My strategies when building rockets.

Now. Imagine you are building a falcon 9 replica. You build the booster itself and the booster can push to a good 100km until it runs out of fuel.

Now when you pop the second stage on, you may lose about half that altitude. You see, sometimes if you are making a booster, you want it to be a SSTO (single stage to orbit) so it can surely handle the second stage.

But here’s the thing. The booster pushes stage 2 into orbit well with no payload, but what happens if you end up sending a big satellite with a super heavy battery? Naturally, you will not get the height you want. Like if you wanted to go into Geosynchronous orbit (droo synchronous) you would not have enough.

So if you are testing, I have learned to pop a heavy battery in the payload. It sounds annoying at first, but it is really stimulating a giant satellite. This will be helpful if you are building your own sort of satellite delivery vehicle similar to the Falcon 9 (like my echo-7)

So this being said, if you are making a falcon 9 or something and you are testing the booster, try to make it have an encounter with brigo. That sounds unrealistic (really it is realistic considering droo is smaller than the real life pluto) but it will assure your booster can push your satellites into orbit efficiently.