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Hi everyone, in an effort to cut launch costs (which crippled one of my earlier career games), I discovered I could cut Kerbin to orbit costs with mods like Stage Recovery, which allowed me to get refunds for some of my spent stages (For those who don't know, it calculates the landing zone and survival chances of decoupled stages once they leave physics range and refunds you based on landing location and predicted speed). Long story short, I started making entirely SSTO Rocket lifters, that I would then pilot back from LKO to KSC, however, either piloted by me, or by MechJeb landing and even with 4-500 m/s unspent deltaV I usually miss KSC by 20/60km. Sure, I'd still get 90% back or so, but still, when your rocket costs skyrocket because it has to be entirely returnable why accept less than perfect refund? So I started building crawlers to go fetch the landed rocket, grab it with a Klaw and haul it back. (I used Konstruction for the large tank threads and Infernal Robotics for a few other things). This sort of works as I can have MechJeb do the boring waypoint piloting to the rocket and then drive it back to the landing pad . I had initially tried with grabbing the top half of the rocket and lowering it onto a flatbed of sorts with infernal robotics parts, however, they start bending uncontrollably and no level of parallelism or struts seems to help. So I'm stuck with carrying the rockets vertical over terrain, which forces my crawler to weigh at least twice the rocket to be relatively stable. So, I'm wondering, is there a way? should I be using IR differently? should I refuel the rockets and have them haul their big mass back to ksc on their own? I also considered sky cranes but I couldn't build one that reliably balanced and lifted 50 tons off the ground. Should I redesign everything and use FMRS so that my stages get flown back independently? I'll post a couple of pictures of my 6Ton Lifter, 15 Ton Lifter and 30 Ton lifter and the crude crawler I got so far. Primitive Crawler: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0DB1_F3t7P7am10OFBPRTk2amc/view?usp=sharing (had stability problem and could have failing tracks due to load) Primitive Crawler with 6Ton Lifter : https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0DB1_F3t7P7RG51bFJneVdTOG8/view?usp=sharing Better Crawler (I apologise for the lighting will take a better shot of it later): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0DB1_F3t7P7RS0tV1lOMFJINmc/view?usp=sharing 50 Ton Lifter back on the pad with the smaller crawler: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0DB1_F3t7P7Y2tPdlJBWWwtN1k/view?usp=sharing So I guess the question can be shrunk to: How can I manipulate a 50 Ton object on Kerbin's surface with IR or other mods without twisting blowing up everything? On a related note I am struggling to make an articulated docking port for an aerobraking tanker (With the 10Meter Shield to go around) so far I have to quicksave/load to stop the wobbles after docking. Oops can't find a picture of it right now. But basically it is a right angled IR robotic arm that extends out and forwards clearing the 10M heatshield. Thanks in advance for any suggestion or comments