Thanks! I really love the wide, cinematic shots that ultrawide lets you take

10:33 I loved how those burns were sync'd with the music beat :)

Yeah that was the portion of the mission that I really was not looking forwards to. I really dug deep and scraped up as much margin as I could so I could bring extra Ion engines. My original plan was to just do 2, but that would have required over 120 burns, and that just didn't sound like a fun time at all.

Honestly I would have just installed Better Timewarp and left the ions burning prograde on 12x physics timewarp for the next 15 minutes or however long that takes. Not entirely sure why everyone insists on periapsis kicks when the TWR is so ridiculously bad.

@@nvb9218 bro what are you insane the only reason why periapsis kicks is necessary with ions is because they will run out of electricity. have you noticed the top right? where every periapsis kick ends with no electricity left?

@@thesilentpearl8575 add more solar panels or rtgs, or run the engines at reduced throttle

@@nvb9218 that’s more mass… also the amount of ions he used burns 50 units of electricity every second, you’d need like 3 gigantor xl panels (forgot name lol) with direct sunlight or 200 rtgs to continuously run it. That’s literally a whole space station worth of solar panels.

When I saw how low the empty stall speed was, and how fast the propellers could stop it, I just knew I had to try lol!

I wouldn't quite call it unrefueled, considering the isru used ;) But yes, your plumes are amazing, and made for some really beautiful shots. They are part of my standard kit of visual mods now!

I figured if I'm gonna yeet the lads at the surface of a toxic hellhole they can at least be reasonably comfortable while they do it!

Glad you liked it! This was one of my favorite missions!

It is 2 of the medium rotor, max torque setting (70kNm), one in each payload bay. Each has 16 large ducted fan blades attached to it. The fan blades are offset inwards towards the axis of rotation such that the base of the blade is 10cm on the opposite side of the axis of rotation from the rest of the blade. Because drag and lift for the blade are calculated at a large radius outwards, but lift is applied at the center of the blade, and drag is applied at the base, this results in the torque from the lift being partially canceled out by torque from the drag of blade being applied on the other side of the axis of rotation. At low speed this has negligible effect, but as speed increases (and blade angle likewise increases) the torque from the angled lift vector grows rapidly, but the drag also grows as speed increases, so your high speed performance in terms of number of blades per rotor greatly increases, which enhances your thrust per ec/sec and thrust per kNm thereby saving mass on both rotors and power generation/storage. The tradeoff is that your thrust per blade decreases, because the smaller radius means reduced blade rotational speed, and thus a higher blade angle needed to maintain optimal blade angle of attack. Go to far and the increased number of blades needed outmasses the dry mass saved on power and rotor systems. Its a complicated optimization problem, and changes based on max target speed and altitude, but previously mentioned config is what seemed to work well for me.

@@lt_duckweed Wow. This is layers upon layers of finding loopholes in KSP physics engine to make an EVE SSTO. Thanks for the detailed explanation, this plane is nearly impossible to recreate without that kind of information. :)

@@mephisto8101 no one will ever remember the much more loopholed unrefuelled eve sstos...

@@ryanspence5831 You mean that monster from Bradley Whistance from 2018? kzfaq.info/get/bejne/m7yhecRo1b3IpY0.html

@@mephisto8101 no, i mean my 3.6 ton unrefuelled electric eve ssto and stratz' 1.8 ton version of the same design

1: use parts with really high heat tolerances, especially on the frontmost parts of an assembly. In particular, payload fairings (2600K), service bays (2900K), most wing parts (2400k) are your friend. Note that for this craft the front is not a nosecone, but a 1.25m payload bay to take advantage of this. It is almost always a good idea to have a payload fairing as frontmost part due to them having a 2600k heat tolerance vs round nosecones (2400K) or pointed nosecones (2000K). 2: The trick is for a safe eve entry as safe as possible is to have your ballistic coefficient as low as possible. This means you want to be light-weight, with as much surface slowing you down. In this video, the fuel tanks are nearly all empty when the eve entry happens, while the drag is as high as possible thanks to the large wing area this craft has (which is significantly larger than a SSTO of this size would normally need). This maximizes the deceleration of the vehicle, allowing it to slow down in eve's upper atmosphere quickly, before entering eve's lower atmosphere layers where the incoming heat flux would become problematic.

Also a shallower reentry angle and when you have a spacecraft that generates lift keep in a high alpha (angle of attack) to maximize lift and drag while still in that thin upper atmosphere. Just keep inching your way down and watch out for that zone of heating in the mid atmosphere (around 49k if memory serves) where you need to have enough lift and or drag to not go into that region until you are slow enough to survive the heating.

It's a display bug caused by the props. The aero display considers prop thrust to be negative drag. When I close the prop bays it stops updating the display values for the props, even though they are no longer running, so it shows me having very little drag, even though in actuality, there is quite a lot of drag.

​@@lt_duckweed Ahhh, That makes sense!