700NitroXpress

This is a subassembly unit for you guys. I developed it to lift heavy payloads into orbit. It uses slack tank asparagus staging and has an increasing TWR because of this. To fly it, make sure to watch the fuel gauges of the orange tanks by right clicking on them. Wait for the gauge to hit 0.0 and then eject and click on the next tank in line. Once all of the orange tanks are depleted, start your gravity turn and throttle down to 3/4 or less depending on the weight on your payload. Now you can watch the engine fuel gauge as you normally would and hit each stage as the engines flame out. If you experience structural failure at the decoupler, reinforce the coupler to the tanks and also be sure to attach struts to your payload as well. Only attach struts from the payload to the tops of the nose cones and not the orange tanks. This lifter has been tested up to 200 tons of payload. At 250 tons I was having trouble, so that's your benchmark. The craft in the picture below is 144.55 tons and the Leviathan gets it into orbit with no problem and with fuel to spare. This is a one size fits all design for a single attachment point. I'm working on making a multi-point version. You can download it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-vTRL2n8wvzQkEtUTBCNHpIMW8/edit?usp=sharing Be sure to put it in subassemblies.

Yeah, post some max specs so people know what to expect for the payload limitations.

Can they launch anything at 100 tons or a little over?

Go big or go home!

Check out my video mission where I went to the moon and back to Kerban, I explain everything I'm doing in the orbital maneuvers and braking for landings. Mun landing is 20 minutes in.

Without pictures of the craft it's hard to help, but if you have any blue decouplers on it, that's your problem.

The best way I found to land accurately on Eve, is to have a lander that has a stage for the deorbit burn. You want an angle of about 5 - 10 degrees off of your landing zone so you're basically going to come in straight down on the LZ. I've landed things within 4km of each other doing this, mainly that far on purpose due to the terrain not being flat enough. Alternatively you can overshoot the LZ a little more, then when you're over the LZ and are going less than 400m/s, decelerate with the landing engines so you come in straight down. Make sure your lander has enough power to preform an atmospheric maneuver tho, otherwise I'd go with my first suggestion. I landed on the little island in the middle of the huge crater along the equator of Eve surrounded by ocean using my method. Here is my decent trajectory, first try. Landed within 2.2km of my first Eve landing.

I love using tanks with these engines for inclination changes without burning fuel from the main tanks. Usually with heavily built rockets that are carrying a lander docked to them. They do have very good burn time for adjustment maneuvers.

Very true, but here's the thing. If you choose to, you can throttle down as you drop the spent tanks. This allows you to maintain TWR while dropping the excess weight, without loosing the engines until the end. This also saves on fuel because the engines will use less fuel to maintain thrust as apposed to the other method. So if you throttle down as you stage slack tanks, you won't risk structural failure because you're manually maintaining the TWR and you're using less fuel to do so. Also there is that sudden deceleration jolt from engine flame out that can cause loss of velocity and potential structural failure if you have engines on all tanks. Thoughts?

Have you tried putting half of the fuel tanks of the launch stage on the outside as slack tanks and dropping that extra weight as the fuel drains out? I like this design for an interplanetary probe or satellite.

My bad, you're right, it does work within the physics load range.

I believe the problem is that the orange tanks have a faulty connection between the the two tanks themselves. Meaning that the top tank and bottom tank are becoming disjointed, but are still attached to the craft with struts. This seems to happen when you stack orange tanks on top of each other. One possible solution you might try is using slack tank staging. Put the extra tanks on the outside of the engines and drop the spent fuel tanks with normal asparagus staging and that should fix this issue. Here's an example. The orange tanks on the outside drop as they get depleted so you're not carrying the excess weight with you. Also, in a stress test experiment that I did, I found that the orange tanks have weaker connections when stacked together than the double grey tanks. So I strongly believe that having the tanks stacked is causing the problem due to a faulty connection of the tanks to each other.

When you're not in the physics load range then the part is acting as a static object that just follows it's current path, SAS has no additional affects until you're flying the craft. The best way to keep a craft pointed in one direction is to point it to Normal on the nav ball. That way the craft will only spin while it orbits, keeping it's axis points stationary.

Yeah, for lightweight stuff with one major attachment point it works pretty well. There are better ways to set it up, but for a test flight, that actually had a target destination, this worked perfectly. My actual ship that I used to do real missions to Jool is much larger and differently designed. I posted a thread about it in the space craft exchange called The Papa Dragon, check that out for other ideas. I also have a thread about different staging techniques in the questions area that might prove inspirational.

So I wanted to know what types of staging techniques you guys use to get your craft into orbit or beyond. I have two right now that are personal favorites. There's asparagus with slack tank staging and air lifter to asparagus combo. The first image below is one of my original designs for a SSTO interplanetary rocket ship with a all in one lander attached to it. The staging was capable of getting the entire craft into orbit minus the solid fuel boosters without ejecting anything else. Then the entire craft could be refueled and sent to it's destination. However, I believe the TWR of this thing is relatively low and of course inefficient, but I've had this craft for a long time and haven't changed it until now. This image is of my new asparagus lifter design that uses slack tanks that asparagus off of the main craft before getting to the core engines. Since the outer tanks are slack, I'm not loosing or maintaining my TWR, it's actually increasing at a linear rate as all of the slack tanks drop two by two. This means that I can power down the engines as I gain altitude and use less fuel to get an equalized TWR as when I launched. I think this saves fuel and you're not getting any deceleration at all when a tank runs out of fuel because there's no engine attached to it. This also helps the structural stability as it flies. This design has room for improvement, but it's not really necessary right now as the current lifter can get this 143 ton craft into orbit with half fuel to spare in the main tank at the end of the staging. Then I attach a engine configuration to the bottom to suit the crafts mission. The current craft can go to Moho and return to Kerban. It also went to Jool and made a successful landing on Lythe, but it is basically all out of fuel, however it was just the basic engine configuration with nothing on the lower docking port. It was a test flight. Lastly there's my air lifter design. You can air lift a craft to about 22,000 meters, then fire the orbital engines at high altitude to achieve orbit. Shown here on my Duna Command Center below. I find this effective for lifting craft or stations into orbit with more than one main attachment point. I like using this whenever possible, but I do admit that it has some limitations on it's use and what kinds of craft can be fitted with it. But in some cases, this can be a very effective option to save on size if you're lifting oddly shaped craft or small craft into orbit that have multiple places to attach engines. 1. What do you guys think of these staging designs? 2. Do you have similar staging designs? 3. Share any staging techniques that you think are more effective or improvements to these (mainly the air lifter or the slack tank).

