4 to 5 Seat Fuel Asparagus

[afoolishmoon]

First real post, lurked a while. I'm sure others had thought of this, but I couldn't find any posts about it and wanted to share. So, I give you my fuel asparagus:

Being very cheap, I don't like traditional asparagus designs because dropping valuable parts (engines) hurts. So, I removed the engines and used a central Skipper engine instead with just the fuel tanks in an asparagus array. Added a Hitchhiker module for carrying more kerbals, since I had to use a brand adapter anyway. Just the Skipper saves you around 3,000 versus an array of nine Reliants, and in practice more since you can recover the Skipper. This build gets 4 (or more if you ditch the drone core and go with a cockpit) kerbals into orbit with a fairly substantial amount of fuel left. It's good for early on in career when you don't have a lot unlocked.

It's nice for putting multiple tourists into orbit and/or picking up stranded kerbonauts because of its seating.

Notes:

*Starts very slow, but don't worry... It gets there.

*Since you won't be queued to drop tanks by an engine flame-out you need to watch the fuel levels as you fly.

*Rarely a fuel tank will fall wrong and clip off the engine connector, usually on the gravity turn. Maybe some well-placed struts could prevent this?

*The large number of parachutes is due to how it tends to land: auto-cutting some, then tipping over. The extra chutes on the top seem to help with this.

I'm definitely open to suggestions on improving this, I'm sure it's far from perfect.

Edited May 16, 2015 by afoolishmoon