Booster landing

[SMAEL]

Is it possible to:

 

launch a rocket, get it to some altitude

then decouple booster , save

then land the booster, return back to ship and have it right where you saved it ?

 

so you wont have to do it real time ? Any mods for this ? or any help ?

 

 

thanks

[FullMetalMachinist]

8 hours ago, SMAEL said:

so you wont have to do it real time ? Any mods for this ? or any help ?

No way to do it in stock. I've never used it myself, but I think FMRS is what you're looking for. 

[DrLicor]

As @FullMetalMachinist mentioned, FMRS is the perfect mod for it. 
It does exactly what you describe. After you decouple a certain stage, the mod saves the moment. You can choose to first finish your orbit etc. When you think you're ready, you can select that certain stage, and the game switches to that stage at the time of decoupling. After you've successfully landed the stage, you can switch back to the 'main' mission.
Only thing is that you need to remember not to recover anything before switching to the main stage. So you need to recover in the tracking station. 

This works also with multiable stages.

 

If you're only doing it for the funds etc. and not for the experience of being able to flying back things. There's also a mod that is called 'stage recovery', this mod recovers stages automatically when you've enough parachutes and/or fuel left in your stage. 

[Reusables]

Well, unlike those answers above it's possible and completely feasible in stock. Takes just a bit more time on launch, and save funds. (I used to lift 20t in 1000 funds with this approach)

Just make sure that the stage separation happens over 20km and the Ap of the second stage gets high enough so that you can have time to land the first stage.

This one is much more inefficient launch, since it used high cost aerospike and TWR-lacking nukes.

Edited March 12, 2017 by Reusables