Hi all.
I played around with my excel sheets for dv, fuel fraction and so on to get an idea when to do the perfect staging and suddenly I realised that with a fuel fraction(m0/m1) of ~3 you can reach LKO with your first stage.
That means that a Mammoth powered first stage, supported by by some cheap Hammer solid boosters for better TWR on the pad, can lift over 50t into LKO without a second stage. (20t for Mainsail)
The funny thing is: You can strap 3 or 5 of these stages together and have a payload capacity of 150t oder 250t.
When you manage to survive the reentry and land these monster, you get an incredibly cheap and easy way to bring stuff up. The Mammoth engine has a very high impact tolerance (20m/s), so you can easily land on them with parachutes and a little burst on the last meters.
I use no Mechjeb or other autopilots, so there is still room for improvement.
My first stage looks like this:
Payload
S3-3600 Tank
S3-7200 Tank
S3-14400 Tank
S3-14400 Tank
Mammoth + 4-8 Hammer Solid Boosters
I know that the dv requirments in KSP are lower than in reality, but isn´t that to easy? Or is my KSP broken in some kind?
