Zootycoon said:
Big solids, mounted low on the airframe will do a lot of damage to the runway. A college of mine organised the Sea Dart missile box fire demo, which involved firing a full size, but inert Sea Dart from a proposed storage box with a real booster. The box containing the missile was not far from parallel with the reinforced concrete pad it was bolted to. When fired the pressure wave generated around the booster nozzle is difficult to comprehend. Upon firing it tore out chunks of concrete, complete with internal rebar.
Yep, you are right... Thought about it when the drawing was done... Ah well.
That said military booster use powder that is far more violent than the human rated stuff; an RPG 29 uses ALL it's fuel before it's even left the tube!
I was thinking of it having a tall front gear and short rear gears, the whole underside acting as a lifting body.
Once the outside boosters are on, the thing would be off the ground in nothing, nearly no rolling (to within G's a human can take)
As for the wings, they are for the glide back, all "boost stage" control is thrust vectoring and the control on the inside surface of the vertical stabilisers.
To make it simple, apart from two block flaps, there are no movable surface on the "hot side".
All the appendages are "slabed", X15 style.
For an abort, the boosters can be ejected...
Or the crew module can eject and become a small semi ballistic lifting body and land at a emergency site in line with the launch (hence the big flappy control surfaces things on it).