This can be helpful for protecting payloads with delicate parts that can be easily ripped off during ascent and prevent overheating in the case of very fast craft. The size and shape of the fairing can be edited by the player to fit a specific payload. They have a rather poor ISp though, for their thrust, and so they aren't very good intermediate engines, especially for larger crafts.The AE-FF1 Airstream Protective Shell (1.25m) is a fairing introduced in version 1.0. Also, they can buy you a little more speed and thrust in air-breathing mode, but are harder to push through transsonic barrier (lower thrust that Whiplashes at transsonic speeds). Rapiers are good in that they can serve both as turbojets and intermediate engines - you save up the mass of two separate engines. Of course Aerospikes are the "classic" choice. Recently I tried an SSTO with BACC SRB for the main hull, and it performed very nicely too.
As ridiculous as it sounds, Poodle is a decent choice. The "fish jump" ones are a challenge of choosing the right intermediate engine - anything of reasonable ISp and thrust, from Reliant to Rhino, is a fair game depending on the plane size, desired thrust and flight profile. The slow climb planes are a challenge to balance drag and thrust, as the nukes are so weak the air at lower altitudes can utterly thwart your attempts if you don't have enough power or too much drag. It's good for passenger flights and small payloads. The airplane can be significantly smaller, and arrive to the orbit with enough fuel for some quite distant travel (less fuel total, but much better TWR due to low mass). Fifteen minutes in constant flames is quite standard as you sloooowly gain the second 1100m/s and climb just enough so that earned speed lets lift catch up with reduced atmospheric density, and lowered gravity drag. Once nukes stop giving you acceleration you pitch only a tiny bit up, and fire the nukes. The other approach ("arduous climb") forgoes the intermediate engines, depending only on nukes and turbojets. The extra advantage is that you have some high-thrust engines for maneuvers you want to execute fast. The disadvantage is a worse payload fraction (even if the payload total will be better!) and lower delta-V once in orbit. It gives you a decent time to orbit and is the general strategy to use with any heavier SSTO that would be too draggy to climb on nuke power alone. What you did is the "Fish Jump" approach: gain 1000-1100m/s on turbojets, then use a strong engine (something of moderately good thrust) to get closer to orbital speeds and altitudes, then switch to nukes to circularize and go elsewhere. That's a reasonable strategy, although add nukes (and corresponding Liquid Fuel tanks). But a moderate capture burn aided by very gentle airbraking? Why not? Sure if you dive right in, you're going to burn. It did perform a capture burn at a very high apoapsis, then I performed some magic bringing the apoapsis even higher, and literally aerobraked from the very edge of its SOI with 85km apoapsis. I went for some 85km periapsis with this: Ant, Stayputnik, small tank, antenna, thermometer, barometer and three tiny solar panels. Updated - It's not nearly as bad if you use airbraking very carefully. Although the optimal transfers should remain the same. And you're likely gonna get many much faster cheap transfers that are useless due to high encounter angle = very high capture speeds. aerocapture or fly-by)" to get just departure burns graph. The transfer graphs consider the sum of departure and capture burns for the delta-V displayed. You can end up anywhere between flying horizontally at 25km and aiming 30 degrees from vertical with 80km periapsis, all depending on your payload's lift/drag profile. If you don't really care about the gravity turn being optimal. Rockets often stray off the 90 degrees course. Updated - If you don't care about your orbit inclination. By the way, ever tried to bring a standard-sized airplane into orbit as a rocket payload? Good luck with your "let gravity do the work for you". The ascent had to be done with SAS on, set to prograde. Which resulted in dumped stages to crash into the main hull or rip the drills off. And this one would perfectly follow a gravity turn, except - as normally - the nose wouldn't point exactly prograde. I overcame it with a pinecone nose - a nose cone thickly lined with Vernor engines. The top one - I couldn't get it to do a gravity turn - I couldn't even get it to fly straight up! At 400m/s it would flip if it strayed one degree from prograde. Once strutted properly it allowed for schoolbook gravity turn. The bottom one (power tower) required about twice its own weight in struts attached to decouplers to make it to the orbit in one piece. That's a happy illusion with balanced, tight loads like yours.
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