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This is my favorite design for an interplanetary exploration craft. You can carry 3 kerbals and send one down in the attached lander unit. The lander is rated up to Moho conditions for gravity escape and docking back with the main ship. The lifter attached to it uses a slack tank design that currently lifts objects up to and over 200 tons. The current ship is about 144 tons, cut down from the original size of 206 tons. The lifter gets the craft into orbit nicely with some fuel to spare for fine tuning and altitude adjustment. The remaining central engine can be refueled if a refueling craft is sent up and docks to the top of the lander pod. The lander pod is fitted with Ion engines for long term burns, best for inclination changes done in physical time warp. This saves on fuel during long trips. I'm currently working on putting different engine attachments onto it. I will attach a large docking port on the bottom of the center tank that feeds into the nuclear engines. You can download it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-vTRL2n8wvzTmVCdWM3RElYZHM/edit?usp=sharing I know the struts look excessive, but they're all needed. Remember to power down engines to 3/4 above 10,000 meters otherwise there is a chance that the docking clamp connection could fail. Here's a showcase of the craft with the new Leviathan super max payload lifter.

You can lift limitless amounts of fuel into orbit with the right amount of staging. Here is my current Kerban Fuel Depot, weighs a little over 730 tons fully loaded. Here is another one of my super max stations, this one is the RRTS, Rapid Response Tactical Station. You can dock up to 14 craft to it at full load and fit the bottom with any engine attachment you want. The bottom section is a useful docking station, inside the outer casing are two huge fuel silos for refueling landers and space planes. Getting object this large up into orbit and docking them can get to be a pain tho. I have all of the parts for this station up for download if you're interested. I don't know if everything still works in 0.22, but it should. Here is my current craft and lifter that I'm using for most things now. This lifter can lift over 200 ton objects into orbit. This isn't near the max power of this thing, but I haven't had a need to beef it up yet. The ship attached to it now is around 144 tons. The ship is my Papa Dragon interplanetary ship with lander already attached. It's been tested up to Moho and returned to Kerban. I'm working on improving the engine designs to be longer lasting and have more fuel. The lifter uses full asparagus staging, but all the power is on the inside of the craft, so the outer tanks are slack tanks. As the fuel in them gets used up, they detach and you don't loose engine power, because there's no engines on them. Once the fuel burns down to the grey tanks, they start to drop off with the staging, but they all fuel the central tank. If I wanted to make this more efficient, I would use the small grey tanks only for the other engines and double up on the orange outer tanks. You could even add radial engines to increase power, and put more engines on the girders, while adding more fuel to the outside that drops off once it's spent.

Yeah, on a lightweight craft the ion engines can move it a lot over extremely long periods of time. I was flying around the moons of Jool with this thing. You ride the air lifter up to about 22,000 meters and then hit the next stage and it will handle the rest, no asparagus needed. Once that main engine runs out, use the ion engines to move the craft the rest of the way. You also use the ion engines for the return journey to Kerban. Once you're coming in for a landing, use the last liquid fuel engine to slow the craft down to about 20 m/s and then deploy the parachute, just in case. Then touchdown with any speed less than 10 m/s and there you go, Kerbal saved with minimal effort. You can get the craft I posted above in this link, just look for Atlas I: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-vTRL2n8wvzRmtqaWowdnZYTXM&usp=sharing Number 1 on your keyboard deploys both of the solar arrays and I think 2 shuts down the ion engines, if you want to use this craft. Also, you want to be sure to aim the Kerbal Space Center along Kerban's prograde orbit around the sun, that way when you launch, it's a straight shot out of the Kerban orbit, so you don't have to get into orbit around Kerban first.

Use a craft like this one, it has enough juice to escape the solar system on a straight shot from Kerban. Just attach a lightweight unmanned pod under the parachute. Use the ion engines to do all of the work after the core engine is depleted. Treat the encounter like a regular intercept.

Here is my Gagarin Station with emergency escape pods and and crew transfer lander that goes to the surface and returns to the station. This station can go to Jool and return to Kerban, but this station is a permanent station for my Duna operations. The lander pod on the bottom is just a all around light weight design, but this station can tug my Eve lander after a mission to the surface of Eve or Moho. Here is my Eve lander. This is my interplanetary ship with a lander attached to it. The lander is capable of landing and getting back into orbit at Moho. This entire craft has been to Moho and back to Kerban with the new improvements. I remade the lifter to this model in the image, 200 ton capacity and it can be upgraded for heavier loads.

Yeah, I never got around to getting on imgur, I just have all my screenshots on steam.

I had the debug menu running with, infinite fuel, unbreakable joints, and the lander was coming down at 100 m/s and it still exploded. I just wish that the explosion altitude was 1337 and not some number in the 1200's.

