Building Bigger?

[spacedoctor42]

Does anyone have any links to good guides on building large payload/high delta V rockets/spaceplanes? I'm really itching to build big stations and do long-haul flights but my skills pretty much start and end with litte in-and-out missions and comms satellites.

Edited August 30, 2021 by spacedoctor42

[ffx]

Add more boosters

[The Aziz]

Big stations? Send in parts and assemble in orbit. More dv? Moar boosters, add more stages, with really heavy payloads 3 or more core stages of different sizes plus side mounted srbs are a must sometimes. Just keep adding fuel until the most powerful engine of chosen size can't keep up, then increase the size, repeat.

[Vanamonde]

Look around The Exchange sub and KerbalX for ideas. Maybe download some and try them, not to use instead of your own, but to see how they work? 

[Xavven]

Is @Whackjob still playing KSP? You could look up some of his videos on YouTube. Looks like he stopped uploading KSP stuff 6 years ago, so it's missing a lot of improvements like the Making History parts (including 5m parts and engines), stock autostruts and joint reinforcement, but his principles still apply. Look at how he arranges rockets, girders/panel, and struts them together.

[king of nowhere]

don't forget autostruts, else your rocket is likely to fall apart. that's perhaps the one complicated thing about large rockets. everything else is just moar boosters and moar engines

[ave369]

Having Making History and thus access to the 5m size helps. There is no 5m single engine in the game, but there is a fuel tank/engine assembly part that can serve as the basis for your custom 5m super-engine. It has 5 nodes: 4 size 1 nodes and one size 3 node. A Mastodon should go into each of the size 1 nodes. An engine plate with 5 Vectors should go to the size 3 node. So you have a super-Mammoth with 4 Mastodons and 5 Vectors, and no nozzle clipping. This will be your lower stage engine.

To boost it into the orbit, add 4 asparagus staged boosters. Each should be a Size 3 Kerbodyne with a Mammoth as the engine. So you'll have a Size 4 central stage and four size 3 asparagus staged booster stages. This alone is enough to launch really big payloads into space. Whole stations, or interplanetary cruisers with 10k delta-v, you name it. I can imagine very few payloads too big for this rocket; for example, it won't launch a whole USI Orion (mod) engine with a bomb storage unit into orbit. Anything smaller than that is fair game.

Edited September 6, 2021 by ave369

[Wcmille]

I do inefficient orbits by doing poor gravity turns to get out of atmosphere. It’s more dV to get to orbit than a good gravity turn, but more forgiving on your payloads.