Heavy Lift design

[hoylemd]

Hey KSPers,

I'm trying to lift station parts into orbit, but I'm having trouble building a lift vehicle that can take more than 8 or so tonnes to orbit. I try just making more asparagus stages, or longer main stages, but they always seem to start flipping when I start my gravity turn. Is there something I'm not taking into account here, or do I just need to do steeper ascent paths for heavy lift?

Thanks!

[Anquietas314]

It would help if you could post screenshots of your payload and the launcher designs you've tried already. Also are you using FAR/NEAR? You should be able to build launchers that can lift payloads of 40 tonnes relatively easily using 2.5m (rockomax) parts in stock. With FAR/NEAR you might need to use the 3.75m parts instead (edit: because you typically build thinner rockets), but it should be doable.

Incidentally you can actually build quite complex stations by launching components less than 8 tonnes each (launch fuel tanks empty).

Edited January 11, 2015 by armagheddonsgw

[Pecan]

Have a look at the launch-vehicles in the last chapters (7 and 8) of the tutorial in my signature (stats in the text are for KSP 0.25 but the ships still work as advertised).

A single mainsail can SSTO 11t, a KR-2L 25t. Join a couple of them together and you've got 22t and 50t respectively - you see how it goes. Staging makes everything more efficient (but more expensive and complex) but you shouldn't have any trouble getting above 8t.