"Wheel in the Sky" Wheel-shaped Spaceplane VTOL SSTO

[Kelderek]

First of all, I suck at designing and flying spaceplanes. But I am trying to learn and get better. Learning rockets was far easier for me and the majority of my KSP play has involved the VAB and launch pad. After some frustration with recent spaceplane designs that I could not get to work well, I started just screwing around in the SPH with the intent of coming up with a ridiculous design with lots of wing surfaces.

The result is my Wheel Plane. This large 139t, 544 part vessel was fun to build and it flies surprisingly well compared to my other more conventional designs. Of course half the reason why it performs well for me is that I don't have to land it horizontally on a runway (the part I suck at the most with spaceplanes). The idea was to have a lot of wing surfaces at different angles so that no matter how I turn the ship it would still have a decent amount of lift. The ship launches vertically due to its shape, but it flies horizontally like any other plane. Since I use turbojets and rapier engines, I have to use the standard ascent path to maintain good air intake. I also figured, why not take this ship to space as an SSTO? So I made sure to have some airless engine power and fuel too. In some ways this is still a lot like a rocket and not much of a spaceplane, but I figure it uses jet engines and flies horizontally so that should be good enough.

I know there are a million things wrong about this design and I already know of ways I would improve on it if I were to do it again. The main design flaw was that I didn't plan on using the rapiers from the start. I initially had 16 jet engines which is why the fuel tanks that form the outer wheel only have liquid fuel -- if I had thought ahead properly, these would have included more room for oxidizer. In fact I may have made it so all the engines are rapiers. I felt it was too much hassle to replace those fuel tanks, so I just tacked on some extra rocket fuel tanks and drained some of the extra jet fuel. It works but it is not optimal and added too much mass and drag. I also probably have more air intake than I need, this is more a result of changing the engines and fuel around too much.

I can't fly this ship without hearing "Wheel in the Sky" from Journey in my head.

The flight I used for these screenshots ended in a wonderful explosion due to poor fuel planning, but as you can see I came close.

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[Mekan1k]

Any landing you can walk away from....

[Goodle...]

Is a good landing!!!

[Kelderek]

Haha, yeah, I thought the same thing. I couldn't even find the capsule under all the debris, and it was very laggy on my computer, so I just hit "recover vessel" and called it a successful day.