problem

1. That's a silly design flaw I have a habit of doing, I hate having a fairing over a heat shield so I thought I could just use the heat shield as a decoupler itself. Doesnt take much more than common sense to see the issue with that though... I always manage to re enter kerbin perfectly fine without a heat shield anyway so it's not a huge issue. (Besides weight) 2. That's actually exactly what I did. I tend to use the same rocket for every Joolian moon, with different landers optimized for their specific mission. I guess this means something bad?? Okay I see what you said about KER. Well now I'm really curious about what my actual dV is. I guess if one things for sure it's that Milfurt, Halberry, and Bobney are gonna have an unscheduled 2-3 year stay on Laythe... At least the view is nice. Definitely bringing a spaceplane with rapiers for the rescue mission.

Thanks for the advice. I know my ascent would be pretty bad but I really prioritized getting out of the thick part of the atmosphere too much. I did test my lander on Kerbin and it seemed to do well, but even though Laythe's atmosphere is thinner it seems to me like it wants to keep the same thickness even up to 20-30 km. I'm away from my computer now but I'll try your suggested ascent profile later. The lander isnt extremely unstable, but it will try to flip over early in the flight. I have RCS thrusters to fight it, but it gets a lot more stable when I drop the radial engines. Perhaps I could use them to boost me past mach 1 and immediately drop them before I start to flip. Also another thing I recently noticed is that the delta V values that kerbal engineer displays seems to be more than it actually is... When im going 1000 m/s horizontally near apoapsis it says I have about 1200 dV left, yet I ran out of fuel when going 1700 m/s. Maybe I'm missing something or KER is broken right now.

Yeah I was really proud of this ship up until this point, usually I'm pretty good at planning ahead but I feel stumped here. As far as the lander design, I did actually stick all the science modules on top of the main pod, which I guess could be a major source of drag, but I can't see it being enough to completely kill all my dV like this. Fuel lines are actually attached to the Rockomax adapter between the engine and the main fuel tank. I thought that would be alright but it seems like they aren't actually transporting any fuel. Maybe that's a bit less efficient than a working asparagus but definitely better than making them go the wrong way. The lander is actually a bit unstable so I have to stay a bit slow when ascending, I'll actually start turning slowly at 12000m and break mach 1 near 18000m. By 30000m I'm at a 45 degree angle and I'll thrust to an apoapsis near 60 km to meet the mother ship. I'll actually just share a video of me launching it for even more reference. https://streamable.com/ngewe (this is one of my better attempts but still not good enough)

So it's my first mission to Laythe and I got my lander down on Laythe's peaks, at 4000 m altitude. Kerbal Engineer says I have 4595 m/s of delta V (thats just in the atmosphere). Every time I try to launch this ship back to orbit, it runs out of fuel before I manage to circularize, around 200 m/s short. I don't understand what's wrong here, most of the reddit and forum posts I read say you need about 3000 m/s to get to Laythe orbit from SEA LEVEL. I thought I overcompensated with this lander but looks like that's not the case. Any advice on why this ship isn't working/what kind of ascent profile I should use? Here's a screenshot with the lander stats for reference.