Three Swoopy Cargo SSTOs!

[Fearless Son]

To be honest I have no idea! Many. Most of the time it is around 3 to 4 intakes per engine. I should be more precise, but after building so many SSTOs I can eyeball it and get close. If my minimum climb performance isn't met, I add a few more and test. There is no way to build this style of SSTO (with large payload fractions, high performance and compact, attractive lines without airhogging. One can certainly build non-airhogging large SSTOs, but they will necessarily carry MUCH more internal fuel, and will balloon in size and complexity while losing payload performance. It's definitely a divisive subject, but I fall firmly on the pro-airhogging side because it allows me to play with spaceplanes in a way that I find fun.

Admittedly the current stock spaceplane parts set is insufficient to do some of the more practical heavy spaceplane designs without airhogging. However, once compromise I have toyed with a bit is using some things like closed cargo bays to mount additional intakes inside the cargo bay itself. That way I can pretend the whole cargo bay is just one giant complex intake, and so long as none of the internal intakes intersect with one another, I can justify that it is not wholely airhogging. It still forces me to accommodate for lots of room and mass, but it can pack it into a nice aesthetic package. Even opening the cargo bay just looks like you are opening the intake cowling to do maintenance.

Are you very heavy on fuel? The Asp has very little in the way of sneaky hidden wings, maybe one or two for aesthetics, mostly. It doesn't need them because a full load of fuel is only 25% of the available tank space (those fuselage parts are all empty). If you are avoiding airhogging, you are definitely going to need a lot more fuel than what I designed it for. It will need a lot more wing.

Ah, that might have been it. I assumed it needed more fuel than it actually had. Tying this back to what I just said, those pseudo-structural intakes you built on the bottom would be a good place to mount those several intakes, which is what I am guessing you actually did (and I did not.) So long as no one of those intakes overlaps with another (functionally they would be in a column, one right after the other) that would satisfy my desire not to airhog. Maybe I will try that.