165 ton stock lifter?

[Stratzenblitz75]

Of course I do -- otherwise the jets would die too early for the nukes to make orbit.

http://ksp.schnobs.de/tanker/thumbs/T-80_03.jpg

(click for lots of pictures from the ascent -- was a challenge submission).

If you could have a look and tell me where I'm taking a wrong turn?

Actually, nothing seems wrong here. Your ship burns through about 3000 units of liquid fuel to make orbit, which is less than 3500 units of liquid fuel that the FLS Titan needs. According to the KSP Wiki (And from looking at values in-game), liquid fuel costs 0.8 funds per unit. So really, your ship should have burned about 3000 (factoring the cost of the oxidizer) funds worth of fuel. Now, these values are for 0.24.2, did they change the price of fuel in 0.25? If not, how are you calculating the cost of the fuel you burned?

Also, you should only need 1 NERVA to make orbit. The turbojets should be powerful enough to get you up to orbital velocities if you just level off and gain speed at about 35 Km. At that point you only need a tiny boost of 50-100 m/s to get into orbit.

In addition, I noticed in one of the pictures that half of your turbojets were offline. When this happens, be sure to throttle done a bit. In this case, more turbojets running at a lower throttle > less turbojets running at max throttle.

Edited November 1, 2014 by Stratzenblitz75

[xtoro]

I've ended up using a similar design to the Lopac 18 which works quite well and manages to get the payload into orbit just fine, and it comes in just under 1000t.

Now I'm going for 200t

[Laie]

If not, how are you calculating the cost of the fuel you burned?

Now that you ask me: this is a tanker. The 20k funds includes the fuel that was delivered to orbit.

*facepalm*

The four nervas are a convenience thing -- I like to have some TWR even for the relatively small burns in orbit. They certainly cost me something on the way up, but yeah -- we're not talking about 400% premium. It's all good.

[Redshift OTF]

Are you using this trick? Placing the Engines and Intakes one by one not only prevents flame outs, it also makes the jet engines more powerful (you can see that in a test I preformed in that link). Also, how many intakes are you running? The FLS Titan runs 2 intakes per engine for a total of 32 engines and 64 intakes. I found that two intakes per engine on a VTLV craft should be enough to air-hog your way to orbit. Or maybe 0.25 changed things, as I've said, I haven't tested it 0.25 yet.

Wow, I didn't know this was a thing? How strange. Perhaps this is how all space planes should be working but symmetry is broken, (like in a lot of ways).

[numerobis]

Wow, I didn't know this was a thing? How strange. Perhaps this is how all space planes should be working but symmetry is broken, (like in a lot of ways).

Me neither, though I did notice suspiciously good behaviour on my spaceplane's center engine yesterday.

Is it symmetry that causes this, or order?

Either way it'd be not too hard to hack up a script that reorders your file for you.

[Stratzenblitz75]

Wow, I didn't know this was a thing? How strange. Perhaps this is how all space planes should be working but symmetry is broken, (like in a lot of ways).

Me neither, though I did notice suspiciously good behaviour on my spaceplane's center engine yesterday.

Is it symmetry that causes this, or order?

Either way it'd be not too hard to hack up a script that reorders your file for you.

Kasuha made a thread describing how this works (I highly recommend you give it a read, it contains a lot of good info on KSP's fuel flow logic in general). Apparently, it has to do with how the game reads the craft file. By placing the intakes and engines 1 after each other, you can trick the resource system (which Kasuha describes) into equally distributing the intake air among the jet engines.

[numerobis]

Oh, I get it.

On the first pass, the first engine is totally starved. Its intakes feed the second jet, but maybe it's not quite enough. Second jet's intakes feed the third jet, and if it's not enough, it'll be not-enough by exactly the same amount. Repeat for as many jets as you have. Finally, the last jet's intakes dump their air in the pool.

Second pass, the first jet has the pool to draw from. That has exactly the right amount of air to match all the other jets. All the jets are now equally starved, so we can stay at full throttle without fear of flipping out.

To automate setting that up, I guess we'd just need to reorder the parts in the craft file, maybe renumber them. I should look into setting that up...

[Laie]

To automate setting that up, I guess we'd just need to reorder the parts in the craft file, maybe renumber them. I should look into setting that up...

Might be convenient at times, but there are plenty of ways of doing it right without sorting through the craft file. People have been getting it right by sheer accident; leading to questions why two similar planes showed such difference in performance.

Here's a brief building guide: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/84217-Explaining-burnout-asymetry?p=1234888&viewfull=1#post1234888