Dorlan

The problem was that the lift was pushing the nose out of the prograde marker. I really mean it when I said it was violent. In the second screenshot in the album, for example, the nose was inside the back side of the prograde ring just prior to the screenshot being taken. I normally keep the nose pointed between the center and the back(towards vertical) edge of the prograde ring during initial ascent. In the time between releasing the "D" key and reaching and pressing the F1 key with my left hand, that's how far the body lift from the fairing pushed the nose back. Regardless, it seems that if I make my fairings just wide enough to accommodate the parts of the payload as they occur, even if that makes the end result look like I've strapped a water tower to a rocket engine or I'm trying to fly a "this end towards space" sign, the excessive lift problem largely goes away. So, I can keep lofting awkwardly shaped things, I just need to shroud them in an equally awkwardly-shaped fairing. Solved! As thanks, please accept this picture of the Flying Toadstool. Yes, it made it to orbit.

Flying prograde is what I'm trying to do. In anything except a rocket with a 3.75m fairing on it, I can let gravity do the work. I start my turn between 50 and 100 m/s depending on the rocket, relax, and watch the show. I maybe have to touch the controls 10 times total during a bad ascent, and that counts staging. For whatever reason, that fairing overcomes gravity pulling the nose down with its lift, even when the engines are fully gimbaled, reaction wheels are running full power, and all control surfaces are working in concert to keep that nose down. To keep the thing from backflipping, I have to take a much more active approach to flying it. I'm a keyboard jockey, so I have to tap the d key to keep the nose down. If I'm too aggressive, I'll push the nose down too far too early, and that's a completely different way to fail to go to space today. If I leave too much of a gap between keypresses, it's too late; the lift builds up beyond the point of no return, the fairing takes control of the ship and protracted full yaw won't stop that nose from going back the way it came. That's what I meant about having to fly it perfectly. I did get the station into orbit via launch, but it took way more tries than it should have.

Nope, everything is straight stack-node connected from top to bottom, save the fins and the (not pictured) booster stages. Nothing is offset, CoM is in line with the center of the ship, and RCS Build Aid is showing no thrust offset arrows in the VAB. The fairing is kind of an odd shape, it has to be to accommodate the four arms on the station, but I've tried dozens of different configurations for the fairing and they all result in that immense body lift vector coming off the fairing base. I've also tried forcing KSP to rebuild my PartsDatabase.cfg and getting a new copy of physics.cfg from Steam, on the chance that maybe one of those two files had picked up some bunk values. That didn't fix things, either.

Pretty much what the title says. Sometimes I need (want) to put awkward, draggy payloads into orbit or on another body. Sometimes, these payloads are really big, and draggy enough that I can't keep the tail draggier than the nose with the payload exposed. That makes it fairing time, and that opens up an entire new galaxy of problems. The 3.75m fairing generates a ridiculous amount of body lift -- enough to backflip my rockets. To have a prayer of getting even a relatively awkward, large payload into orbit, like, say, this space station core: I have to build a custom lifter (as opposed to the fleet of lifters I've already built) and revert a dozen times until I get the ship perfectly balanced in terms of CoM and fly it exactly right. Anything less than perfection will result in a dazzling display of aerobatics, but nothing is going to space today. The other two images in the album show the insanity that is the body lift of the 3.5m fairing. The lift is so incredibly strong that it can backflip a rocket when its nose and prograde marker are only 40 degrees above the horizon. It can backflip a stack consisting of a Mammoth with 2 Twin Boars pushing on the other end and, after it does so, when the rocket starts to fall fast enough it will flip it back upright. How am I supposed to handle this? I have to be doing something wrong, but what? 2.5m and 1.25m fairings don't give me this trouble. Relatively aerodynamic payloads don't give me this trouble. Only the 3.75m fairing does this, and I'm at a loss as to how to deal with it without engaging in the fun-killing grind of reverting until the stars align and the payload makes it to orbit. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!