Reinforce decouplers?

[Spyritdragon]

I've recently started building bigger rockets, and i've found that my lower stage often has trouble lifting the heavier payloads up: first it goes up steadily, albeit a little bit wobbly, but at some point in my launch i always find that a point along the connection with the upper stage (1 big fuel tank and a skipper for getting further into orbit and then my +-43t payload) the stack buckles, my lower stage crashes into my higher stage and the entire thing blows up with the exception of my command pod.

How do i reinforce my decouplers so they won't buckle when i push my payload up? If i use struts, im afraid the struts will just cling to the bottom stage and pull it along with the rest. The point at which it decouples it's powered by 3 skippers and 2 mainsails - no exceedingly large accelleration. I even have to power them down a little due to overheating sometimes.

[Strategia]

Put some cubic struts (as in, the tiny girders) on your rocket on either side of the decoupler, preferably at 4x symmetry or higher, and connect them using struts ("real" struts, space tape). The game doesn't actually model the struts as objects; they just create an intangible physical link between their attachment points. I used to have the same trouble you're describing, but once I found out about this method, it stopped happening (mostly).

[Spyritdragon]

So then then space-tape struts attached to the cubic struts won't pose any problems while decoupling, because once the force pulls them away the link is destroyed?

[stibbons]

Yeah, no problems at all with strutting one stage to another. When you decouple the stage, the struts disappear.