Well, I thought 600t to orbit w/ engine heat is an achievement. But then Altair did it too. Well, two days ago I learned that epic chicken did 650t. So I decided I must -beat him- do better. This is the rocket I used to get 600t into orbit originally:
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It has this extension mechanism that allows me to extend the titans so I don't need to sacrifice launcher mass to prevent engines destroying fuel. (Sorry for the grainy gif)
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Well, I was looking at it yesterday to think how to optimize it.
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See all these red circles? That could be fuel!
But idiot me from January decided "it works so it doesn't need improvement". Anyway, this is what I got:
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It looks less wonky and has a smaller part count. I flew it with a quite aggressive ascent profile, I got 31% fuel left in the third stage. According to my calculations, this means I could add like 175t of fuel to it, that would be 775t
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So, I redid the second stage. And I ended up with this:
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The payload only weighed 764t instead of the planned 775t, but it got into a 30x55 orbit with 5% fuel left. So, that's at least 20t of fuel to add! So, more mass launcher upcoming! I want to have at least 785t in raw fuel to orbit, but I wanna make a variant that can send max. 600t, but with a bigger payload room for stuff that is less dense than fuel tanks.