Hi tke_quailman, welcome to the community Yeah, the large engines are so powerful, they can collapse your rocket, I suggest you throttle back, you lose efficiency if you muscle through the atmosphere anyway, try to keep the G meter in th green By my guest and download add-ons from here. Some add-ons have bugs, and I recommend Tosh's carts, Orda, Damned aerospace, zoxygene and the Lazor Look here for an excellent tutorial on flying in KSP And you don't need maths at all, the map can show you the way, especially if you set Conic_Patch_Limit to 3 or 4 in the settings.cfg, or try this