Watch the first 20 minutes of this for interception and docking an engine to a orbiting base.

Here is my first SSTO design, the Razer SSTO. Here's a shot of the Razer docked to my orbital docking station for refueling. Since then I've made this one that I like a lot better, the HS - MK III If I attach double intakes to the ram jets, then it's even more effective. Here is a shot of the max air speed without the use of the orbital afterburners.

Pretty slick indeed.

Here first design for my Atlas I air lifter. It uses jet engines to lift the craft up through Kerban atmosphere, then the jet engines detach and the main engine burns to either get a heavy craft into orbit or get a light craft anywhere in the solar system. This first model got the pod out to Jool and the lander visited all of the moons and crashed on Lythe. This first design doesn't use asparagus staging, instead, all of the engines run out of fuel at the same time. For the improvements on the design, I got rid of the jet fuel and attached the engines to radial decouplers around a main powerful engine. The jet engines draw fuel from the extra fuel in the main engine so the Jet engines don't waste fuel when they decouple. They also automatically shut down when they're ejected because they get fuel deprived. Then the main engines burn and push the craft through the rest of the atmosphere and allow you to achieve your desired altitude. Next, the smaller 215 power engines fire and allow you to achieve orbit with fuel to spare for fine tuning and inclination changes. The next big improvement is that you can then undock the small engines from the main vessel. You then send up whatever engine you want using the same air lifter and dock it to the vessel. One double-long grey fuel tank with a nuclear engine on each of the five ports had more than enough power and fuel to get this Duna Command Center all the way to Duna, do the fine tuning, and assist with landing. Here is the base on Duna after parachute repacking and deployment. So the drawbacks of the lifter are: limited size and weight that they can lift into orbit, limited configurations. Pros: efficient for the max payload, easy to get large surface area vessels into orbit for assembly, easy to build and set up, one size fits all in most situations, fewer stages, 0% failure rate on craft under 100 tons. This method can be used to lift craft in excess of 800 tons into orbit, it's very effective for getting full sized orbital fuel stations into orbit and transferring them to other planets using the attachment engines.

Here is an example of a transfer craft for the ATV, it consists of an engine and sky crane. The ATV is inside. You can see the marker for my base below on Duna, this is the intended LZ. The ATV will drop out of this box in mid atmosphere and land on it's own with the parachutes on the ATV itself. I'm going to record the landing process of this vehicle so you guys will have a video demo of what the challenge conditions are. I'll also add these to the initial post for others to reference.

Check and see if there is still power and if the wheels are getting that power, also if you right click on the wheels you can try shutting down the motors and then reactivating them.

This can happen a lot and you can fly pieces of debris too if you go to them from the tracking station.

I've had this problem, if the rockets aren't secured to the rest of the ship with duct tape, then they can detach from the radial decouplers. The problem that's happening is that the large solid boosters are providing all of their thrust to themselves and none to the ship. Therefore, the decoupler fails and the rockets come loose. This also happens at high altitude because there is less air resistance keeping the boosters in place. Another problem that might be happening is that, if you have docking clamps attached to the boosters before it launches, then the weight of the craft dropping on the launch pad is causing some structural failures and the boosters are then more likely to come off.

It looks like your staging is dropping one tank at a time and you should be dropping two. Another reason is that the blue decoupler can fail under enough force from the rockets, the red decoupler should always be used to avoid this. You could also get rid of all of the RCS components because you never need RCS on anything unless you're docking the craft, use SAS for turning. Also, you should add an SAS component because I don't see one on your craft and that could also cause it to be hard to control. I would put a large SAS ring right on top of the orange fuel tank and a small SAS ring on top of your lander can. You already have solar panels, but adding two electric generators wouldn't hurt either.

Here's what I came up with for the Eve lander based off the feedback. The pod on the bottom isn't part of the craft, only for testing purposes. The tank in the center is a slack tank with no engine, but it feeds fuel into all of the others.

I'm well aware of this, Eve is the only planet that's giving me trouble otherwise I have a "one size fits all" ship for everything else. One problem is getting the kerbal back up and onto the pod from the surface because the jet pack is useless. Another problem is having something that can land on rough terrain, Eve isn't flat in a lot of areas so a taller ship tends to flip over on the slightest incline. I had ships with high enough TWR to fly on Eve, but not enough fuel to get out of the atmosphere and into orbit.

Yeah, but you can always test it on Kerban and know if it's going to get off the ground or not.

I don't use those stats for anything. I understand m/s, altitude, and the fuel gauge. I've used those small engines on landers, but never in that way before so I just wanted to know if it worked on Eve.

No, I don't understand MJ because I don't use mods.

So I built something similar to the craft displayed on page 2.

This thing with the little engines actually works?

I like my solid booster rocket chair.

Here is my design so far for an Eve escape craft.