Lifter Trouble

[LittleItaly]

So I have tried all day to get this bad boy into space.

She's destined to be a deep space solar sailor; essentially going into other planets' SOIs to gather recon.

I can't make anything powerful enough to get her into space without making it insanely unstable, yet I can't make it stable without giving it enough power to get into space.

Any thoughts or help? This is all stock, mind you. Not even MechJeb since I can't get it to work on 0.21 (frustratingly)

Thanks!

[allmhuran]

I have just the thing for you...

[Tripzter]

You clearly dont have enough thrust to get it off the ground with those tiny engines. You have to make a lifter that separates just like the vid posted in post 2.

[LittleItaly]

You clearly dont have enough thrust to get it off the ground with those tiny engines. You have to make a lifter that separates just like the vid posted in post 2.

I know that those little Ion engines aren't getting me anywhere, that is just what I hope simply ends up in space. I've tried strapping that whole thing to various lifter designs with limited success. The Ion engines are supposed to be used once I am already in space

[annallia]

How much does it weigh? If you are not opposed to mods Nova punch has a few parts that would make it easy to get her into space assuming it doesn't weigh too much.

[Johnno]

I can't make anything powerful enough to get her into space without making it insanely unstable, yet I can't make it stable without giving it enough power to get into space.

Doesn't look too heavy, should be fairly easy to get it into orbit. Stability is just a question of symmetry and some wellplaced struts.

I made a quick mockup in my testbed save and threw together a launcher. Keep in mind this is just for demonstration purpose to give you an idea of what could work (as I don't have you exact design).

Some experienced players may say it's a bit overkill and less would've done the job, but I didn't feel like trying to optimize something since you didn't note any part count or budget/size restrictions. It was a quick design and overengineered to do the job straight off so I didn't have to keep trying.

It flew like a dream, no signs of instability. Did have to keep an eye on the throttle with mainsails straight onto orange tanks (they have a tendency to overheat) but other than that piece of pie getting it to orbit. I put it into a 100x100km orbit with fuel to spare.

4x jumbo tank with skippers onto the 'payload', 4x jumbo tank with mainsail below those.

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[AstroRick]

You are going to need more RTGs I think. Each ion engine can be powered by one "Gigantor" solar panel, and I think those are equal to about -20- stock RTG units?

[TheHengeProphet]

My philosophy would be to throw a stack separator on the nose of that panoptican and launch the vessel inverted, allowing for a single vertical stack. I've gotten much heavier craft into space, so this should really be no problem! Good luck!

[shand]

See my approach would be to put decouplers under the ion drives- a docking port on each one, docking port on one of those, then attach the same quad splitter that was used at the top of the stack, attach docking ports to the remaining 3 surfaces of the quad splitter, then build the launch vehicle below (I'd start with a BOT with a skipper below, decoupler, BOT, skipper, then with 4x symetry (2x longest narrow fuel tank, aerospike below) - you may need to upgrade the aerospikes to rockets and the skipper to a rockomax depending on the weight of the payload.