Some of you may remember one of my experimental craft designs from previous versions; the ones which use huge numbers of wings around a very small body to drill their way through the atmosphere w/o engines.
Well, as it turns out, I realized the new canards and advanced canards had insanely better lift/drag and lift/mass ratios than the wings available at the time. I present to you XPREMENTAL:
It uses a single SRB to launch (as this design needs an engine to start out the flights), with that SRB being used as the craft's body. It has 104 advanced canards for thrust, with the old-style capsule (though I suspect I could improve it by switching to a new one). It has 8 struts reinforcing the capsule's connection, as the high torque can result in it falling off and killing the craft if they aren't there.
So now you must be wondering as to its performance. It is in fact insanely good compared to the old wing versions:
Max velocity: 1560 m/s in atmosphere, w/o engines
Max altitude: aprox. 170 km or so (whatever 1560 m/s gets you up to, really)
Optimal altitude: 4,000 - 10,000 meters
So yeah; near-orbital velocities at very low altitude, allowing for point-to-point travel in a timely manner. Can't really land it, and it does get a bit jiggly with all the wings, but overall a pretty interesting experimental craft. The main limitations are cpu speed and drag; cpu speed prevents it from scaling up much more, as even doubling the size and number of wings would probably bring it to a crawl; drag prevents it from getting too much faster (which may be helped a bit by changing cockpits). But that it can already make it to orbital distances makes it a potentially useful tool, or at least augmentation for another design.
Oh, and it can pull nearly 30 G's while accelerating.
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Topic: Kerbal Space Program: Now Hiring Optimistic Astronauts for Dangerous Munission (Read 1488427 times)