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If you have a really wide landing base, then it will be almost impossible to flip a lander over. You also want your lander to be bottom heavy and not top heavy, as top heavy craft will flip over and a bottom heavy craft will be really difficult to flip over. As far as fuel consumption goes, use a lander that's lightweight with small engines that give it a huge TWR. You can make a lightweight lander capable of getting into Kerban orbit all by it's self with very small engines and a compact design. Do that and Mun landings are a piece of cake. Here a Mun landing and return video I did a while back, see if it helps with your attempts, this is a heavier lander, but it works well for landing anywhere.

If you use radial mounted engines on a 720 fuel tank with a skipper on the bottom, you'll get insane amounts of power out it in career mode. Use that with a combination of radial slack tanks on asparagus staging and you'll have an early super lifter in career mode.

Alright sweet, I have lots of photos of every major event that's happening. I also like to show my entire fuel gauge stats. What you see with all of the MK. 1 pods is capable of landing on Kerban all on it's own without ripping apart. I'm going to try my hardest to land it right next to the space center on the first try. Getting all 19 kerbals down to the surface of Vall will also be challenging due to fuel consumption, but we'll see today.

Part count of the lifter is 375. The current one in the picture is an older version, the new version has more docking clamps for better stability when loading in super heavy payloads.

Also, if you visit the SSTO sections of the space craft exchange threads, there's lots in there that will give you ideas or explain what they did for their designs, check em out.

What kind of lifter are you using and what's the payload weight?

No, this is the prelaunch weight of just the payload itself sitting on the launch pad. Which would be the weight of the payload in space after it's been lifted to LKO. Here is ship one, the mothership with a lander attached to it. Here is ship two, the supply ship, with a refit engine.

Sometimes is the craft isn't properly supported, then this will happen a lot. The weight of the craft acting on all the parts will cause structural failure if it's not held in place properly. Usually it's because the craft in the center isn't supported. If you can't put clamps on the center of your craft, you can put a stack decoupler on the bottom of the rocket engine and then put a big metal plate on the bottom of that, then put one docking clamp on the bottom of the plate. When you launch the craft, stage it so the the decoupler releases, but the launch clamp that's holding it stay's attached by putting the clamp in the next stage. This prevents the shrouds from moving and bumping into the engines. If this doesn't work, try using different methods of lifting your payload.

Here you go:

There's a better response for you in your thread now, if you still have questions, I'll help if I can.

Well, I posted pictures of some of my other ship above and I'm using the lifter attached to the Papa Dragon. I explained my thought process of how I would do it with a combination of those ship ideas and that's the inspiration I'm using for my craft. So here's some "help" for the challenge. 1. First build an extremely lightweight lander unit for your crew. Make sure it has enough power to to fly well on Kerban, if it achieves orbit than you're good to go. Vall has roughly the same gravity as Moho, so about double the gravity of Mun. If you test your lander on Mun and you can land, take off, get back to Kerban, with just the lander alone after you transfer it to the Mun, then that should be a good benchmark. You can build landers like this with the really small engines, and the 180 liquid fuel tanks and a command seat on top of the lightest probe core. 2. If you plan on doing apollo style with the lander, don't put any RCS on the lander to save on weight. Instead put only a 750 RCS tank on the main ship at maximum. Dock the main ship to the lander with the RCS. Or don't dock at all and space walk instead. You shouldn't take an extra lander back with you, it's just dead weight. 3. I used 3 nuclear engines total to get my craft from Kerban to Jool. One of the double long grey tanks and the other two were on the thin long tanks that were placed on the side. I then used the slack tank asparagus staging method that is in the lifter in the images above, to stage the slack tanks that were feeding the nuclear engines. The 3 engines were capable of pushing a 150 ton craft from Kerban to Jool with 5030 units of liquid fuel. One 1440 tank, one 720 tank, and 8 * 360 tanks. So there's an idea of fuel consumption for the engines I had and the total weight they were pushing. That's a one way trip fuel load, so you double that and add about 720 more and there's a round trip. 10,780 units of delta V to make a round trip to Vall and back to Kerban, with perfect orbits and landings, for a 150 ton, initial weight craft. Hope this is helpful to you.

Ok so here is my Prelaunch weights for my craft that I'm sending on this epic journey. This entry is for hard mode, read the PS entry at the bottom for full details. Craft 1: Mothership - 391 parts, 153.75 tons Craft 2: Supply Ship - 244 parts, 164.24 tons Subtotals: Parts, 635 / Weight, 317.99 tons Subtract the 9 launch clamps which each weigh 0.1 tons (These do affect the Prelaunch weight values) Grand totals: Parts 624 / Weight, 317.90 tons I use the exact same lifter to lift both ships into LKO, no jet engines were used. I'm documenting everything that's happening during the journey with screenshots. Both of these craft are untested, once they get off the ground and into LKO, they're officially on the mission and I'm not making any changes to them. So this is challenge completed or Bust! Mothership Crew: 19 Kerbals on board. Flight Crew: Capt. Jebediah, Cdr. Bob, Lt. Mundo Ship's Cook: Sidely Janitor: Newvey Security Chief: Kenmore Security Staff: Billy-Bobbart, Johnley Weapons Officer: Gus Data Analyst: Franklin Chief Scientist: Jenzer Science Crew: Fredming, Adming, Ellock, Fredzon Ship's Reporter: Kelson Ship's Engineers: Jeddous, Johndorf, Mitrod PS: I'm using no mods at all what so ever, and no third party information. This means no perfect launch windows or anything like that, no maps, Nothing. I'm only using the pictures that were posted for the original challenge and the coordinates to find the easter egg site. I've never landed on Vall yet or flown to Vall. I have flown to Jool and landed on Laythe once, but didn't make a return journey. The reason Bill isn't on the flight crew is because he is captain of my Duna Command Center base.

