspi techtree in career, building up a sizeable energy transmitting network infrastructure (with the actual costs of 24.2 where reactors cost millions and millions of funds each), getting your hands on enough antimatter in the process, build the needed (you guessed it *expensive*) spaceplane(s) is a "trivial task" you are mistaken.

But when everything is researched, paid for and delivered to eve... then its great

[Geschosskopf]

I understand where you come from, but if you are thinking researching the whole kspi techtree in career, building up a sizeable energy transmitting network infrastructure (with the actual costs of 24.2 where reactors cost millions and millions of funds each), getting your hands on enough antimatter in the process, build the needed (you guessed it *expensive*) spaceplane(s) is a "trivial task" you are mistaken.

No, I'm entirely serious. With KSPI, all you need is patience. Eventually you'll get everything you need to make every feat trivial. There is no need to struggle with engineering challenges anywhere along the line. If you can do it with stock rockets, you can do it better with whatever KSPI offers at that point in the tech tree. And if for some reason you can't figure out how to do it right now, unlock a couple more nodes and you'll be able to do it in your sleep. Not that there's any thing wrong with this. As I said, the whole point of KSPI is to be able to do this sort of thing. But it's that sheer inevitability of ultimately making all things trivial that turns me off.

[Geschosskopf]

Haven't seen anyone try with Karbonite parts, it'll be interesting to see your results.

Well, I've been testing this since I got home tonight. The Karbonite engines, whether jet or turboprop, are wonderful things for flying around with, but they all flame out from lack of "ScoopedAir" at about 30km and 1100m/s on Kerbin. This isn't quite as good as stock jet engines, but is still well within the range of getting to orbit with rockets on the spaceplane. On Kerbin. And with sufficient provision of fuel, both LFO and Karbonite, it should probably work on Eve, too. This is using NEAR, which does something to stock aerodynamics but not as mcuh as FAR does, but in any case makes spaceplanes more challenging than stock.

HOWEVER, there's 1 thing standing in the way of using Karbonite for SSTOs, either at Kerbin or Eve. This is the ScoopedAir intakes burning up on reentry, at least if you have Deadly Reentry installed. There's no way to protect them without a really ugly, unaerodynamic mass of cubic-octagonal struts with inflateable heatshields on the ends, all supported by regular struts, which tends to cause control and stability problems.

Hmmm, looks like I'll have to add a few lines to my "how I prefer things" module manager file, to raise the temperature at which the ScoopedAir intakes burn up.

In related news, Eve has no Karbonite hotspots at all; everywhere is a uniform 8ppm. And there doesn't appear to be any in the atmosphere at Eve, and I know there's none in Kerbin's air, so there's no point in trying to suck any up there. But OTOH, the Karbonite jet and turboprop engines have enough Isp to get by without needing any more en route, at least if you don't build your spaceplane too big.

[smart013]

But it's that sheer inevitability of ultimately making all things trivial that turns me off.

Thats not how i experience it ingame, but different players, different playstyles. Playing stock is trivial enough in my experience of building and flying vessels, and kspi adds complexity rather then taking it away. But, ok, we agree that we disagree, case closed

[laythelover17]

Take off on Kerbin land on eve carefully and take off the exact same way.