A bit late, but I updated X-Plane to beta #12, and it allowed me to load replays from XS5 mission (they seemed to be broken previously).
Here is the launch video, but too bad that there’s a bug that prevents rocket exhaust from being seen (but rocket engines are activated). I had to cut a lot from it, because it’s mostly boring, I left the best parts here. It shows acceleration from 0 km/h to about 28000 km/h. That’s 7.8 km/sec, and it’s the orbital speed for 430,000 feet (124 km).
You can hear loud noise when it lifts off – because it does so at about 300-400 km/h. Why so fast? The X-30 lacks flaps or anything like that, so it has to gain huge speed before it can lift off. It also starts with initial weight of 270 tonnes. You can imagine forces that main gear should withstand – it probably needs to be replaced after every flight.
Oh yeah, I did some mistakes while transcoding videos, so the sound is broken in some parts:
This is re-entry, I had to cut it down from 28 minutes. I left the trajectory a bit early, and ended up 50 miles away from Edwards, but I got a chance to fly over Los-Angeles, and do some sightseeing from height of 24km (80,000 feet).
The landing wasn’t perfect, I didn’t land on this runway before and kind of underestimated it’s size. This runway is 7 km long, so that is not really a problem. Oh yeah, the engines sound as if they would turn on, that’s cause of airflow making them spin + it’s a bug in X-Plane:
Also here’s “artists impression” (I am the artist, and impression is my poor photoshop of the screenshot) of how X-30 reentry could look like. It has only slight basis on reality, and the fire color might be different in reality (due to specifics in the heat shield materials used):
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