How to make tactical ICBMs...Know everything else but how to stage and decouple.

[Major "zubb" Tom]

I have been inspired by the OP's rocket thingy.

Fly that missle over the target and fire the sideways missles at the ground as a sort of bomber missle.

That would save the trouble of building a bomber plane as I think rockets are easier than planes.

[Alistone]

I remember in the past having some difficulty in getting some small SRBs to fire at the same time as a decoupler (to deorbit the mainsail & tanks). When I put them both in the same stage sometimes it would decouple without firing the engine. The delay between stages was enough that it would slow down my spacecraft a bit if I seperated them into 2 stages due to a couple seconds of reverse thrust.

The workaround I use is to manually activate the decoupler just after I fire the engine. Action groups make this much easier to do in rapid succession.

I have just gotten by with the workaround, but if I wanted to find a real "fix" I would play around with putting the engine above/below the decoupler within the same stage to see if there was an order within the stage that could be starting the rocket or decoupling first.

[Taki117]

Stages work from bottom to top. If you have retrorockets that need to fire put them on the bottom of the stage. That way when you stage the signal to fire the rockets gets there just before the signal to decouple the stage.