Here is what I used on my first flight to the Jool system using much of the same technique, only I had a live Kerbal in a lander pod. I did this as a test flight to see how many moons I could visit in the Jool system on my first try and possibly land on Lythe. This rocket uses jet engines to reach about 22,000 meters and then the main engine fires as the jets decouple. There's no asparagus staging in the outer engines so all of them burn out at the same time. Then I used the Ion engines to do all of my maneuvers and orbiting of Jool and Lythe. Just the two Ion engines shown on the craft below had enough power to move the craft well enough in physical time warp. This is my first trip to Jool and the maneuver that put me on an intercept for Lythe. You can still see that I have lots of XenonGas left. Here's a close Jool orbit that I achieved with the same craft. Unfortunately I didn't manage to land it on Lythe, it crashed into the ocean because I didn't have enough rocket fuel to slow down and the parachute ripped off. But this design suits you purposes if you put a small probe core on the top and fly it unmanned.

Not really, let me explain. He's using a 3 man pod for a mission that can be done with a 2 man capacity craft + 1 unmanned module. This example craft only has one SAS unit and no RCS. When you make lightweight and compact craft, you don't need RCS for assistance, like I stated before above, RCS is really only for docking and on his craft it's just excess weight. Also, you should never stack the orange fuel tanks like that because you're pushing that excess weight for a longer period which requires more fuel. On my craft, you put the extra tanks on the outside of the craft so that you're dropping the spent tanks instead of carrying them with you longer than you need to. The key points to take away from my example that you can use to improve your rescue craft are these: 1. Use SAS not RCS 2. Lighten your craft for the mission it's needed for 3. Don't carry excess weight with you 4. Lightweight craft won't have the issues with destroying themselves on the launch pad 5. Always support your craft properly with launch clamps if it can't support itself In the picture of the craft in question, there's at least 120 tons of unsupported weight that's resting on the radial decouplers and that's probably what's causing the problem, they're breaking. Either that or the blue decouplers are breaking, my money's on the blue ones. Later on I tested this, here is a back to back comparison of Red vs Blue decouplers. Red obviously wins. The blue one holds 3 grey tanks barely, red holds many. With the orange tanks, blue holds none and red holds the same as the grey tanks shown below. This tells us that the red decoupler should always be used instead of the blue decoupler whenever possible.

Here's a better and more lightweight option. This lander has an unmanned pod so you can send it to the moon. Jet engines lift it up through the thick atmosphere, then the solid boosters push it up the rest of the way. The rest is asparagus staging with slack tanks on the outsides so you're only dropping dead fuel tanks and not fuel tanks with engines attached. This has more than enough power to get to the moon and back to Kerban and land on both.

If you don't have any struts supporting the center of the craft, then the force caused by it being dropped on the launch pad could be breaking a connection somewhere. If you lighten your craft and use different propulsion that should fix it. Also you don't want to have the blue decouplers, those always seem to cause more harm then good. Also, make sure the craft has power. Get rid of all the RCS, you can use SAS for turning, RCS is for docking only.

This hasn't happened to me tho, so it's all good.

Bingo, so word got angry with me because it doesn't recognize the format, but it said click "No" to preserve formatting and that worked. So everything is fixed! Thanks Sal!

Well, I have Office Word 2003 and Notepad left then, either of those?

How do I open a craft file?

This is mainly a problem I'm having with rover designs although I could run into this problem with space planes too. Basically, I create all of my rovers in the SPH first and test them on the runway. Since I have a lot of parts attached to the rover body that I started the thing with, I can't detach the rest of it and save it as a subassembly. I also can't put the entire object into the subassemblies area because it's not an attachable part. I want to get the rover into the VAB so I can put it on a rocket and build a transfer vehicle for it. So what I did is, I copied the .craft file from the SPH folder and pasted it into the VAB folder. It put the craft in the VAB in the game and I could manipulate it and do everything I wanted to it, but when I launch it and revert back, it sends me to the SPH first, so any changes that I made that aren't saved yet aren't on the save for the VAB file. Is there a way to transfer these craft easier? Is there a way to make the craft load and save only in the VAB when I move the file there? Also sometimes the symmetry thinks that it's in the SPH when it's in the VAB, any way to fix that too? Does anyone have workarounds for these issues?

I've only had this happen once, but the 4x physical time warp is to blame. Whenever possible, avoid using it. Otherwise I had a Kerbal fall through a planet because he got out of his pod, dropped to the ground and then things exploded, the camera shook, and then the game crashed and a message said Oops... As far as the ships go, I believe it's because in regular time warp, all physics calculations for the most part are stopped and the craft cant be moved because it makes it one object. However, in physical time warp, the physics are still being calculated on all of the parts and movement is amplified so certain parts will collapse into each other. Then when you come out of time warp, the parts expand and things fail, then everything falls apart.