breakthrough

There is an absolute maximum delta-v for a single stage based on the ratio of wet mass to dry mass, so no amount of cleverness will get 12,000 delta-v even with aerospikes and an unlimited number of fuel tanks.

I saw "cruiser" in the title, and given that any real life cruiser less than 100 years old is on the order of nine thousand tons, I was expecting something that would carry at least an orange tank of cargo. I was ever so slightly disappointed, but the stacked engine configuration was cool.

Make sure your orbiting lab has at least three docking ports. One for the lander, one for the vehicle that will move crew and science, and one last one to add on something you didn't realize you needed until after you arrive.

Cost in funds, part count, and having a separate dedicated fuel supply so I don't inadvertently blow 2km/s of LVN delta-v doing 10m/s of maneuvers with 260Isp thrusters.

This may get nerfed in 1.0 but the adapter pieces that hold fuel (such as the C7 brand adapter and the Mk3 to 3.75m) are so much cheaper than regular fuel tanks that you can beat SRB costs with liquid fueled engines. Doubly true if you keep all the engines on the core and recover them all.

Feels a little a redundant with all these good replies from people, but I did say I would post pics. The engines are mounted in the wings and CoM and CoL stay aligned both with and without the 4.5t payload This shot of the undercarriage shows how I normally mount the gears. They are angled so the light is in a better direction and they are clipped upward so as to keep the gear bays from sinking into the terrain if the gears are raised while on the ground. A gear bay that is partly clipped into the ground won't lift the vessel up off the ground when it lowers. As I said, despite the Com being very far in front of the rear gears, it easily rotates by the middle of the runway. This vessel has about 600 delta-v left on orbit, enough to circularize at 500km. Probably should have used RCS tanks as the test payload since my delta-v displays insisted on using the fuel in the payload so I don't have more exact numbers. craft file on MediaFire

The CoG thing is a common misconception born out of a standard practice rather than a physical necessity that can't be engineered around. I'm a little too sleepy to KSP properly right now, but I'll whip something up next time I have a chance to play that will lift off before the end of the runway with absolute zero possibility of striking its tail and post a pic.

It turns out I like canards, so all the pictures I have on hand feature them. But the landing gears can be mounted on ventral fins. As for mounting engines in the wings, most of the mass is in the engines anyway so the CoM should follow them forward substantially allowing you to have the wings more forward as well. EDIT: After reading your post more carefully, I guess you don't want my solution for aesthetic reasons. Just in case you don't already know, the other stock solution for working around the landing gears is VTOL.

A clamp-o-tron jr is both lighter and doesn't drain electricity and you can control from them just as well.

If the node was at periapsis and some of the burn took place far away from periapsis (likely in a Moho encounter), then Oberth effect is working against you and it will take more delta-v than the node indicates since the node assumes an instantaneous burn.

[thread=80654]StripSymmetry mod[/thread] will do what you are trying to do.

I would like the tech tree to be a plain text config file so I don't need to wrangle a hacky undocumented mod to make tiny little changes to it. I want the aerodynamics to be unrealistic enough that my rockets aren't forced to look and fly exactly like everyone else's just to minimally get into orbit. I want the reentry to be easy enough that I don't have to spend large amounts of real time watching pods slowly fall down just to keep them from exploding.

TreeLoader never worked well on my computer so I can't help you much with that. You could open up the persistent.sfs file and just give yourself the science points you normally get from Minmus if you can't find a tree you like. But, if you can't do Mun missions with fuel lines and the LV-909 you are badly misunderstanding some of the game mechanics and bigger rockets won't fix that. If it is taking more than one afternoon to mine Minmus for science, you need a biome hopping lander that can hit 4 or more biomes in a single mission. Now if you don't want advice on those things that's cool, but if you post some pictures of what your doing when you get bogged down, myself or someone else on these forums will gladly help you take your game to the next level.

Can't you just pulse the 'b' key, if you're willing to pulse action group 1 anyway?

Brakes have their own action group (defaults to 'b' key) that behaves the way you describe.