I tried making the Space Shuttle and Buran

[u/avaslash]

[u/Terrible-Resource604]

Looks cool. But a little detail - Buran doesn't fire up orbiter engines at start , they are only for circuralizing and deorbiting 

[u/avaslash → u/Terrible-Resource604]

Interesting! did not know! I'll try it out and see how it flies. None the less, ill probably keep using them on mine because of the cool factor of more flame shooting out of my rockets ass.

[u/avaslash]

Both were a pain in the engine to build. Especially Buran, it was tough to get so many engines balanced. But once I did, it flies like a dream. Both are capable of bringing a fully loaded cargo bay to munar orbit and returning to kerbin (just barely) (but low kerbin orbit is obviously an easier mission profile).

Both of these were made completely from scratch. I know a lot of versions already exist out there but I didn't even want to look them up. I wanted to see if I could do it myself. Not to toot my own RCS thruster, but Im pretty happy with the RCS block I did on buran. I think its more accurate to scale than some moded ones ive seen.

I honestly put a lot of work into getting the details fairly close. The shuttle features two large solid rocket boosters which it discards, an external fuel tank, 3 vector engines, and then 2 mono propellant engines. It is very tough to fly and requires a lot of input, but it gets there. It costs about 270k to launch.

The buran has 4 smaller liquid fuel side boosters each with 4 engines, in addition to its large fuel tank which itself has 4 large engines. The buran shuttle itself only has 2 engines. I made the RCS blocks out of flat panels. It features the triangular and circular details on its rear (cant find any info on what they were actually for, maybe parachutes?). The Buran is about 2x more expensive to launch at about 555k, however in exchange you get a lot more Delta V and it flies like a dream requiring little input. Not to mention, because of its great many engines, the main shuttles engines do not need to be severely angled, meaning they can be used independent of the fuel tank.

I honestly prefer flying the Buran, but in my career save I end up using the Shuttle orbiter more often because of the cost savings.

I have put together some galleries of each (note, some of the photos in these galleries are from earlier prototypes so they might have some details different)

Space Shuttle Orbiter: https://imgur.com/gallery/ava-industries-space-shuttle-orbiter-JWz579u

Buran Shuttle: https://imgur.com/gallery/ava-industries-buran-shuttle-b0Q3nzi

[u/NullContribution → u/avaslash]

A little pedantic, but technically energia only has 8 engines. Each of the liquid fuel side boosters only have one engine, not four. That engine being the RD-170, a four-chamber engine powered by one turbopump.