Playing a bit KSP (Kerbal Space Program) again. I love building huuugeass rockets and fiddling with spaceships just to see them crash horribly or go up in a fireball, but his time i tried to build a plane instead of a rocket to see how fast i could go in the atmosphere.
Well, behold, Flaming Dart Mk1. 6 Ramjet engines, 500m/s, still climbing to an altitude where the engines give max thrust.
800m/s, air resistance starts to kick in and stuff starts to get hot.
Max speed i reached in the atmosphere was 1387m/s, then engine 5 and 6 failed (on the right wing), i instantly came into a brutal spin which turned my heat shield, the other engines failed too and ultiamtely the plane broke to pieces midair. Was uncontrollable at those speeds anyway, every little steering resulted would've resulted in losing control entirely.
Highest G-Force in my spin of death was 21G btw
Also tried to build one where i had some solid rocket boosters attached which i tried at different flight stages, but they didnt really give any speed advantage due to the weight. They are great to get stuff to orbit fast, but in horizontal flight they arent useful apparently, so i went with jet engines only.
Flaming Dart Mk2 will have another 4 engines installed on the wings since i still had plenty of fuel left before breaking apart and maybe some more air intakes for the engines. Still investigating the engine failure, so i might be able to fix that for the next version of the plane
If anyone plays KSP, lets see who gets the fastest ship
Edit: Ah well had to try it out. Added another 4 ramjet engines, this time it went pretty well actually. I reached a bit above 1450m/s when my first engine failed, and thank god it was one of the fuselage mounted ones so i didnt start to spin around instantly due to massive thrust loss on one side, but i still had to correct flight path a bit, and at those speeds that turned out to be extremely hard. Shortly after that pretty much all engines stalled and i couldnt turn them on again so i dropped to the ground like a rock with nearly 1000m/s speed ^^ Btw, i reached that speed in under 1 minute :O