starlordthis is a ongoing project and entry from last years contest and the evolution of years of work and study I have made a lot more progress and gained some new insights into the design and process of this spaceplane/one man dyi space program. laying everything out in the open source contest forum with hackaday.io has helped with giving me more motivation to push the project along and a good opportunity to network and share my design ideals. so on this years contest I will be rehashing part of last years contest to give you a general ideal of what I have in mind but you can check last years entry if your real interested. on my updates section I will be taking up from where I left off and discussing some of those issues and what I have been up to since the last contest. what I have learned some change of plans and some of the off shoots. so hears my description from last year that still looks good to day. interested in personal space craft on a budget the only viable option I see at the moment is a fairly self contained single stage to orbit lifting body craft I hybrid aircraft spacecraft flying fuel tank with rocket I will start out at the beginning and give some of the background on my design and some more details and the logic my design solutions and reasons for sharing this very viable design I've been developing off and on for the last ten years then get in to more detailed descriptions of hardware and then go into the different flight geometries and there uses also in the upcoming weeks I will be scanning my notebooks and showing my designs in more detail with hand written sketches and then start digging out and dusting off my cad models and start cleaning them up and putting in some more detailed explanations IN the beginning I was always interested in aviation but never quite having the funds to get that involved past basic flight instruction a sport of the well off at least not for one with one foot in the poverty level so I figured I will build a kit plane and studied all the designs methods of construction reading the story's of dedicated builders there heartbreaks and triumphs and had a few ideals of my own but always that one small problem I am fuc!#$%^&* broke I don't got no dam money. so I kept studying and designing. then came Burt Rutan and his space ship one the first private spaceships to break gravity and I said I can build one of them maybe better. The ultimate hack of all hacks if you survive . lets get into more detail as previously stated I am using a lifting body fuselage built in three sections so why three sections first off ease of manufacture building the main larger center section in common frame tube Monique construction seams the most logical also a note on this center section as far as scaling. it would be easier widening and or lengthening the design. and this center section with large flat curved surface on the bottom is ideal for hanging different thermal protection systems for different flight geometries that I will get in to more detail later..so lets talk more on lifting body you mite have noticed in the pictures of the cad models and if you opened my note book file most all these designs have a blunt nose those are tradeoffs I made for the reentry part of this fuselage what this does is upon reentry sets up a shock wave in front mitigating some of the heat blast effect similar to what was used on the space shuttle the currant Boeing air force space plane and the Russian space plane designs .lets talk outer fuselage sections these components can be built in high temp composite in pieces using standard methods but now with the advanced materials at hand can be build cold molded meaning you don't need a giant oven or autoclave like Lockheed martin or Boeing .basically using composite boat building practices. o by the way also you may have noticed you don't see much in the line of landing gear or wheels on these fuselages hell no we don't need no stinking landing gear these are flying space boats 75% of the earth is water. wheel wells trap doors mounting points hydraulics struts wheels brakes all this weight and some holes down on the bottom where the blast furnace is happening no thanks keep it simple keep it light. dumb ass landing gear was probably why the space shuttle burned in. No we don't need no stinking landing gear hell I am a Alaskan we don't need no stinking landing strips I land where I want. talking of the home land this bird that I designed is called the black raven in the first nation tribes the spirits of the elders when they die are taken by the raven to the after life so I thought it would be a good name as this bird ...