You're very welcome, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I think I already told you this on reddit haha.

I will not ignore,in fact I will pay close attention,use,appreciate,and thank you! Nothing you can do to stop me. Thank you for posting this.

Thanks! High praise coming from you sir!

"Lacks the sex appeal of Scott Manly" LMFAO!!!! I pee'ed a lil when I read that.

Indeed! I was holding alt on pretty much every node placement in this video ;) The problem was sometimes the part wants to be way behind the craft when you have long fuselages like this so it takes some creative camera angles to get the part there even when you hold alt.

FINALLY THANK YOU I KNEW I HEARDT THIS BUT FORGOT THE KEY THANK YOU

Oh wicked cheers

You're very welcome, thanks for the kind words ;)

Paint ftw :P glad you enjoyed it!

Glad to hear it, good luck!

Excellent, glad it could help!

Soon! ;)

Transfer windows, transfer windows. With a bit of practice, 60 m/s sounds completely reasonable to dock with a station.

Excellent, I'm glad it helped you!

Shit only 1 video on your channel 😅

Yeah same principles. You want to make your plane as streamlined as reasonably possible in the hangar and then fly it as fast and as low as you can without it blowing up :D For sure I'll make small passenger one in the next video. Someone else asked for a lower tech SSTO so I'll plan on making it a passenger SSTO without RAPIERs.

F00FlGHTER I just started playing again and running career mode. Currently unlocked the first mk2 parts and have been fiddling around with a low tech ssto for tourists and rescues without much luck. I’d love to see some designs with lower tech stuff, even if you don’t get to more videos you’ve inspired me to keep working on it! I’ll do some experiments to see if I can establish some numbers like you have here for the rapier and keep working on it.

@@f00flghter29 what happened to that

Merci! I'll add VTOL to my list of things to do for a future video! :)

Sorry to hear it's not working for you. If you want I can take a look at the craft file or you can post some images. When my designs, that follow all the principles and characteristics in this video, struggle to break the sound barrier it's almost always a drag issue. Sometimes the cargo bays can be buggy, make sure that your cargo isn't creating any drag by using the aero overlay (F12) or by turning on aero data in action windows (alt+F12-->physics-->aero-->check the action window box). To try to avoid cargo bay bugs try not to use the smaller bays with bigger parts; do not start with them open, or open them before getting to orbit; and always load from the hangar, don't revert to runway.

Im in the same boat. Not getting anywhere near the speeds or lift using the same calculations in the video of 1 rapier/30 tonnes and 5 tonnes per meter sq of wing area. 4 rapiers at 93 tonnes isnt even enough to get me off the runway with 4 Big S dv's.

@@Kinaek What speeds are you hitting by the end of the runway? If you can get to 110m/s or so you should be able to takeoff. If you can't get to 110m/s with 4 RAPIERs and 93t then you've got some crazy drag going on. Do you have any images or a craft file?

Yeah it's big but not big enough that it's completely unstable without autostruts. As long as you use the same attachment hierarchy you should be fine, it'll be more wobbly and difficult to fly but it shouldn't fall apart unless you do some crazy high angle of attack maneuvers.

Yikes, those low frame rates can really try my patience :/ What speed are you going when you switch to closed and what is your wing area to mass ratio? Are you using wing incidence?

I'll repost the same response I made above: Sorry to hear it's not working for you. If you want I can take a look at the craft file or you can post some images. When my designs, that follow all the principles and characteristics in this video, struggle to break the sound barrier it's almost always a drag issue. Sometimes the cargo bays can be buggy, make sure that your cargo isn't creating any drag by using the aero overlay (F12) or by turning on aero data in action windows (alt+F12-->physics-->aero-->check the action window box). To try to avoid cargo bay bugs try not to use the smaller bays with bigger parts; do not start with them open, or open them before getting to orbit; and always load from the hangar, don't revert to runway.

Delta-v at launch can be misleading or even meaningless with jet engine SSTOs. But it could be because I used much less rocket fuel tanks than most during the ascent so there's less oxidizer as just dead weight after it assumes the jet engines use up all the liquid fuel, or it could be because you've got extra liquid fuel dedicated to your Nerv engines. If you put that liquid fuel towards the RAPIER's 3200s Isp then yeah you're gunna have a lot more delta-v at launch. The way the game calculates delta-v it consumes all available fuel in the stage. Since we only have one stage, it assumes your jet engines with their much higher Isp consume all the liquid fuel. Does that make sense?

@@f00flghter29 Yes it's possible. It could be that also be that I'm not that great at this game yet. In fact, the SSTOs I build are far more capable than I am :) I believe some of my creations could reach Laythe, but I can't get a ship to the Mun yet due to my bad piloting and not getting to grips with manoeuvre nodes . I could do with someone to really check out one of my ships to see how good they are; someone who can actually play the game

@@DavstrWrexham I could give em a spin if you want. You can share the craft file through kerbalx.com, googledrive, pastebin, etc.

