Which kind of Landers?

[Superfluous J]

I tend to design my one shot missions with tight fuel budgets and leave the landing gear on the surface or drop it shortly after liftoff.

But I also frequently have shuttles and fuel tugs that stay in orbit or landed until they are needed for something, and those are by design and necessity SSTO. And SSTL. As SSTO sites not actually mean "never stage at all anymore" but we all know that.

So anyway, I'd have to answer "both" but that's not an option so I will abstain.

[roboslacker]

One advantage to using multi stage landers is that an engine explosion can sometimes be survivable.

[Kroslev Kerman]

3 hours ago, roboslacker said:

One advantage to using multi stage landers is that an engine explosion can sometimes be survivable.

yes thats actually true

[Freshmeat]

It is all about where you are in the game.

I drop everything that is not needed on the ascent stage in exploration phase. It has been a while, but I seem to recall that it allowed me to drop engines as well and ascent on a single Spark, while three was necessary to ensure a reasonable deceleration on descent. If it is SSTO, it gets re-designated as a ferry. Then I would ferry crew from surface to transmunar shuttles, that would again rendezvous with SSTO's from Kerbin surface for a complete trip.

I have yet to move out of the exploratory phase for planets, so there I use expendable landers.