I'm actually doing this challenge right now since I checked it out after you're post. 320 tons is gravy, my mothership is on the way, apollo setup. I don't use any mods at all and no 3rd party information either, so this is fun. My Leviathan lifter unit can get everything into orbit as long as it doesn't exceed 250 tons because then structural stability becomes an issue.

There should probably be bonuses for precision landings too. Landing super close to the target LZ, and landing the kerbals back at the KSC. Have point reductions for any kerbals that are KIA. Maybe a bonus for apollo landings on Vall. Lander unit is expendable after the Vall surface missions are complete. Anyone who copies another persons craft voids there submissions.

Thanks for clarifying. Also, how do you want submissions to be handled? Last question, when you say payload to LKO, you mean only the payload that is going to Vall and not including the lifter used to get the payload to LKO right?

If I do one set of challenges in the scoring, can I still do all the separate missions and add to the original score or is it one score per mission? This question pertains to non-career mode. Also, can an armada of ships be launched there for this? Example, one craft for kerbals, one for probes and satellites, one for orbital refueling at Vall, and one for rovers? Also, there should be a bonus for using no mods at all.

What's Kethane?

This lander can get a kerbal on and off any planet or moon, including Eve. Total mass, 38.23 tons. If you refuel it, it can be reused and it doesn't require much fuel to do so. Since this lander was designed for Eve, you can get rid of half the craft as far as the lower aerospike engines go. That cuts down on the weight. If you don't stage the craft, it should still be capable of getting of of Laythe and Tylo with no problem. To do this with more kerbals, you could use a probe body on the top and add four seats to it. Or a big metal plate and 6 - 8 seats and it should still work. Then I would use this craft and take off the jet engines and asparagus the other engines as nuclear engines. I would have one on the large tank, and two on the last set of asparagus. That way, the rest will be slack tanks for fuel only and refueling of the lander. Then I would attach that lander and transfer stage configuration to a lifter like this one that can easily lift over 200 tons into orbit with fuel left over for the Kerban escape burn. The lifter is everything below the large decoupler next to the nuclear engines. But that's just how I would do it. This last image is of my Papa Dragon ship and lander, it made it to Jool and landed on Laythe for the first test flight. Total weight 144.33 tons, lifter not included. It did not have enough fuel to get off of Laythe or return to Kerban, but it was just a limitation test flight. Here is the result of the Papa Dragon The next option is to do something like what I have in the second image. Make a lightweight lander and instead of using lots of delta V, use Ion engines. The amount of Ion engines and Xenongas on the lander shown had enough fuel to Orbit Jool and Laythe and have about 1/4 gas remaining. If you bring Xenongas in a 3:1 ratio of Gas to Engines you'll have enough for a trip around all of the moons. If your craft is larger than the one in the second image above, double the engines and solar arrays. Solar arrays gather less energy the farther out you get, like they should. Here is my first orbit of Jool with the little lander craft and a fuel reading during the orbital burn to a Laythe intercept. Here's the craft in action.

Well, does the lifter have weight requirements? because I have two kinds of options for you. One uses Ion engines, the other uses nuclear engines.

Ah, for a career mode booster then, this is freaking fantastic! I usually like manned landers that can do multiple landings for science, and early on, the return journey might be difficult.

It depends on the size of base you want to get there and the transfer stage used. This is my Duna Command Center base. I lifted it into orbit as one whole part. Then I sent up 5 nuclear engines and fitted them to the base and sent it to Duna. So with something like this, it's easier to piece the engines to it as separate missions, but it would be more efficient to launch it all up as one with the nuclear engines already attached. But my orbital vehicle was simple enough and once you get into higher tonnages, the lifters get more complex to rig. So it really depends on what you want to do. I'm a pro at docking anything in orbit so I found this way to be easier than building a complex lifter because I already had lifters that could lift the things that I had rather than build a new one just for this mission. The Duna Command Center is about 80 tons or so with full fuel in the landing engines. Here is the lifter. This configuration got the base into orbit with fuel to spare. Here is the base after it landed on Duna and deployed. Here's a video of the mission and the landing: The video also shows the engines I used and the docking process if it helps your inspiration. You can download this base here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-vTRL2n8wvzalY4b0VZc0Fsdk0/edit?usp=sharing

If Hodo's suggestion doesn't work, try reinstalling the game. If it's a steam game, you can also check the file integrity, something might be corrupted somehow.

I you have more than three wheels, double check the spacing and rather or not they all line up properly. Also, check your center of thrust and make sure it's in line with the center of mass. If there are parts on it that aren't perfectly symmetrical it could cause this. If you have tail fins, it could also cause this. Depending on what control surfaces you're using, those could also be a major cause. One last probable issue that could cause this to happen, is that the plane might not be properly supported on it's landing gear, meaning that the weight sags down on the wings and could cause the plane to tilt and then it goes off the runway. If you post pictures of your plane, everyone will be able to help you more.

With the first one, it's about 5fps, the second one is about 15 - 20 fps, so not too horrible. It's better than slide show mode.

Still a cool lifter design for light to medium weight craft, I never really use the stack splitters much, and stacking SRB's like that is effective for getting out of the thick atmosphere.