A Plane's Guide to Space

[manni01]

A Planes Guide to Space!

Welcome to any poor soul who has dared to click on my thread. You will vigorously be injected with knowledge beyond your liking, this will hurt. But seriously now. This thread will be my way of showing other people how to build SSTO space planes. "But shouldn't this be in the tutorial section?" you might ask. No (if you're a mod who doesn't approve, move it to the tutorial section. It won't result in the apocalypse, I hope). Instead of telling you what to do, I will do it and show you how it can be used. Simply said, I will make many crafts describing the basics of SSTO making. With each one, you will learn more about something.

Chapter 1 - Planes in space you say? ft. Drittle - a little non air hogging SSTO

To start off this series, I will give you one if the simple-iest SSTO crafts I have made. The "Drittle" is very new player friendly and is very easy to use. Though very inefficient, you can just take off and point this craft at 45 degrees and fly up until the jet engine burns out. By then you have an apoapsis of greater than 70 km and you still have enough dV to circularize. I suggest building up as much speed in the atmosphere as possible, so just fly up to 10 km with your jet and point at 25 degrees until you flame out. After that, point up 45 degrees and activate your rocket engines until your apoapsis is above 75 km. After that you can cruise up to apoapsis and circularize or do whatever, you still have a lot of dV. Don't worry about stability or anything other than your fuel. It has batteries and no part clipping was used. Everything on the craft can be spotted from the outside and no tricks are done here. Just a simple and easy SSTO for getting your beginner into Space. This craft has a single jet engine and is therefor very light. It is easily carried through space with its 2 little rockomax motors, which are very very good for small crafts. They have a very high TWR and therefor can increase your dV more than ISP can. The Drittle has enough lift and control surfaces to be stable and easily controlled. It has two RAM intakes and one circular, all feeding one engine for a light craft. The lesson learned with this craft:

- Keep SSTOs light

- You can build good looking SSTOs, but before that, you have to learn to make normal SSTOs. Keep part count, weight, and wings to a lower number for basic SSTOs

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Download

Please give me feedback about this. Do you like the idea or intention? Can I improve something? Did I do something wrong? Tell me.

FYI, this will end up teaching people to airhog, as that makes SSTOs easy. Also if you don't know if I'm good at making SSTOs:

Mun SSTO

Many of my newest SSTOs

Vtol capable of landing on Minimus