Dangerous_Beans

as Reddeyfish said, just use girders. or just sit the tank on the ground, just make sure to land carefully. if you really want landing legs, i think there are some heavy duty deployable ones in the Karbonite mod. Nova-Punch also had heavy duty static ones.

OTRAG is not quite boosters, it's using a cheap, simple rocket design as both the core stage and boosters. i did something similar a while back. there was the Tiny Cat 1 that could get about 5t into orbit, using a long 1.5m tank (from a mod) and engine. then the TC2, which was a TC1 rocket with 2 other TC1 cores setup as an asparagus staged boosters. next one (Tiny Cat 3) had 3 TC1 rockets as a central stage, with 3 asparagus TC1 boosters. i think the TC4 might have had a TC3 core with 6 asparagus boosters, in two stages. from memory there were also heavy versions that used SRBs on the initial launch. they were cool to design, but not practical in Kerbal logic. @RocketBlam it would be cool to see what your rockets could do if you had them staged, either asparagus or sequential.

weird, 30km should be ok. try Lupus Irae's suggestion, and just graze the atmosphere a few times. another suggestion, since it's a part from a mod, try updating the mod. the version you are using might have weird settings that don't work with the current aerodynamics.

what periapse are you using on re-entry? you want to be aero-braking by going horizontally through the atmosphere, if you have the periapse too low you will have too steep a re-entry trajectory and end up going too fast too low.

The Time Warp! "It's just a step to the left"... someone had to do it

back in the 50's or 60's, they accidentally launched "man-hole cover" into space using a nuke. basically, they accidently made a Verne gun/space gun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun). maybe a probe that bores a shaft to use as a barrel, some explosive (small nuke) as propulsion and another craft to retrieve the sample would work? still has the problem of the atmosphere and gravity, but seems like a potentially practical solution. edit: ok, the plate was the Pascal B test, and probably burnt up on ascent (i love that problem!), but the basic idea clearly works. the payload would just need better aerodynamics.

Jeb's only love is space. Now, Bill/Bob, there is a romance for the stars! at least in my headcannon

for the Mun the low/high border is around 50km, from memory. were you in orbit, not on a hyperbolic trajectory? you might need to have your entire orbit above the boundary (i can't remember for sure).

i was running B9 without ATM up until a few days ago, along with a few other mods (interstellar, karbonite). i was using pretty much all the ram, to the point i was getting the occasional out of memory crash, but it was working. if you are just running B9 without any other part mods it's worth a try

~0.8 T/W for the core stage looks about right, based of the stats on wikipedia. try a steeper ascent profile so you have more vertical speed when you stage the boosters. also don't worry about always having positive vertical velocity, you can still get to space if you start dropping back down provided you are gaining horizontal velocity fast enough.

0.75m high and green?

i have been having the same problem (though on 64). i haven't tried the module fixer, though the thread suggests the issue is with the part description.

the nova-punch part pack has a long, low strake which i have found useful for adding yaw stability when attached to the ventral surface of the plane. it acts as a vertical stabiliser, but is short enough not to mess up your ground clearance. you might be able to do something similar with the stock control surfaces, with all the control options disabled?

this is one of the things i like about the Kerbal Space Program Interstellar mod. you have separate reactors and thermal rockets, so you can have nuclear reactors powering thermal rockets on take off/landing, then shut down the NTRs for low thrust electrical propulsion while in space, and during the downtime the reactors can power the craft. i had a flying, self fuelling nuclear power station for beamed microwave power that took off on thermal rockets (4m/s), and cruised on plasma (~1m/s). could go nearly anywhere. though weighing 600 tons made it a pain in the arse to land. on topic: given the focus on career mode and research, wouldn't it make sense to have some early parts that get eclipsed by better parts later on? if you have to spend 3k science to unlock engine x, why does it need to be balanced against engine y you start off with? there is no need for a spear-man to be competitive against a battle tank in civ.

I tell Mechjeb to do it on 2-4x time acceleration, and then go get a drink, harass the cats or make a space sandwich.

i went back to the stock aerodynamics when 0.24 came out. for about a day. i got sick of flying in the soup using the stock aero system isn't going to mean you have to build that much larger rockets. you clearly know how to build efficient (small) craft, so an extra ~1000m/s is just a 909 and medium tank, or maybe a couple of drop tanks. it sounds like what you really need is a reason to build bigger, more complex ships.

given there is no stock re-entry damage/heating, it would probably just be aesthetic. or maybe just break solar panels. sounds like something people could (and would) mod in.

that is about what my last one was getting on the rapiers: 30km and 1,500m/s before toggling mode. my guess is that with FAR it depends more on your T/W with jets rather than your air-intakes. eg i had a KSP Interstellar fusion powered plane that had a T/W of around 4.5, and was able to get to Kerbin escape velocity at about 30-35km.

eh, it's not much of a purpose (though i do have permanent probes on Duna, and around Minimus and the Mun). you don't need to do those contracts, and going to the probe and hitting transmit is pretty boring. i would still rather see science that takes time to do, eg the mapping in ScanSat, or temperature recordings for a year. still it's a start, and i'll have to find some Kerbals i don't like to strand on other planets (maybe all the stupid ones, they'll go for it. reminds me of my KSP Interstellar game, where all the smart Kerbals were in the research complex on Minimus, and all the stupid ones were flying the prototype space planes). edit: that too, building a honking big station is quite fun.

if you can make it require resources, you could have an upgrade pod that contains the resources needed to upgrade other things? you could also link the upgrade functionality to the pod. so once you can build gas core fission reactors, you send up an upgrade pod, dock it to the craft with the old reactors and use the pod to upgrade it. the pod can only do the upgrades available when you launched it, so you can't have a pod launched before the gas core upgrade was researched do a gas core upgrade. make each pod only able to do one ship, or maybe some number of parts, and also require a kerbal on EVA. also have most of the cost be the resource, not the pod part. so instead of clicking on my reactor out in Eeloo orbit and upgrading it, i have to send a kerbal out with a box of parts. it also costs money instead of science, and requires you to design craft capable of being upgraded.

an orbit with radius 3,463.33km and velocity 1.90807km/s give you a orbital period of 22,171.65s. so you are a little high (or i am a little wrong ). sadly i don't have the brain power to do the maths right now, but i'll have a look tomorrow if someone hasn't answered this.

mine do the same thing. it has got to the point where i don't really use ladders any more, unless it's for a higher gravity world where the jetpack won't work. Bill looks pretty happy for someone who just fell off his spaceship.

yeah, thinking about it further i don't think it would be any more efficient. it was just one of those thoughts where i didn't entirely realise that we are dealing with orbital velocities in a vacuum. like getting out of orbit by burning towards the planet.

@Dave Kerman: i have a quick question about your explanation on the previous page. since you are on the prograde side of the Mun, why not: launch north @45 degrees until your apoapsis is ~8km, then burn at the horizon until you get the desired Kerbin periapsis? intuitively that would seem to me to be the more efficient method (and also a bit faster), so i assume that i am missing something.

yes, at least with FAR. i have used them as tail fins before. you can't control them, but they make it more stable.