dm1940k

I vote you share your obviously successful rocket design

As the title suggests, this is my best rocket to date. In the last few days I've been advancing in leaps and bounds. This is the fruit of my labors. Its a 2 stage rocket. The first is just 6 solid fuel boosters. The second stage is a 3 tank liquid fuel rocket, nothing fancy. I also through some stabilizers on top of the solid boosters to help with pre-space wobbles, as well as some parachutes for fun. This should prove that simple(ish) can be a more effective design philosophy. Early today I got to roughly 2500km up with this simple design. Pics for proof: I've also been able to enter into a stable orbit with the addition of one more fuel tank. Also it should be noted that I havent modified or added to my client at all, it's pure KSP 0.8.4.

Agreed, I keep my engine at 100% power until I reach about 1km/s then Ill turn it down to the point where the speed remains constant, not increasing or decreasing. This helps save fuel and get me a little higher.

Just a quick update. I broke 36.7 km a minute ago using a variation of the above rocket configuration above, but it had 3 fuel tanks instead of 2. May break gravitational pull with a 4th fuel tank.

What Ive found to work best so far is a two-stage rocket, the first consisting of a tri-coupler with a solid-fuel booster on each port. That is attached by decoupler to the second stage. Starting from the top, the second stage consists of a parachute, the command unit, 2 fuel tanks and a liquid fuel engine. It's basically a copy of the original Apollo designs. Though it can't reach escape velocity, it got me over 16 km up on its first run and all I had to do to keep it pointing up was hold down the SAS button. I'd say start small and add things, keeping them when they work and tossing them when they don't. Some of my best rockets have been little one fuel tank liquid engines. By the way I'm not using any addon files, just KSP 0.82. Hope all that rambling helps.