GetOutAndPush

I'm going to watch this thread with a lot of interest. I don't get super hung-up on the realism aspect, but if a bunch of people agree that something works well, I'll use it in my playthroughs. With the mods I'm using I find it interesting comparing LqdHydrogen designs (with or without oxidizer) vs. Liquid/Oxidizer. The delta V and TWR ends up about the same, but the former cuts quite a few tons off of what I need to lift to orbit when I assemble them.

Procedural Fairings fuselage sections can be handy for making large flatbed truck/rover chassis, if you turn the whole assembly on its side and only use a panel or two (you can change the overall count of them to modify how much fuselage you have per panel). It's nice to be able to tweak the length of it. Speaking of rovers, IR Rotatrons allow you to twist your low center-of-gravity rovers 180 degrees in the middle so they're balanced down the long axis; then you can mount the rover in a fairing pointing upwards, on top of a lander engine with legs. Put a docking port on the back of the rover between the lander and the truck. Attach some RCS on decouplers on the front to tip the rover over once you've landed and rotated it into it's normal form. You can put the whole deal inside a fairing. I landed a 30 ton flatbed crane truck on the Mun like this. I like placing KAS strut endpoints in the VAB for precision placement on things that I want to dock and strut together later. Makes it easier to strut stations up in space with EVA. If I need to strut things together before launch and want to unstrut them later - example, struts securing an IR crane arm on a rover cargo, or otherwise making a cargo more rigid - I place the struts on radial decouplers so I can detach them. The radial decouplers tend to be easier to place than the linear ones. If you *really* want to get aggressive with part count reduction and don't want leftover decoupler bits on your cargo, you can stick something light like a lander can in your cargo bay or inside the fairing. Place your KAS strut endpoints for the cargo before launch. Launch with a dude in the can (or transfer them over), EVA on the pad, and connect the endpoints before launching. You can then remove them later when needed.

Both that and Firespitter should work great with rockets, but the large jet engines are problematic because of throttle response.

Rocket balance is easy, spaceplane balance can be annoying. SSTO VTOL dropship balance is a serious pain. 74 tons (fueled for Orbit takeoff weight) of "You Know, You Should Really Just Put Wings On This And Go To Bed". You can't really say this "flies" without using air quotes. It can take off, achieve stable orbit with a bit of cargo, de-orbit and land successfully (I play with FAR). It also putters around in atmosphere quite nicely and can cruise at supersonic speeds. After some tweaking I intend to take it on a joyride to visit various other planets. I find that once you start getting in this weight range that Firespitter's VTOL steering and hover functions cease working entirely (you will just fall out of the sky) and the B9 compressed-air RCS adds weight faster than it adds effective attitude control. If you want to fly this, it's just you, Jeb, manual engine tilt, throttle, air brakes, and 2 gigantic reaction wheels cranked to 200 and powered by a bunch of RTG's. ActionGroupsExtended is pretty much mandatory. You can actually get more mass into space using the S2 fuselages, 4 normal sized VTOL jet engines, and two rockets, and the hover commands will actually work - but then you miss out on flying a ridiculous ship. Balance has to be fairly exact both loaded and unloaded. Minor discrepancies in the 2 main LFO tanks when you're not fully loaded are fine, but you can't use the Monoprop tank in the command pod. I build everything around the central cargo bay so that I can add cargo without having to rebalance the whole ship, then use symmetrical tanks around that for takeoff. Fore-aft fuel balance is irrelevant in space so you can add more fuel after orbiting. The tail is hollow for interplanetary fuel loads. I find the easiest way to fine tune that last bit during building and updating is to tweak the mass/strength ratio on the control surfaces. RCS Build Aid is great, but you can get it close enough watching the way the CoM and CoT spheres clip through each other. And yes, I'm going to put a ladder on it at some point.