Zeekin

I'm curious as to the kinds of masses it's possible to get into orbit and the techniques associated with it - the best I've been able to manage so far is just over 100 tonnes (screenie) My intention was for it to be a re-fueling area, but I had to burn 1/2 the fuel in it just to put it into orbit I used a slightly modified asparagus staging system to get it up there, mostly a manual effort as mechjeb+gimbal = unstable Anyone have any tips for getting large weights into orbit? Cheers!

I tried many of the suggestions and failed many times, I finally got something working which borrowed the radial separator idea from akalael, and ditched the orange tanks in favour of the grey ones. I put in some supporting beams and strutted the entire craft so it was as rigid as possible. I think what might have been happening was that even though it looked stable on the outside there was massive wobble/shear from the top end being wobbly kind of like if you try to balance empty soda cans on top of each other.

So, trying to make a kind of heavy-lifter type rocket, got some of those rockomax tanks in an asparagus type formation, when I didn't have the command-module like extension it worked fine, now that I added a little more mass to the front I can't get out of the atmosphere now that my rockets decide to split... For the life of me I cannot figure out why they decide to go rogue on me, no matter how many struts I use, the same rockets decide it's time to get outta here. I made a vid to show my design & what I'm talking about.. so very very frustrating. On a side note, I have KSP installed on an SSD and my computer is a beast so I don't think it's related.

Good news! I have managed to get both designs (without any changes!) into orbit (albeit minimal oxidiser left - but I'm guessing I'll get better at it as I figure it out) turns out I needed to make use of the RCS sooner, as long as it doesn't *start* flipping out, it typically wont. My first design you can see there actually worked the best, weight distribution was much less an issue than my second.

So after (more-or-less) getting a grip on rocket building, I decided to try my hand at space-plane building, I've built a few designs that I thought would be good, they always make it to ~24000 and when I switch to rocket-engines only go all ninja on me and flip out like crazy, often deciding that it's time to drive butt-first for some reason. I built this one first: that one took quite a long time and I thought maybe it was too asymetrical once it's in orbit or something causing it to do backflips, so then I built this one: this one can basically fly vertically up, I fly it to around 17000, get a bit more level, get to around 24000 and 1400m/s, turn on the boosters, pitch up and BAM doing backflips again.... I've tried various weight configurations, I've tried turning various fuel tanks on or off to try to distribute load (if that was the problem), but nothing seems to matter... what am I doing wrong?? Help!