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On the Xbox I was trying to plant a flag on the Mun and return to Kerbin using asparagus staging but the asparagus staging and I am confident with my design could anyone else see if they are having this problem or tell me a mistake I might be making thx

Hi folks, I'm currently having problems setting up asparagus staging for big boosters ( for heavy lifting off Kerbin). I'm running the most recent version of KSP in Career mode. I've carefully setup to pairs of boosters around a large central core ( core is the huge four engine cluster with two large ranks above. Each booster is one if those twin engines with orange large tank an cone. I'm using a single large hydraulic decoupler roughly at the mass center of the boosters. I set up the asparagus staging using those yellow ducts to plumb from Paul 1 to pair 2 then into the core tanks. And setup the decoupler staging to shed the booster pairs in the same order. But test flights so far gave been less than successful. The problems I get are: 1) not getting sequential high burn rate on outer tanks first. All booster and the central core appear to be burning all if the lower stage fuel as a single burn. 2) attempts to stage each pair of decoupler results in an explosion and no shedding of the boosters! It's almost like these hydraulic decoupled aren't releasing ( or booster stage is otherwise permanently glued together) I suspect problem 1 is a symptom or the decoupling problem 2? Has anyone using the more recent KSP also had these problems (and/or have solved them)? Again I've noticed most online KSP tutorials are quite old (2012-2013) and make,asparagus,staging look easy. Is this another case where something has changed in more recent versions that has rendered this method more difficult? Am I simply using the wrong decoupler?! Thanks in advance, Jon Sorry for the terrible grammar! I typed my question on my cellphone with one thumb injured so auto complete made a mess of some sentences! If meanings are unclear I'll try to clarify tonight when I get back to my real PC!

Carry a payload to LKO, you may only use 3 Skipper engines on your first stage. Max payload wins. you wouldn't believe how hard it is to balance this out between TWR and DeltaV. You may have an empty fuel tank on your payload to drain leftovers from your last stage before detaching it. You may not use fuel from your payload to get into orbit. (Imagine the fuel crossfeed between payload and last stage works only in one direction, only into the payload) There are 2 (3) Categories: -Asparagus -Non asparagus (-Delta IV Heavy Style: Non-asparagus and modular, wich means the boosters and core-stage are identical and you have to throttle down the core engine during ascend to save fuel.) This main goal of this challenge is to determine how beneficial asparagus staging actually is. For this reason, please try to participate in both categories asparagus and non-asparagus. pictures would be great, but simple stats are ok as well: -Launch mass -Payload mass (must be seperated from the core-stage) -Booster configuration Leaderboard: Non asparagus 1. @Martian Emigrant: 32.79 t, modular core/booster and upper stage. I hope I got this right from the pictures, but it looks like he simply build a single first stage with 3 Skippers that burned out simultaneously. 2. Me: 31.867 t, modular core/booster, no upper stage, throttle control on the core 3. @MarvinKitFox: 27.1 t, throttle control on the core, no pictures Asparagus: 1. Me: 34.196 t, modular core/booster, no upper stage 2. @MarvinKitFox: 31.1 t 3. @Martian Emigrant: 30.36t, modular core/booster and upper stage. Extremely low TWR after booster sep lead to a shallow launch profile with presumably lots of drag losses.

I've noticed that when i use the stock Kerbal X rocket, asparagus staging seems to work perfectly fine with no trouble, but when I build my own asparagus-staged rocket, it rolls uncontrollably until the last of the radially attached boosters are jettisoned, and only then can I correct the persistent rolling. Has anyone besides myself noticed this problem, and has anyone found a way to correct it?

While the name "asparagus staging" apparently barely predates KSP, the idea has been around a long time: And obviously it is harder than it looks like in KSP. The book I am quoting is from 1958 (presumably hastily published after the Sputnik launch). It is a nifty book I found in my parents old collection: being from 1958 it starts *everything* from first principles, without launching into extremely specialized engineering. I've looked through some fairly well stocked used bookstores for other Kerbal-type books on rocket science, but haven't seen anything close. http://www.amazon.com/Space-Flight-Early-thoughts-projections/dp/B0000CK2Z4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451578393&sr=8-1&keywords=space+flight+by+carsbie+adams [ps. Of course it should include trigger warnings for 1950s-type thoughts.]