Best Payload?

[Jestersage]

While there's the good old orange tank, about what mass do you think is the best choice to use for a payload test of a "realism based" rocket? I want to test if a particular stage I am designing is good enough.

[Harry Rhodan]

Well, the most ugly and best mod evar:

 

[regex]

21 minutes ago, Jestersage said:

While there's the good old orange tank, about what mass do you think is the best choice to use for a payload test of a "realism based" rocket?

Do you mean "realism" as in "real world" or as in "realistic to consider"?

If you mean the first then I would tell you that is not applicable to KSP because payload fractions IRL are much, much lower (1~2%) than what you can easily achieve in KSP (>15% up to nearly 50% with specialized systems, last I checked).

If you mean the later then I would say "what do you want to put into orbit?" In stock I generally build a few subassemblies to handle payloads up to about 70 tons (5, 10, 20, orange tank, 50, 70, something like that). Anything more than that usually requires a custom launcher (the way I build, at least).

The orange tank, though, is what I consider to be a "gold standard" for LKO. You can do a hell of a lot in KSP with 36 tons.

Edited June 29, 2017 by regex

[magnemoe]

The orange tank is heavy, perhaps a bit too heavy, it also have an very high density, most heavy payloads is far more bulky. 
Also it does not have engines, all the stuff I launch who is 32 ton or heavier has engines. this imply it can be its own upper stage, might with drop tanks, or empty tanks if you have an Minmus mining base running. 
I launch an base or interplanetary ship, ship itself takes it from 1.6-1.8 km/s to orbit and have 800 m/s fuel at launch, its refueled in orbit and continue to target. 
I get some weird stuff:

This tanker was launched with 4 srb and 4 mainsail on bottom docking ports using the fuel and oxidizer tanks at burnout I dropped the engines and continued end of gravity turn to Minmus with the LV-N, the LV-T30 is used for Minmus takeoff only after Kerbin takeoff. 
 

[KerikBalm]

On 6/29/2017 at 4:34 AM, regex said:

The orange tank, though, is what I consider to be a "gold standard" for LKO. You can do a hell of a lot in KSP with 36 tons.

Agreed, the orange tank is the gold standard. It used to be the single most massive part before they added 3.75m parts.

As it stands now, its the single largest and most massive part that fits inside a mk3 cargobay, and thus its my cargo gold standard for the way I play KSP now.

I generally design all payloads bound for the surface of another body to fit inside mk3 bays, and thus the orange tank is my standard for payload capacity... though in my 3x rescale, some of my designs for LKO fail to meet that standard:

(note that its half empty)

Its still easy to meet and exceed the standard on smaller worlds:

(Mod planet: Rald, 0.5 G, 450 km radius in stock, 1350 for 3x rescale, which was what I was using above)

*Granted, that duna one was using modded ramrocket engines

An old 100% stock shuttle (in which the external tank gets recovered, but the SRBs don't, no stage recovery mod needed), again the same payload test:

[wumpus]

The gold standard for sharing remains the orange tank.

For a better answer, you have to look at your cargos.  Is there a common satellite that you lift?  Or perhaps some sort of self-contained ISRU lander that you have developed?  Perhaps a deliverable MPL-LPG2 lab?  Or perhaps a standard interplanetary vessel?  If you have something like this, you build something to lift them.  Otherwise, lifting is measured in orange tanks.

[NSEP]

I usually use Ore or Leadballast as a payload. Whatever is the heaviest resource available.

[SpecialSpock]

Because I don't always have a lot of time to play, even if I design a realistic rocket, I never have time for test missions. Therefore, my payload is always my mission.