So other than the going-sideways thing, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with the construction of your rocket so you get more headroom for mistakes. The mai

So other than the going-sideways thing, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with the construction of your rocket so you get more headroom for mistakes. The main thing is "asparagus staging", which is where you set up fuel transfer pipes between stages on the same vertical level such that the outside engines run out first, and the inside engines last. Say you have a single stage, Add two fuel tanks to the side of the main tank with separators and hook up a fuel line feeding fuel from the outside tanks to the inside tanks. Add engines to the outside tanks. Repeat for more layers, transferring fuel from each layer to the previous. Doing this can get you a rocket powerful enough to almost go in a straight line to wherever. Whenever an engine runs out of fuel you can jettison that stage, and have the remaining fuel tanks all entirely full. The second thing is to make sure your final stage is as small as you can get it. Use a tiny capsule, a tiny fuel tank, and a tiny engine. This makes the final stage more maneuverable but more importantly it exponentially decreases the size of the rest of the rocket. As a rough rule of thumb each next stage should be around 4x the size. Once your rocket starts getting kinda tall switch to building a massive set of asparagus stages. Use struts to make the whole thing stop wobbling.