SPAAAACE

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Space Planes > Reusable Rockets

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>>49760533

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>>49760558

>>49760598
>>49760558
>Those wing configurations
>Capable of surviving re-entry

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Are spacegirls okay?

>>49760533
Space planes can be useful in the future for getting crew and small cargo up, but in general they're a complete waste of money. Especially the Space Shuttle.

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>>49760558
>>49760533
>>49760598

Fuck your space planes. A waste of cash and a engineering fuck up EVERY TIME.

VTVL SSTOs where it's at! Towers forever!

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>>49760328
>>49764613

Most space ships are 'towers', but we literally have a hard time imaging it so we always put them on their side in drawings.

Even I, a hard-mundane scifi fanatic, find it hard to overcome that ingrained artistic style. Space is really, really alien.

>>49764613
That is the dumbest thing I have ever seen. If Tsiolkovsky were still alive he'd be crying at that image.

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>>49764629

So I'm just gonna rotate all my pics to their main focus of acceleration if they're not already towers

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>>49764639

A reusable VTVL SSTO is the dumbest thing you've ever seen?

Why?

It's not going to the moon. It's not going to Mars. All it does is launch to LEO for transport of goods and people, and they can fuck off from there with a dedicated craft, then it splashes back down/lands down.
Better than a fucking 'spaceplane'

>>49764641

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>>49764653

In fact here are some more VTVL SSTOs. Can't be worse than the shuttle fuck up.

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>>49764661

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>>49764674

>>49764653
The idea of a space plane is that you can use lift generated from the wings and conventional supersonic jet engines to expend as little fuel as possible until you've hit the Karman Line and must use conventional rocket engines to get yourself either to a suborbital trajectory or (in the future) an orbital trajectory.

Conventional rocket engines are god awful at consuming as little fuel as possible, which is why the Rocket Equation comes in and you have staged rockets dropping more and more mass away to get objects into orbit and the first stage having to manually feed fuel in due to the surrounding air pressure and the second (orbital) stage being able to utilize a far simpler pressure fed design due to it being launched from an altitude with almost no surrounding air pressure.

This space turd design basically proposes that we use the least efficient way to launch anything into orbit without taking advantage of multiple stages this turning it into an engineering nightmare.

And that's not even counting how the fuck do you expect to get that thing back down again making it also have to survive reentry.

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>>49764685

But yea, I grew up in the 'dark ages' - the 80s and 90s. Where the shuttle failed to deliver, where the European space planes never got off the board. Where SEI happened.

Where the Delta Clipper and the Kankoh Maru and the Phoenix went up from drawing board up to 1/3rd scale prototypes.

Where the ISS went from 30 bil to 130 bil over it's lifespan

Kinda made me a bit of a 'send cans up first' kinda guy. Skylab over MIR or ISS; VTVL over VTHL/HTHL whatevers

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>>49764613

>SSTO that can't land at a specific location and has to be recovered by another vehicle

It's like you don't even want airline-style spaceflight.

>>49764714
Yes, everyone in the industry has known the shuttle was a terrible idea, but the idea that it makes space planes in general look bad is laughable as the shuttle was not a conventional spaceplane design. In addition that doesn't make that space turd concept still not terrible as well. Mass produced engines with reusable stages is the future, and suborbital flights can be made with space planes that are NOT the shuttle.

>>49764707

Yea, and fuck that noise. We'll 'use the most inefficent way' - the rocket equation is harsh, but it is not unforgiving - because it's more simple.

And it's called a heatshield design - same way Soyuz and Apollo come back to earth. Having seen the Delta Clipper tackle all of that, damn the 'inefficiency' or 'how to survive re-entry', with the Russians and Americans doing it on a smaller scale in the 'return' leg of their journeys, I'll stay with the 'space turd', you can keep your little metal planes.

Not to mention, but you didn't hear this from me: what are we doing right now? VTVLs; with TSTO designs and even one NSF VTVL design almost exactly to the Kankoh Maru. Where are the space planes? One little USAF bot and European designs which never get off the board?

