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Epigram Shuttle

A vertical-takeoff horizontal-landing shuttle.
⨴ On landing, touchdown speed should be below 15m/s vertical and 180m/s horizontal. This might be a bit tricky to achieve.
⨴ Pull too many G's and you'll break the elevators. They're glass surfaces.
⨴ If you're bored enough, you can realign the shuttle with the crane after landing, hoist it back onto the pad, and launch it again.





The Epigram-class shuttles were designed by the ██████████████████ both as ████████████████████ and to replace their expendable research vehicles (which ████████████████████████████████).

While a single shuttle could orbit the homeworld of ██████████ without much trouble, it would be another matter on █████ - which was some 30% larger. For this reason, they were also designed so they could be attached back-to-back with propellant crossfeed, allowing one to stage off of the other. This would ██████████████████████████████████████████ - a shuttle would be useful on ██████████, but a dedicated booster stage would be useless until arrival at █████.

Each one was designed to orbit 20 tons of people and cargo, and land 100 tons of the same. While some 56 people can be put into orbit at once, over a thousand people can be brought down from orbit by emptying the main LOX tank and using it as passenger space.


No, I'm not going to tell you what's been redacted.

The vehicle design is partially based on the British MUSTARD shuttle concept design, which uses three near-identical vehicles staging off of each other. It's not particularly efficient in terms of fuel, and probably a pain in the rear to design, but is excellent for manufacturing efficiency once the kinks are ironed out.
It is designed explicitly for ease of manufacture, with the hull being symmetric on two axes and constructed from as few - and simply-designed - parts as possible.

I did actually intend to stick two of these together but decided it was too much of a pain in the rear to wire up properly.
The vehicle has since been fitted with the required hardware, though, in the form of a hardpoint and a retractable attachment arm.

Some technical stats for the vehicle design are as follows:

Vehicle specifications (Epigram)
Mass (dry/payload/propellant/total): 140t / 20t / 882t / 1042t
Shuttle x1 (mass ratio/stage delta-v/total delta-v): 6.5 / 6745m/s / 6745m/s
Shuttle x2 (mass ratio/stage delta-v/total delta-v): 1.8 / 2007m/s / 8752m/s

The hull is constructed from 304L stainless steel, and plated with a heat-resistant nickel alloy on the underside and wings (or ceramic tiles, assuming that doesn't cut it).

Engine specifications (NA-4)
Type: Methane/Oxygen, staged combustion cycle
Specific impulse: 367
Oxidiser/fuel ratio: 3.5
Thrust: 2.5 MN

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