rakutenshi

Build your ship from the top down. Try to make your payload as light as possible to accomplish your goal (unless you'r whackjob, or someone like that, then make it out of boiler plate steel with room for 50 and it's own cable tv company) build your manouvering stage with the payload, this is what the LV-909 Terrier excels at. You should easily be able to get a LKO rescue ship that has around 1km/s dV to play around with, build your lift stage to get this into orbit without even touching the fuel in top stage. If you're good at making smooth gravity turns and sliding into orbit, you don't have to worry quite so much about TWR, however, if you have too steep of a trajectory, you need to make sure you have a very high thrust to weight ratio - this will allow you to make the circularization manouver in less time. SRB's are cheap, powerful, but very heavy, if you haven't upgraded your launch pad, you'll want to stick with liquid fuel. This isn't meant to be critiques, just general advice, maybe some of it will be helpful. Also - does anyone else think we should get a :dv: emoticon that displays "Δv"?

Just to point out an additional reason for staging like the Apollo rockets did. real rockets tend to have very little throttle control (assume this is to reduce weight as much as technology limits), so staging is a form of throttle control. Look at the Saturn V, for example. about half to a third of the total launch mass is in the first stage, by the time the first stage burns out, the effective TWR of the stage has just about doubled, also air pressure has decreased, staging and using a different set of engines allows for total recalculation of ISP And TWR with the new mass, significantly increasing efficiency. In KSP, rocket engines can be throttled from 0% to 100%, so having one large lift stage with a very high potential TWR is fully acceptable since you can literally adjust the throttle to be whatever TWR would be ideal for your current situation.

Just a point of clarification here- since you're using a modded install - you're just using standard LFO engines, right? not realfuels or anything similar, changing the fuel types and tech levels for engines with realfuels installed can have.. varied results.

It sounds like you're just building the payload/crew section too skinny for its mass. It may be worth adding some control surfaces to the portion of the ship that will be reentering, this will aid in 2 ways. 1.) More drag just by being there, as long as your center of mass is ahead of your center of lift/pressure these can also be used as passive stabilizers for reentry. (if you're coming in bottom first, you'll want to make sure the mass is below the center of lift when you're putting your payload together) 2.) Improved manouvering in atmosphere without relying on ASAS will allow you to bleed off more speed once the reentry has cooled off enough that you feel safe turning. Even pitching up 5-10 degrees can significantly increase the amount of drag your ship is feeling and drastically slow it down.

I personally like to build my rockets a little bit lighter on the main lift stages as far as TWR goes, but I add SRB kickers aiming to add about 400 dV to it get it off the pad. Once you've reached a decent speed (varies per rocket, but it's usually transsonic-ish) you really don't need a massive TWR, if you're using FAR you should be able to pull up the flight data and look for 'q' .. atmospheric pressure, once that number starts to drop, if you've throttle back your engines to save dV losses to drag, you should be free to open it up. But then again, I use radial SRBs just because I like watching them fall away. They're not fuel efficient, but they're usually a very very cost effective to give a rocket a kick in the pants off the pad.

"I could shave in half the time if RL had mirror symmetry mode."

am I doing something wrong or are all the stock parts and most of the AIES parts supposed to be showing up as non RO? Also a bit suspicious that I can only fit a 4m long tank on a redstone motor - any larger and I don't have TWR>1. edit: part 1 seems to be a result of a sneaky RF Stockalike config staying loaded (thought I got them all, but newp, missed it) part 2, similar to ANWRocketman's suggestion below, but not quite,, switching to a Balloon type RFP tank signifigantly reduced the weight of the tank itself and made things fly much much better.

Is this supposed to be working on CKAN yet, because I'm having nothing but fits with it screaming about anything that asks for RO in the dependencies on CKAN with the message "Module RealismOverhaul has not been found. This may be because it is not compatible with the currently installed version of KSP" edit - saw the little blurb at the very bottom of Fel's post... nm.

1st .. just wanting to say I'm one of the great masses that feels FAR/nuFAR are almost required to play KSP happily, even with the new (massively improved) stock aero model. 2nd, I'm nothing close to a computational fluid dynamicist, but I get the feeling that Ferram4 is, or has at least had several courses worth of exposure to it, so often when things go wrong for me in a save where I'm using FAR, even when it goes horribly wrong, my first assumption is that I did something wrong and honestly I don't know enough to differentiate between user error and an actual bug. 3rd. KSP Forums celebrates we love Ferram4 day and enters a golden age. @RyanRising, re:edit2, probably related to official release, it's no longer a super scary early access title, so your perspective probably has merit.

For stages that will burn out in atmo, fins with control surfaces and disable the gimbal, flipping usually means topheavy/front dragheavy, fins can balance out that quite a bit, almost always works for me, also try to make your TWR at least 1.5ish at takeoff. on larger rockets my first two stages will often have fins, stages that are going to be burning above about 35km or higher can forget the fins, though. (totally opinion based)

I've noticed the marker not always switching over to surface automatically when I'd expect it to, that may be part of the issue, also if you've added stuff to one side of the capsule and not in symmetry, that could do it too.

Confirmed, I got my second scientist by rescuing and he was a he. Just sheer (un)luck I think . I use rescue contracts because I'd rather build a 50,000spacebuck rocket than pay the pittance it would take to just hire a new one from the complex .

I love the more is less approach to wings now. It's just my opinion, but I hated the "lets just stack more wings on it" approach to spaceplanes. Glad to see the increased drag/lift ratios on the wings making the darts more viable. see lots of people who can't get their old onionwinged SSTOs to orbit any more, but with the new lifting body mechanics and all, delta winged muscle planes are the way to go it seems.

Aside from contracts specifically requesting something on the Mun, I avoid it, for bases/resources, etc, it's only a tiny bit more dV to get to Minmus, and a massively reduced amount of dV required to land/take off/orbit... the only thing the Mun seems to be better for is rovers, and I've been having absolutely horrid luck with the rovers - namely their inability to stop without RCS, even without applying throttle, brakes on, and holding reverse, they only go faster and faster... and then when I reload a quicksave they get dropped from low orbit and explode.

A very well documented way to get support for your opinions on an internet forum is to insult everyone else on the forum with a blanket statement. Considering the huge leap forward that they made with the aero modelling in 1.0, I'm willing to give them some leeway. even if it's still bad (in some people's eyes, other players absolutely love it, go figure, a forum with differing opinions on the same subject), it's a huge improvement over the previous aero model.