Separating two airplanes in flight and having both remain controllable is hard, but what's so clever about blowing the wings off above the atmosphere? Engine dropping is just a case of making sure your engine pods are over the CG so it doesn't move around afterward.įor me, I find building large, tall rockets that stay controllable harder, but i've been flying flight sims since 8 bit days and it kind of comes naturally, wheras gravity turns etc. at least compared to getting to orbit single stage on low tech, where the margins or razor thin. Whilst it's economically bonkers, I don't think staged airbreathing is that hard. That's an awesome design Wander, I did a much less ambitious one in my current career game (with Whiplash engines). Of course you don't need nearly as much for LKO rescues, but why stop there? Last time I checked, even some stock planes could do recues well enough.Ĭompared to sane SSTOs, the only extra difficulty here is that the wet/dry CoM/CoL should be aligned not just for the whole craft, but for the separated lifter part too, in order to land it. I feel it's impossible to fully separate lifting parts from a considerably sized payload on this tech level. It has 3.5k dV on LKO, and a whopping 7 terriers for the silliest suicide burns.Ībout building hints. Except those wings on the front, but no one will notice that. It's definately an SSTO, and almost everything on it lands that isn't considered payload. The most I managed to construct is this munar biome-hopper / Duna craft. I didn't have those fun little new engines, so I taken a Whiplash test mission to never complete, while only having Mk 1 structural parts. I had great fun with low-tech spaceplanes before - though I started my relevant career save in 1.0.4. PPS in the second screenshot i'm going to have a problem soon, because i didn't research solar panels yet. PS the ground screenshot is of an experimental version with 7 Junos on each wing, but it didn't let me climb any higher airbreathing than with 6 per wing. You could probably do the mission cheaper with a disposable rocket, than you could by throwing all those Junos away. As you can see, virtually no payload/delta v capability remaining. Sorry about the poor screenshots, but here it is on the ground and in orbit. Since we're no longer targeting 1.3 as their "max thrust " airspeed, i just fly to constant AoA now on the Terrier. At this point I use a radial decoupler to separate them, their intakes and fuel tanks from the wing. Stage 4 - At around 17KM the Juno will flame out. With this number of Juno it should be possible to reach 1.3 mach and 12km before she stops climbing, then press SPACE again to start the Terrier. Stage 3 - The Juno reach peak thrust at 1.3 mach, which corresponds to the low point in the drag after the transonic drag spike. We'll be landing in the water, or in very small pieces. Stage 2 - After liftoff, punch off the fixed landing gear, don't want their weight and drag. Note that "Spaceplane" does not necessarily mean SSTO, as it is with my design - the staging is set thus If you're doing low tech spaceplane for the hell of it, you can get there with Junos and a terrier. If you really want to do spaceplanes, they're a lot easier if you wait until you have a bit more tech. Honestly, I'd suggest just going with a rocket. Yes, the percentage recovered would be a little lower than for a spaceplane, but it will be much simpler to build and operate, and in any case the cost of the rocket is only a small fraction of the reward you get for rescuing the kerbal, so it easily pays for itself many times over. You can build a rocket for only around 8000 funds or so that will retrieve a kerbal from LKO without a problem. is your reason practical, or is it just "I want to do a plane because I like planes"? If you're just doing a kerbal rescue from LKO, you really don't need a plane- a very simple conventional rocket will do it. Is there some particular reason you want to build a spaceplane? i.e. If you can unlock Supersonic Flight, then you get the Panther, which makes a spaceplane much more possible (still not ideal, the Whiplash would be best, but it's doable with the Panther). In other words, they're more trouble than they're worth. You can use them to lift a ship up to 10 km or so, but not much higher than that, which means you'll need to use rocket engines for nearly all of your dV, which in turn means that your jet engines will just be dead weight for 90%+ of the dV to orbit. With the tech nodes you've described, you only have the low-speed jet engines (Juno, Wheesley), which can't get over Mach 1.
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