Yea, I'll stay with the 'space turds'.

>>49764714

>>49764764
>the rocket equation is harsh, but it is not unforgiving

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?

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>>49764764
>>49764714

>>49764732

Yea no shit. I don't. Space is not 'airline' worthy; space is 'send shit up already' worthy.

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>>49760328
>Tower Ships edition

YEEEEEEAAAAA

>>49764764

>And it's called a heatshield design - same way Soyuz and Apollo come back to earth.

Not that guy, but; okay, that's fine. Do you know that the Soyuz literally explodes its heatshield off after re-entry? Because it's single-use? The Apollo capsule's heatshield is one-use too. Not to mention, your designs have rockets in the bottom, making holes in the heatshield. How you gonna shield those? Re-entry plasma coming into your craft is pretty bad, just ask the crew of the STS Columbia. And if you have fuel left in your tanks? You'll break up AND explode all at once.

>>49764790

I do. Just because you see an 'inefficent design' does not make overall an 'inefficent vehicle'. All these designs have done the math of the equation and can still bring shit to LEO, so what's the problem? If it gets the job done, with all the advancements along the way tackled with the benefit of 1) no real waste, 2) less engineering complications due to no staging, and 3) gets shit to LEO, then it simply works, and that's good enough.

>>49764819

They are closed with receding bays, like the landing gear - they're moved aside for the engines to burn and then cover the engines when on reentry, until the aerobrake has slowed down the craft enough to be reopened and used again for the final splashdown/landing.

Furthermore it would be most prudent to have a check while in orbit to make sure the shield is fine; IIRC in the shuttle disasters NASA didn't even tell them because they had no other craft ready to pick them up and had to write them off as a lost. If we're using VTVL SSTOs then it would be most likely - since obviously all such use will be in the future - that there will be standby craft.

>>49764828
>this design that requires all the engineering requirements of every single stage rolled into one has less engineering complications due to having to do everything
>this UNTESTED design simply works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTFwAxfHgSA

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>>49764794
Interesting read for this. Dude made a book for his RPG/comic just on spaceship design, mostly hard sci-fi though it has jump drives. Put some thought into the layout and materials (resources, thruster rings and manuevering, monomolecular composites via electrochemical layering, etc). No artificial gravity or inertial dampers, so the ships are vertical, the seats automatically collapse "flat" with force, the ships never exceed normal g's of acceleration except in emergencies... etc.

The decks are modular and designed to be swapped out on standardized hull frames !
I like that idea.
1) Easy to repurpose a ship
2) Easier to repair when you can swap out a couple decks, replace damaged armor panels, and the only thing you may have to repair is the frame

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>>49764878
>>49764794

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>>49764898

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>>49764906

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>>49764916

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>>49764926

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>>49764944

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>>49764972

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>>49764981

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>>49764898
These look like skeletons.
>>49764892
>>49764794
These talk about more durable ships, and has a similar internal layout despite being very featureless on the outside. But I don't see a lot of actual Armor armor aside from putting the fuel/water tanks fore and aft.

Here's what I wonder:
What will "durable" ships actually look like?
Either for combat, radiation, and/or collisions with tiny objects.

We really don't have the material science, and probably never will, for thin shelled ships. Unless maybe we get some serious non-Newtonian fluids? I'm imaging something like the fat cylinder ships above, but with more empty space rather than relying on the fuel tanks.

"Spaced Armor" it's called. You've seen it on tanks before. Big ships use the same concept with multiple hulls with space between them. I'm thinking more like that. Hypervelocity impacts actually have their own considerations, where even if it doesn't penetrate a layer, the force of the deformation will actually rip away material from the otherside like if you weaponized a newton's cradle.

>>49765015
3 layers:

1st layer being a whipple shield for micrometeorites
2nd layer being copious amounts of water for cosmic ray protection
3rd layer being the pressure vessel for the astronauts

>>49764764
>Not to mention, but you didn't hear this from me: what are we doing right now? VTVLs; with TSTO designs and even one NSF VTVL design almost exactly to the Kankoh Maru.
Are there any Reusable Rocket SSTOs in development? Kankoh Maru was like 20 years ago and AFAIK hasn't been heard from since.

