SRV Ron

While using math, charts, Delta V calculations, and the mod flight aids are good learning tools, the best learning tool of them all is the Kerbal School of Hard Knocks. (Just slap something together and see what works or not. If it works, modify it to get it to work better. Learn how to do the orbital turn till you find a method that gives the best efficiently for orbit.) Two early career Mun orbiters. A very unconventional and very Kerbal lander. Try one thing at a time and enjoy your success. (Or catastrophic failures.)

Try placing two sets of six instead of the eight then four.

The mass launch and flight. (Not all from the same design.)

Test Flight of a 3 Kerbal Jool system explorer. Plan to add probes to the design after shortening the four pairs of drop tanks. The big NovaPunch Nuke comes with built in continuous generator so no solar panels are needed,

Stack doanut tanks in long strings. They make good springs to cushion your Kerbal in flight even if they are a bit hard to keep flying straight. Launch dozens of rockets at once. That way you get more of them in orbit. Braces are over rated. You get more interesting flights when you don't use them on Saturn B designed launchers.

While the SRB cluster is fine for a boost stage, they are inefficient in later stages. I see struts scattered about. Additionally, the SRBs generally are not steerable. For the upper stage, the SRBs are better off clustered close to the core instead of double stacked the way they are and dangling as others have mentioned. Currently playing with this deep space 3 Kerbal monster. Have the orbiter nailed down. Plan to add several small probes to the payload section and send it on its way to explore the Jool system. The nuke in the payload stage also supplies continuous power. There are also four pairs of drop tanks. Enough fuel remains in the core launch stage for an escape to solar orbit where a long burn of the nuke will not be an issue for interplanetary flight. Note, only one additional SAS was added to aid maneuvering. Ship is quite stable in flight. I found the NASA engines to be more efficient with a bit more power then the Griffons I used earlier. Results, a bit better launch speed with fuel savings.

One of my first long range designs; First Mun lander came down hard enough to lose several solar panels.

A picture of the bug. Land in the water and you will be OK. Land on the missing land and this will happen; On a theory that the bug could be related to a scenario since I keep getting that error on this one Sandbox game, I switch to a different one without exiting the game and brought a ship back from Mun. The terrain generated normally.

The dancing 7 segment booster.

The mod exist but needs updating as the sound no longer works. It has unlimited Tardis power to fly anywhere. And room inside for 9 Kerbals I have no idea why they are screaming in panic during powered flight

Landing on Jool

Experiment and see what works;

Some mod parts don't stay together well. Stitch the offending section together with braces. If you can't get them to connect, use cubic struts to connect one end of the braces to. Without stitching, this rocket would fall apart on the pad.

The core stage, while ideally should be capable of lifting the payload on its own, doesn't need to for efficiency in asparagus staging. It only needs to be placed almost to orbit. I have used nukes for the core stage efficiently. They don't even have to be firing either. I did one where half the fuel remained in the last pair once orbit was reaches and dumped the engines to take advantage of the high isp of the center nuke. Ideally, the asparagus is made up of copies of the core section. Get a combo right and you can get very good launch to payload in orbit ratios. And, experiment with different engine combos. One heavy lift stock design worked best with all skippers combined with a pair of mainsails on the last pair stage. Example of a matched core to asparagus pair. Another matched core example. And, the stock mixed engine example; All skippers was too low a thrust weight ratio while all mainsails was too high using fuel up too quickly. The one pair got the right combo of power and fuel efficiency for placing the fuel can payload in orbit with lots of fuel to spare.

First one with a probe ended up with most of the solar panels ripping off from sliding on Mun. With the update that altered Mun's surface, the probe was floating so far above the ground that it crashed into a crater slope. This is the second successful landing using the LADEE which was not designed for that mission, but landed successfully.

Going to a direct landing can use more fuel then shedding some of the approach speed by a retrograde gravity assist prior to landing. Still, you are better off going into low orbit first so that you can pick out your landing spot. The most efficient landings are those where you can use an atmosphere to aerobrake to a landing, or to slow down enough to reach the intended target moon. Those maneuvers are difficult to set up but not impossible. Rare is the ability to set up a gravity assist capture. I almost got one on Laythe.

In a challenge, cheapest rocket to orbit, the lightest simplest designs brought out the high efficiency of few parts and single stage. You can easily reach Mun orbit with simple small designs. With mods, such as NovaPunch and KWRocketry, one can build small probes capable of exploring almost everywhere.

There will always be a rotation issue when using thrusters for translation. This is because while you can balance them to the ship COM during construction, that COM will change as fuel gets used during flight. Therefore, the best combo is a pair of thrusters on each end of the ship but have SAS enables so it can cancel out the unintended rotation caused by the changing COM of the ship.

Try to encounter the moon retrograde so that encounter slows you down therefore requiring less fuel for a capture.

19 probes coming down on parachutes. Still no way to switch between them. (Parachutes and separation was activated before reentering the atmosphere.

Nukes, with their high efficiency, are good for long range flights such as to Jool or Moho. For landers, an LV-909 or smaller engine will be more efficient since they are far lighter then the heavy nuke. Note, the little Rocomax is more then enough to land Bob on Minmus and had plenty of fuel for his return to Kerbal.

A simple three stage example of testing to orbit; And the test where SRBs are added to the same design for additional range. Build simple, test in stages, look for that ideal launch profile, and you can go a long ways without having to build huge complex designs that require refueling or assembly in orbit.

An example of testing in stages. The payload, this complex lander, was built and flight tested by itself. A core stage was then added and a suborbital test done (No picture.) Finally, the booster, in this case a six asparagus launcher, was built and flight tested. This combination reached Minmus on the mid stage and achieved its goal of landing there. When I do come up short or want some additional range, such as the ability to reach Duna, I will add a ring of SRBs on a design for that extra punch to reach 5,000 meters before going to the liquid engines. (See the Tutorial thread on how to get 5 sided symmetry.)

Check out the ratio of launch to orbit on this mod design. From a launch weight of 190 tons to 46 tons in orbit and 23 tons around Mun. It turned out to be an extremely efficient design. Orbital Berthas were used exclusively in this design.

Congratulations on landing on Mun with its uneven surface and difficult reference to actual distance from the surface. Would like to see a pic of your moon ship to see if anything else is needed, or you just need to fine tune your flying skills.