BitPoet

I just got one in the 1400s as well, didn't think to screen cap it. A few problems appear at speed: The first is altitude control. Keeping it under any specific altitude is more luck than anything. The second is that your aerodynamic nosecone, which you need to go that fast, blows up, dropping your speed. Roll issues also appear, but they can be mostly mitigated by taking an elevon and turning it on its side. Craft is basically: nosecone, your choice of probe bodies, engine pre-cooler (both intake air and fuel, and it's light!), a FL-T100 fuel tank, a rapier, some wings and elevons to keep the thing in the air. You'll also need a few seperatrons and a launch stabilizer to get it in the air. edit: radiators do fix the overheating problem, but I think the airbreathing rapier runs out of power at ~1400m/s

I'm using this in my current playthrough very early in the tech tree. More efficient SRBs and LV-909s are a wonderful combo.

Maybe the ability to add ablator material to parts? Up the cost and weight, obviously. Worked for the X-15

How about temperature tolerance? I'd love to jack up the tolerance on the mk1 parts (along with solar panels, etc.)

Damn, just cracked 400, and find it\'s just been shattered. welp, back to the drawing board...

351,000 at the 3 minute mark. Take Omnivore\'s concept, rip off the SRBs on the outer ring. Make it a 6-way instead of a 4-way balance. Add a SAS to keep it going in the right direction, and a few struts to keep it in one piece, and you\'re off to the races.

Put them in separate categories: struts and no struts. IIRC I hit something like 18k last night with no struts, orbit is doable I think (and if you can get orbit, escape velocity can\'t be far behind!), but I was distracted by shiny things before I completed the build. and adding one more layer of boosters does almost nothing but get me past the tower, and bog down the computer. My high is 18699 when the speed hit 0. I might be able to tweak it a bit and get rid of some of the pieces (especially if I broke down and started using struts) but I doubt I\'d get much more altitude out of it.

Nailed it. 1:34, moving at just outside escape velocity. Config: CMD tall 1M fuel tank M-50 booster + 2x struts to fuel tank for heat disspation Really tall separator thingy. quad splitter. 4x tall 1M fuel tanks + M-50 boosters + struts to keep it in one piece (and bonus heat dissipation!) 4x tall radial connectors. 4x tall SRBs 2 with SAS module Each one of those SRBs has two more hanging off it at a 90 degree angle. strut it all up to keep it in one piece. The strategy: All 12 SRBs + 4x LFEs are the first stage. Throttle the LFE\'s at about 60% for about 15 seconds, then firewall it. You\'ll need those SAS modules now to keep things from spinning. When the SRBs are burnt out, drop \'em. Dropping the 4 LFEs and igniting the final stage should be sequenced in one shot, again kept at full burn. Done right, you\'ll top out at almost exactly escape velocity.

So, using decoupler to handle the sticky pad and we\'re off to the races! After a couple tries, I\'m getting close to orbital speeds. A little refinement in technique might just make it. I\'m sure with good thrust control I can squeeze a hundred or so m/s out of it.

Closest I can come is 1:40 (eyeballing, of course) stage 1 is similar, but 2x3m tanks, no solids, and there\'s a 3m Liquid engine in the center. If you brace the 8x aero decoupelers together, you can run stage 1 at full throttle. Stage 2 is a FL-S2000 liquid tank and a M-50 engine run as open as it goes.