>>49764828
>I do. Just because you see an 'inefficent design' does not make overall an 'inefficent vehicle'.
This might be true. The Kankoh Maru for example only has a payload fraction of something like 0.7% to LEO (compared to around 4.2% for a Falcon 9). But as long as refurbishment and checks are not too expensive it might work.

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>>49765015
>What will "durable" ships actually look like?
>Either for combat, radiation, and/or collisions with tiny objects.
The ships from Children of a Dead Earth is probably a good place to start. Though one thing that struck me about those designs is the radiation. It seems a lot of the more realistic designs try to put the reactor as far away from everything else as possible and cram everything behind the shadow shield to avoid issues with radiation gradually degrading your radiators or backscatter affecting the crew.

CoaDE doesn't seem to worry about it. Maybe the power levels involved aren't sufficient to be such a concern.

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>>49765015
>I don't see a lot of actual Armor armor aside from...
No, you've got the right idea. It's spaced armor of sorts, those ships have a lot of non-critical space inside which is very decentralized for essentials (water, air, etc) dispersed through the ship which adds to the size. Also they're made for long journeys carrying non-astronauts (Eg civilian colonists) who haven't been psych evaluated for long trips. Even the military ships are pretty luxurious compared to our ISS. This is feasible since they're True Spaceships aka built and decommissioned without entering atmosphere.

It assumes some shit you can't really stop. The super-advanced precursor Aliens in the comic lol its humans ship they find had the crew killed by a micrometeorite shower despite being a few hundred years more advanced.

Hypervelocity impacts, as you said, are a bitch.

Would be cool to have an Empire that punishes traitors by shooting them in pods into black holes.

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>>49765182
Give them the Death Metal penalty?

>>49760533
>>49760558
>>49760598
>>49764732
If you're talking sci-fi, then yeah space planes are neat and all that. But if you are talking actually getting humanity off the Earth and back in to space, the space plane idea is (at current tech levels) a dead end.

We shouldn't give it up completely, but it isn't going to get us anywhere soon (barring a huge breakthrough of some sort). But we shouldn't let it steal money from projects that will work and work in the next 5-10 years.

>>49765240
Suborbital, not orbital, space planes can still be useful; I think Virgin Galactic will finally pull through after their disastrous tests, but space plane projects like the Skylon are definitely a dead end.

The biggest thing we need to get humanity into space if mass production of engines and stages. SpaceX is on track to be the company that does it, but Blue Origin is catching up to them with their niche of significantly lower cost suborbital flights.

>>49765268
>Blue Origin is catching up to them with their niche of significantly lower cost suborbital flights.
Their next planned rocket is bigger than a Falcon 9. Suborbital is not their goal as far as I have heard. Maybe you're thinking of Virgin Galactic.

>>49765390
Really? I though they had a similar short term goal to Virgin Galactic's long term goal: funding through suborbital passenger flights. I guess I'm wrong, then.

In that case this is great news. Private industries need competition to function.

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>>49760328

>>49764629
>>49764641

To be fair, it's not really artistic style. On a planet's surface, things that travel go sideways relative to us. So when we draw a thing that's travelling, we put it sideways. It feels natural because 90% of all things on earth travel sideways, not upwards.

>>49765444
Their first rocket was kind of like SpaceX's Grasshopper. Just a test rocket. Their next one will be kind of like a Falcon9. Their new engine is even a Methane/Oxygen engine like SpaceX's Raptor. Not saying their copying, it may just be a sensible development path.

>>49765496
If that rocket was comparable to the Grasshopper then that's a hell of a test case. This is really good to hear.

Hopefully some company in Singapore steps in and builds a launch side on the equator, then we can REALLY get things into space cheaply. Brazil could also be another candidate, but I don't have high hopes the Brazilian government would allow it.