help on puilding a spaceplane

[alpha tech]

hey i need help building a good reusable space plane i have 0.25 and i watched Scott Manely do it and i know all of that and it just seems not to fit together;.;.

[capi3101]

Alrighty. Specifics then - what do you want to do with your plane?

I generally point spaceplane newbs to two places - Keptin's Basic Aircraft Design Explained - Simply with Pictures post (a great place to begin) and to DocMoriarty's KSP Space Plane Construction and Operation Guide (a great place for specifics and ideas on what exactly you can do with planes). DocMoriarty's guide focuses on use of the RAPIER engine. It's slightly out of date (by slightly I mean it was designed for 0.24.2 and he hasn't yet updated it for the changes in 0.25), but so far the only thing I've seen that's major is that the new Wing Connectors are functionally equivalent to Delta Wings. Shock Cone Intakes are equivalent to 1.2 Ram Intakes and 4 of the new Structural Intakes are roughly equivalent to a single Shock Cone Intake.

Best set of advice I can give without knowing more about what you want to do exactly.

[RizzoTheRat]

I started by building something similar to Cruzinak's design in this video

, got Jeb to orbit on it's maiden flight, and then I've been experimenting with larger and larger designs

[Wanderfound]

hey i need help building a good reusable space plane i have 0.25 and i watched Scott Manely do it and i know all of that and it just seems not to fit together;.;.

Go have a poke at the Akademy Awards link in my .sig. There's a good collection of ships for both stock aero and FAR there.

[bsalis]

Have a look at some existing designs that are known to work well, and emulate them as a start.

Once you have something, if you have problems with it, come back and post some pics. Plenty of peeps around here willing to help get it going.

[Raptor9]

How I designed a working spaceplane was I designed a straight airbreather that could go as high and fast as I could get it, with some of the equipment required for a spaceplane installed (reaction wheels and/or RCS thrusters/tanks, docking port, payload bay, whatever you'll need for what you want to do with it). I'd tweak it to the point I got the most performance out of it in the atmosphere, then I would save it as a new craft file and start retrofitting it. RAPIER engines (my preference), oxidizer, adjusting the wings slightly to compensate for any shift in Center-of-Gravity.

The new spaceplane parts are in an indirect way, helpful in this manner. If you want to use the streamlined Mk2-1.25m adapters, they only exist in LFO versions, forcing you to defuel the oxidizer portion if you want to use them for just airbreathers. When you switch to the full spaceplane model from the straight-airbreather, you already have the oxidizer tanks on board. The most invasive things I had to do to my spaceplane derivative is swap out two MK1 Fuselage fuel tanks for two FL-T400 and add canards to help with the initial takeoff.

Another useful tip I recommend is adjust the fuel sliders in the SPH editor and watch where the Center-of-Gravity and Center-of-Lift indicators are when your spaceplane (or any plane) is empty on fuel. If the CoG is aft of the CoL, you'll spaceplane will topple during reentry and at best be unstable in aerodynamic flight in the lower atmosphere. A plane that handles great on takeoff might not handle great later on as you burn off fuel.

[Wyre311]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/96406-The-Arcadia-series-and-the-Zeus-Ships?highlight=Arcadia

[panzer1b]

nevermind wrong thread srry

[alpha tech]

docking and cargo transport and other stuff like that like i have a space plane that works has docking but i have little to no fuel left and it uses the rapier engine and i cant keep refueling it all the time also what i am having trouble with is fitting an engine to a Mk 2 space plane and having enough fuel to keep it afloat

[megatiger78]

just throw it together in a way that looks like a picture you saw. I got one stuck in orbit, so its not that hard

[The_Rocketeer]

Sometimes the problem is just flight-profile (i.e. the shape of your flight). The crucial thing is to get as much speed as possible before you run out of air, because when that happens you need much, much more fuel to make the same change in velocity.

I tend to use 3-engine arrangements for LKO planes, usually a pair of RAPIERs and either a Toroidal Aerospike or a Turbojet:

If the jet, I aim to get up to about 1400-1500m/s (surface) before I need to switch the RAPIERs to closed mode, usually this is at an altitude between about 20-25km.

If the Aerospike, I keep it turned off until I'm around 20km up doing about 1000-1200m/s (faster if I can). Then I turn it on before the RAPIERs need to switch and pull up hard to climb as steeply as possible.

This should put you in orbit. Once there you can use RCS thrusters to make any docking maneuvers.

If you're wanting to reach higher altitude orbits, consider adding a rocket-booster stage behind the RAPIERs and launching vertically to orbit (as you would with a rocket). I used this technique to get my Remote-Tech relay satellite into GSO.

For inter-planetary spaceplanes, you're going to need to use LV-N engines, which are a lot heavier and will need more supplementary engines to reach orbit, but once there will be able to get to other bodies on much less fuel.