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Description
Principally, the Defiant's flight path trajectory is not all that different from that of modern rocket launches that any KSP player is familiar with. The most important departure is the variation of oxidizer injection to trade specific impulse for thrust, maximizing thrust in the lower atmosphere and throttling it down as it loses mass. Figuring out the specifics required developing my own code, importing engine figures from the Rocket Propulsion Analysis package, but the results speak for themselves. In spite of the ship's enormous cross section, with sufficiently high thrust to quickly burn past the lower atmosphere and thus minimize drag losses, a mass ratio of around 4.5-5 is possible (compare to around 16 for the space shuttle). Once in orbit, the ship can transition to fully nuclear propulsion to get as much delta-v as possible, enabling all the missions described in the lower figure. The ship has enough propellant to do this from launch without orbital refueling (although these figures do assume aerobraking to return to LEO), making it suitable for practical single stage to orbit operation essentially anywhere in Earth's sphere of influence.

Description
Principally, the Defiant's flight path trajectory is not all that different from that of modern rocket launches that any KSP player is familiar with. The most important departure is the variation of oxidizer injection to trade specific impulse for thrust, maximizing thrust in the lower atmosphere and throttling it down as it loses mass. Figuring out the specifics required developing my own code, importing engine figures from the Rocket Propulsion Analysis package, but the results speak for themselves. In spite of the ship's enormous cross section, with sufficiently high thrust to quickly burn past the lower atmosphere and thus minimize drag losses, a mass ratio of around 4.5-5 is possible (compare to around 16 for the space shuttle). Once in orbit, the ship can transition to fully nuclear propulsion to get as much delta-v as possible, enabling all the missions described in the lower figure. The ship has enough propellant to do this from launch without orbital refueling (although these figures do assume aerobraking to return to LEO), making it suitable for practical single stage to orbit operation essentially anywhere in Earth's sphere of influence.