@@f00flghter29 Thank you. I have put 2 up. At the moment there are no pics, since I'm new to that site, here are the links: kerbalx.com/DavstrWrexham/Grand-Explorer and kerbalx.com/DavstrWrexham/Duna-Flyer

@DavstrWrexham Your grand explorer is definitely capable of landing on Mun. Here it is in orbit (i.imgur.com/YC2ksfO.png) with almost 4km/s remaining, and here it is on Mun (i.imgur.com/FoVQslW.png). I'm guessing your problem with landing on Mun is the low TWR, as you can see in that last image we landed with a TWR of 1.3 and I believe we started the deorbit with a TWR of 1.1. The trick to landing with a TWR

It depends on what you want to be doing. If you want to land on Mun for example, you're going to want to have a TWR of around 1.5 or so on Mun in order to land safely. So about 1 Nerv for every 27 tons. However, that's after you've already spent all the fuel getting to Kerbin orbit and transferring to a Munar orbit. So if you take that fuel mass into account it comes to about 1 Nerv for every 40-50 tons or so. Keep in mind that you can use the Nervs to help you circularize so you don't need as much oxidizer as you see in this video, so you can make things more efficient and err towards that 50 tons mark. I'm currently working on a low tech SSTO video and after that I'll tackle a long range SSTO with RAPIERs and Nervs ;)

Mainly through trial and error. For turboramjet style engines like the Whiplash and RAPIER you're mostly limited by how much you can get into the air off the end of the runway since they're at their worst at subsonic speeds. While it is possible to get 40t+/RAPIER into the air if you have enough wing area and you give yourself a longer runway, you use a whole lot more fuel accelerating up to speed due to the ascent taking longer and from the extra drag on the wings. At some point you break even where the difference between adding more fuel and wings vs another engine results in the same performance. If you're just going to low Kerbin orbit that point is around 35t/RAPIER. However, if you want to make a longer range SSTO the benefits of being able to burn off fuel mass compared to hauling around another engine become much more apparent. You can load your RAPIER down with 45t and it'll take an extra 6t of fuel or so to get to orbit but that's 6t you can burn off as opposed to a 2t RAPIER engine that you have to drag around with you. Most fuel tanks have a mass ratio of 9, so up until the point where it takes 18t of extra fuel to get to orbit it is theoretically more efficient to cut engines and load up on fuel. In practice however, you're approaching the point where you're hurting the maximum speed you can get out of the airbreathing mode by loading it down so much so you're losing out on that ultra efficient open cycle Δv. It's a delicate balance and a lot more complicated than just going to LKO which is why I didn't talk about it in this introduction video. However, I plan on doing a long range mission after the next video which will be a lower tech SSTO, so I'll be talking about different engines there as well.

Forgot to put this in the comment, I have 4 rapiers and 16 m^2 of wing for an 80 ton craft including the 36 ton orange tank payload. No matter what I do to uprate the craft I cannot get it faster than this.

@@ryanspence5831 It sounds like you've got drag in your cargo bay. Cargo bays can be kind of buggy so make sure you always revert back to the hangar and launch from there instead of reverting to the runway and never open your bay until you're in space. To confirm this is the problem, use the "aero data in action windows" by going to alt+F12-->physics-->aero and then check that action window box. Then you can right click on parts inside your cargo bay during the flight to see if they're generating any drag. If it's non-zero then revert back to the hangar and try again. If it's always creating drag then you've probably got a part that's too big, e.g. using the 36t orange tank with the small or medium mk3 cargo bays.

@@f00flghter29 Thank you so much! Will report on results.

​@@ryanspence5831 legend has it, he still hasnt reported on results to this day... fr tho did it work? i wanna be sure to avoid that problem since its my first time building a heavy ssto

@@chocotriscuit4917 i forgor 💀

Hold down shift while offsetting

OMG Life Saver!

I suppose with rcs, a skilled pilot, and a very low space station its certainly possible

@@Commentsnotvideos Not really. Unless you pretty much match the station orbit exactly on your ascent. And even then you'd be lucky to pull it off with 66 m s-1.

Putting 90t into orbit was the purpose of this space plane. I mentioned at the start of the video that I'll be doing other things, including long range SSTOs in the future, which will undoubtedly use Nervs. However, lets not kid ourselves, there's nothing "practical" about SSTOs beyond delivering payload to LKO. There's no reason beyond bragging rights to drag a bunch of air breathing engines and wings around in space. Don't get me wrong, I love the challenge of not staging, but it's certainly not practical. The goal here was to show how to make and fly an efficient SSTO, while correcting many of the common misconceptions I've seen in SSTO design. Mark Thrimm and Matt Lowne make great, fun videos, but their SSTO designs and flight profiles are not efficient, they routinely use excessive engines and make unnecessary, large AoA maneuvers. If you want to be inspired by ultra efficiency, check out Bradley Whistance's SSTOs. There's also no reason why the concepts and techniques I demonstrate in this video can't be used on SSTOs for any application. You can hide anything you want in cargo bays or fairings to very easily "get around" the drag they create. I will certainly take your request for a Duna expedition SSTO video. I'm currently working an a low-tech passenger SSTO, among other things, so it'll probably be til March or even April before a Duna video comes out ;)