Mid-Career Reusable rocket

[SofusRud]

So, I'm at tier two with most of the buildings, and I decided that I wanted to be able to launch a payload of 20 tons, and be able to recover as much of the cost of the rocket as possible.

After a a number of failures:

The biggest problems were that my mass limit is 140 tons, and I also had to have a wide enough base that it wouldn't tip over when landing. So in the end I came up with this bad boy:

By using the bigger rocket tanks, I was able to reduce height and increase the width of the base, making it far safer for landing.

A little while into the launch the 3 LVT-30s are shut down, once the mainsail can manage a good enough TWR, since they have a slightly lower ISP. The first stage needs to get an arc that either reaches or almost goes out of the atmosphere, whilst at the same time sets it up for a landing at the peninsula east of KSC. This allows it to be recovered at about a 80% rate.

The booster has air-brakes, and should always have a sliver of fuel left for course corrections and touchdown. There are five chutes, as well as the probe core and reaction wheels inside the cargo bay.

Then second stage kicks in. With a 20 ton payload, the second stage has a little over 900 m/s of delta-v, which is enough to put it into orbit and allow it to deorbit for reuse.

After putting the cargo into orbit, the second stage deorbits, and land with parachutes. with good aim, I'd be able to recover an even greater portion of the cost from this stage.

[FishInferno]

Very cool indeed!