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In my experience, all bases jump when you approach them and physics loads, regardless of legs or lack thereof. As far as I know, there's no way around this. However, you can try the following to mitigate the problem: Use landing gear instead of landing legs. They tend to be more sturdy. Increase to the maximum the spring and damper strength of the legs/gear. I'm not sure if you need to activate advanced tweakables in the main menu options for these settings to appear.

Beach landings FTW. Edit: Water landing and takeoff also deserve serious consideration for a Laythe plane, as most of its surface is covered in ocean. Landing in the water is possible for pretty much any craft as long as you come in gently enough. However, getting back out of the water is another story. Some designs need hydrofoils to take off from water. You can test it in Kerbin's oceans.

So add more fuel, got it! /s That's nice of you to say

I would like to have this mod only for re texturing the stock parts without changing their performance or adding new parts. Is that a possibility?

Thanks dude, I appreciate it. I did read through all of it a couple times before asking, FWIW. It's not really the maths that are the issue, but rather the concepts. I know, I'm stupid :P. Let me take a shot at it and you can say if I'm on the right track: 1. Divide stage total Dv by its Isp. 2. If the result is <8: stage is inefficient, add more fuel (or change to a higher Isp engine?) 3. If the result is >8 and <12: nothing to do 4. If the result is >12: split into two stages Thanks again!

The mass fraction part.

Can you give an ELI5 for the non-engineers among us?

Any chance we can have this on CKAN now?

As long as you have enough wings that are oriented parallel to the ground providing sufficient "upwards" lift to counteract gravity, and as long as everything is attached symmetrically, it doesn't matter if the COL arrow in the editor points in a funny direction, you will be able to fly well enough. It will be inefficient and possibly hard to control, but I take from your post that you're going for looks above other aspects. Sometimes (at least in prior versions) symmetry will "malfunction" and you'll have to detach and reattach the things for the symmetry to work again.

As usual, @Snark has completely killed the thread with his thorough response. I will add however a note of caution that imparting too much outward rotation to the boosters can also cause the butt end to hit your central stack, especially on longer boosters that have the center of mass further from the bottom. Because of this, my go-to method is usually to use separatrons to try and have the boosters gain distance from the central stack while reducing rotation in any direction to the minimum, so that the boosters maintain parallel to the stack as long as possible. Aero forces will eventually win, but hopefully by that time the stack is far away enough so that it no longer matters.

The only real way to land vertically without parachutes is using a powered landing. For maximum efficiency, you'll want to do a suicide burn. This means you start burning at the last minute possible to avoid a crash. The KER mod gives you a handy readout to know when to start burning. You do need to make sure your TWR is above 1. Other than that, the only solutions it to put wings and wheels on the rocket and land horizontal on the runway.

This seems to be the normal effect of physics time warp (i.e. the kind of time warp you can do in the atmosphere which is limited to 4x). This kind of time warp tends to exaggerate the effects of physics on your craft. In any normal airplane, the wings support the weight of the fuselage. When this effect is exaggerated, the result is that the fuselage will seem to sag down between the wings, or seen the abnother way the wings will seem to be angling up. This is a normal artifact of physics time warp and there's nothing you can do about it. The good news is that this effect is mostly harmless.

If you're going interplanetary, when ditching the stages you can leave some extra fuel enough to alter their course so that they encounter Kerbin in the next solar orbit for recovery, which IMO is pretty badass. Also, you could make it landable (or have it carry a lander) to refuel using ISRU.

Ah, the old lifting by the bootstraps

Also consider making the first stage booster an SSTO, pretty achievable in stock Kerbin. That way you only need to leave enough Dv for deorbiting (anywhere between 200-500 m/s depending on your orbit), making the entry burn and the landing burn. It will save you all the Dv needed to boost back. The thing is, with stock Kerbin, because of the low orbital velocity (compared to IRL Earth) it's often actually cheaper in terms of Dv to continue on into orbit than to boost back.

I've never tried such an aggressive aerocapture myself but 8 Km/s does seem to be way too fast, and a periapsis of 13 Km seems too steep as well. What I can tell you is that there is indeed a certain speed where no heat shield will save you, even in Duna’s thin atmosphere. So there’s basically only two ways to solve your problem, slowing down before entering the atmosphere and/or going for a higher periapsis. Your solution will likely be a combination of both. You’ll probably need to do lots of trial and error in your “simulations” to find the maximum speed and minimum Pe where you won’t explode but will still capture. Just from memory, using a typical Hohmann transfer you would enter the atmo at about 5 Km/s so try shooting for a speed around that range and a slightly higher Pe of maybe 20-30 Km. As to the Scott Manley video you mentioned, atmosphere and part physics are all tweaked for RSS so it’s normal that you could pull it off there on not in stock.

Also from the flight view if you double click on any empty space (i.e. not where another craft is) and that will also unset the current target. I don't recall if this also works in map view, you might want to try it.

Hey thanks for the input everyone. It seems like the general consensus is to go with an old-fashioned, bring-your-own-fuel-style mission. This mission is not maximized for efficiency but more for style, so I guess I'll leave the ISRU-ing for a later mission that will focus more on the efficiency. To reply to your individual comments... That's what I thought too originally, which is why I considered ISRU in the first place. But it seems like more people favor the old-fashined option. Mind, this is a mission I'm doing specifically to share and not just for me, which is why I'm so concerned with what other people think is cooler. EPL is definitely out of the question for this mission, but I'll consider it in the future! I hear you, it is. But for this case, I'm already settled on the Apollo-style mothership, mainly because my space program has a self-imposed habitation space requirement for interplanetary missions. In fact, the lander is about 300 tons fully fueled! The lander is a behemoth so finding a way to reenter it without expending fuel was definitely one of the bigger challenges of the mission. Actually we're sending a 3 man crew and they will ascend from Eve in a proper capsule! We also have safety margins such that we can still make it even from sea level. That's the idea! Maybe next time when I focus on efficiency.

Hello folks. I appeal to the wisdom of the forums once more. I'm designing an Eve return mission and hope to make a video to share with you all. The mission is configured as a mother ship that will carry the crew, a lander and utilities to Eve orbit, then deploy the lander which will return to the mother ship for the trip back to Kerbin. I guess you could call it Apollo style in that sense. Anyway, what would you like more for the mission, for the lander to use ISRU at Eve for the return to Eve orbit, or to bring the fuel with us from Kerbin? Both approaches have unique planning and execution challenges which may be interesting or not to some of you, so I ask your thoughts on this. I'm not looking what's most efficient, or practical, or easy, but what you think is the coolest and more impressive/interesting way to do it.

Could you give a quick guide on how to do this?

Landing gear is automatically autostrutted to the heaviest part by default.

Lol I wish I knew what azimuth means.

I recommend the Trajectories mod for this.

I second what others have said that the roll is probably being caused by the SRB's flexing and thus producing offset thrust. Sadly I don't have much in the way of tried solutions, but there are some things I can think of: -Limit the thrust on the SRB's. Less thrust should mean less flexing. This will make you have to adjust your flight profile, but it should be manageable with a rocket this size. -Activate rigid attachment in the advanced tweakables. I've never actually done this for any craft but who knows, it might work? -Strut the decoupler as well as the SRB itself.

Try the FMRS mod.