RuBisCO

I use the Claw often actually. It is great for attaching rovers to a miner/harvester It is great on an "Assembler" for assembling modules in orbit. When landing on low gravity worlds like Minmus, Pol, Gilly, Bop, why not land on top of your mining harvesting station, dock with the claw, instead of having to land afar and have a harvesting truck shuttle the fuel between the to? I only use docking ports on parts I expect to stay connected or to have thrust going through, or when I need the strength and stability of a large docking port.

Once I get something inside I generally work on it by off-setting it as far up as I can, when I finish I set I back down in the bay, then reconnect it.

Here is what I have learned from making the Xylol 1. Wings, pre-coolers and Mk1 Jet fuel tanks wick heat nicely from intakes and engines. 2. Turbojets help: Rapiers perform poorly at low altitudes. Turbojets can make up for that. 3. Dive! When lifting heavy loads I go 30° to 10 km, then gently dive at 0° to break though the sound barrier, once past 600 m/s I begin climbing back up to 20° pitch. 4. Close intakes, I close the per-coolers until speed exceeds 1 km/s, I think this improves performance but honestly I have not noticed, other though live by opening and closing intakes at the right times. 5. Make the wings the right way! Because of the size of the Xylol the wings needed to be made out of multiple parts and assembled in a particular way to maximize stability. The Xylol's wings are made out of 4 sets of wings, each one attached to a different segment of fuselage, I call these sub-wings. The sub-wings are strutted together such that every part of a sub-wing has at least one strut connecting it to another sub-wing. I learned the hard way that if I made a single wing with just one part connected to the fuselage and all the other parts connected to it, even with equal numbers of struts connecting the wing to ever segment of fuselage it is unstable. Each strut adds weight and drag but if the wings flex and deform too much your craft is going to have phantom yaw, roll and pitch, loss speed from snaking, worming and dolphining, even if you get MJ to try to make the thing stable enough to fly parts are going to break or overheat, and generally your craft will never make it to orbit, so trade offs.

I can attest to and verify this advice.

No harm, I just got no story. How to get everything there: nuclear or chemical, I think I will go with a Chemical runner since I'm going to be making fuel there.

...What do you want from me? Its sounds cool that is all, geez. I got others named Xanthan and Xylose. Next up: a Harvester

Chemistry Yes to fit the lander I needed to cut it into two

He stows away, I launch something and then realize Jeb is in there!

In career mode landing a Xylol manages a 96% refund on the launch cost (not include the cost of what ever your cargo is that you leave in orbit), so the idea of a fully reusable SSTO in KSP as a money saver is sound, in theory. Of course many whine about how the SSTO parts simply lack the space to carry big cargo, even the MK3 is not enough for most. The Xylol was created to see how much could be done within the limits of a Mk3 cargo bay... so I started a project to go to Duna, explorer it and return, all using parts fitted inside of and launched via the Xylol 3. So far the results are promising. First a small fuel depo and assembler station Here is a Mobile Science Lab (also doubles as a fuel truck) Ok so here is the MSL at the assembly station (did not notice Jeb stowed away) Using the Assembler I take the core out, then attach the skates More to come

Slugy, Try tail planes instead of canards. The problem maybe that SAS and MJ can't handle the increased instability of canard configuration. I personally have found all my tail plane crafts more stable then canard ones. Canard Conventional : Tail planes If roll is the problem use smaller roll controlling ailerons, while I generally have several ailerons set for pitch I have the smallest ones set for roll.

Try using a tail fin that is mostly static, like the Delta-Deluxe Winglet, the less fish tailing the better performance.

I've made some improvements, and edited them into the OP, previous models have been deleted from upload. The Xylol 3 has more aesthetically pleasing bow and stern, and a redesigned and strengthened tail fin for better yaw control.

This one was specifically designed from the get go to achieve the highest mass fraction while still retaining enough fuel and flight capacity to land back from orbit. The Xylol 3 is a small improvement on the Xylol 1&2, having the extended cargo bay of the Xylol 2, but with more aesthetically pleasing bow and stern and re-designed and strut re-enforced tail fin. It comes with an external docking port (open/closes with cargo bays custom09), RCS and air brakes. The Xylol 3RB is a cut down version with Xylol 1 cargo bay, removal of external docking port, RCS, airbrakes, 4th landing gear and some struts which make the wings uncomfortably wobbly at times while shimming off 0.6 tons. You can remove my previous record, this is my last attempt with the Xylol as their is no chance I can beat the 2-stagea: that thing is a monster. http://www./download/8g6o128l5lxa736/Xylol+3.zip

Yeah no thanks, it was just a proof of concept I made awhile back, and no: one tank has oxidizers half empty. I moved on to much MUCH bigger spaceplanes.

I use a AMD FX-6200 OC to 4 GHz and AMD R9 280 and it works great for FPS and such, not so much KSP where I get lag with aerodynamic effects. The problem is AMD processors have a lot less performance per core then Intel, which is fine if you have more cores and multi-thread support, but Unity 4x does not do multiple threading in API, in even Unity 5 will probably be limited in its multiple threading support. As for my graphics problems that may be because I'm running linux and AMD Catalyst drivers for linux are sub-par, heck it still thinks I have a Radeon HD 7900 in there!~

I tried all Rapier, it simply does not perform as well, the turbos help provide acceleration needed below 10 km. I managed to get it with 36 tons to orbit manually, and I'll admit it was a pain. I use MJ for stability and to control flight angle and it does a near perfect job: all I have to do is dial in the angels when it reaches the right speeds and altitudes in MJ and it does the rest. Perhaps it would fly better with a joystick and not a keyboard. I do land it manually though, MJ tends to snake on landing.

Easy solution: we call them "kibles" and make them diffrent shades of green.

Why not somekind of distinkly kerbal animal? Heck why not a Tribble?

I think the problem is MJ does not account for struts properly.

Check the pictures again.

Well there is KAS/KIS mods for actually on site construction.

Here is a complete family of extended and unextended Xylols, 6 in total for all your SSTO cargo needs. A: bare-bones, for max lift, prove to lift 41.7 tons to 80 km orbit. B: RCS and extra docking ports, to bring to cargo to stations, proven to lift 36 tons to 125 km orbit. C: RCS and airbrakes and 4th wheel, good for bringing down heavy masses, proven to lift 27 tons to 80 km orbit. 2: Extended cargo bay and 4th wheel. How to launch is in the descriptions. http://www./download/jr68vrasyv1qt9g/Xylol+SSTO+family.zip

This works with 500 m/s dv left.

23 part SSTO single-turbojet.

I have now achieved 41.825 tons of cargo on the Xylol A. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/116729-Stock-Payload-Fraction-Challenge-1-0-2-Edition?p=1980020&viewfull=1#post1980020