NecroBones

Oh and also--- just wait until you start putting 19 mainsails in a lifter... lol (OK, actually it was 18, with a skipper in the center.)

It's become a fairly common design, I think, since nothing really beats orange tanks and mainsails for pure lifting power. Some main points of advice when building this way, to keep it from blowing up: 1. As others have said, struts. I would put a pair of struts at each of the top and bottom of the tanks, to hold it to the center tank. Wherever you use a fuel-line, remember that it also acts as a strut. To keep the design balanced (and not introduce rotation), treat the fuel-line as a strut, and put a matching strut on the other side. Struts automatically disconnect if they bridge over a decoupler, so don't worry, and just add struts anywhere you need to. 2. As others have said, you can use the more stand-offish radial decouplers to have some breathing room between tanks. You want to use these, and fuel-lines, to do what we call "asparagus staging". The tanks will feed fuel through each other, so that you can drop them in pairs, until you're down to just the final, center tank. The fuel crossfeed lets you drop empty tanks, and have all of the other tanks still full when it happens, but make use of all engines simultaneously. This buys you maybe 5-10% more total acceleration when compared to dumping all 6 of the outer engines at once, while letting them use just their own fuel. 3. Use "Sepratrons". Those tiny little solid-rocket engines are designed for aiding in separating stages. Use those to push your discarded tanks away from your ship, to reduce the chance of it scraping other parts of your ship off. 4. Stitching. This is a method of using struts to strengthen the connection between engines and fuel tanks, or tanks to other tanks, in a vertical stack. Make a strut that starts near the bottom of a fuel tank, and extends straight down into the engine underneath it, and it makes a little "stitch" that helps hold it together.

(Emphasis mine) That's the crux of it, right there. Not everyone wants the same extended features. The things that I think really *need* to be added are the informational displays from some of the mods. We should have overall weight, TWR, and delta-V estimates available in the VAB, for instance (such as what you can get with Engineer or MechJeb). I'd really like a radar (topographical) altimeter display that doesn't require looking in the cockpit. More parts, better aerodynamics, clouds & weather, robot arms, and the like would all be great stock additions. But the bulk of the mods out there probably add things that go beyond what's needed for everyone. So I think the devs are doing the right thing about carefully considering what gets added.

I think Imgur is limiting the rate at which you can look at the photos, or something. If you wait a short time and come back, they start loading again. None of them are actualy black.

When building my ships, I don't usually look at the dV numbers for the lower stages. There, I care more about TWR, and whether I can get the orbital stages into actual orbit. dV only matters to me from the point after getting into orbit. Once there, if you still have 8 km/s or so left, you can go just about anywhere.

I've had many "mistakes of omission" in my launches. As you'd probably expect, I was meticulous early on, but now that launching has become routine, it's easy to forget a detail. I've forgotten or brainlessly messed up things like: * No antenna for a my science lab space station. It had to use the lander's antenna instead. * A skycrane that only had a stack decoupler instead of docking port, while the rover it dropped had the docking port. No picking up and moving that rover. * No RCS on a lander that needed to re-dock. Thankfully the orbiter could do it, just less easily. * No probe controller on a lander that I wanted to de-orbit after getting the crew off (but MechJeb worked in its place, I discovered at that moment, as it was the first craft I added it to) * A ton more I'm forgetting. Thankfully, most of my hair-brained mistakes have been recoverable in some fashion. Of course, this doesn't count the countless launch failures as I fine-tune the struts.

I don't usually grab screenshots of my explosions, but I've certainly had my fair share. Here are the screenshots I do have. In fact, I turned the first one into my desktop wallpaper.