How many parts can you handle?

[CG_Kerbin]

Enough to make one hell of a explosion (around 800)

[theend3r]

With about 1000 parts the game becomes hardly playable but I'm runing this on a laptop. Aerodynamic FX slows down the game even with just a handful of parts though.

[Tex]

I've never really pushed the limits of what my Alienware can do with KSP, but think I can handle a pretty substantial part count. Hasn't had part lag yet!

[ShadowZone]

About 1000 is doable. The maximum I did was a launcher for this beast, which came in at about 2300 parts. The craft alone has >1700 parts.

[SkyRender]

It depends on what mods I have installed and how complex the parts are, but it usually starts to lag at around 200. It starts to really chug around 300, and it becomes completely unplayable by 400. Really hoping the optimizations for 1.0 boost those numbers.

[Linear]

It depends on what mods I have installed and how complex the parts are, but it usually starts to lag at around 200. It starts to really chug around 300, and it becomes completely unplayable by 400. Really hoping the optimizations for 1.0 boost those numbers.

Probably wont be until the Unity 5 update you'll see big improvements.

[Slam_Jones]

I gotta ask: to the people able to do 500+ parts, what kind of framerate are you looking at? Also what processor are you using?

(Personally I try to keep everything under 200 parts)

[Aragosnat]

+300 parts closer to 450 before it lag gets annoying. But, trying to keep it under 300 parts just to have good frame rates. But, seriuosely. Not enough parts.

[Francois424]

You put 500+ as a choice. Mine is about that, 500.

Any more and it becomes annoying.

I'm willing to go in the 700's to launch something but that is the absolute limit.

(Note that I seldom need to now that we have those huge, white Nasa tanks and huge engines)

[OhioBob]

Although I can probably handle more if necessary, so far I've maxed out at close to 200 parts. Most of my missions are in the 50-150 range.

[ShawnPhillips]

Enough to were I do not need to concern myself with it. I was once driving a 300 part rover around the KSC while a friend tried to crash a rocket into the buildings on the multiplayer mod and the timer only occasionally flickered yellow. I rarely build several hundred part crafts so I do not concern myself with performance.

[BigDog]

I haven't built anything really big in a while. In older versions I got around 3200 but that wanted to stuff up in the VAB. Most I have launched was probably right below that, at around 3000. This screen is from a few versions back but it shows 2548.

[LABHOUSE]

If 2300 won´t work, how can 3000 work then?

I did not say how many fps I got.

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I gotta ask: to the people able to do 500+ parts, what kind of framerate are you looking at? Also what processor are you using?

(Personally I try to keep everything under 200 parts)

intel core i5-4210U and 2-5 seconds per frame, the maximum fps (what is set as max) is 10.

[Sidereus]

After about 180 or so my game starts lagging quite a bit. I think I've only pushed the 200 limit a few times, and it gets very close to being unplayable.

[Whackjob]

Lol, not possible with the current game code. On ANY CPU.

Politely begging to differ.

Largest craft I successfully flew had 6,700 parts. (not the one pictured, this was ~3,200) The machine whose processor I finally burned out died on a launch of an 8,200 part craft.

2,300 is doable. Please take my word on this.

[Slam_Jones]

Politely begging to differ.

http://i.imgur.com/wK4kpd4.png

http://i.imgur.com/R6FFXy8.png

http://i.imgur.com/6ej9h5r.png

http://i.imgur.com/Q5BLQau.png

Largest craft I successfully flew had 6,700 parts. The machine whose processor I finally burned out died on a launch of an 8,200 part craft.

2,300 is doable. Please take my word on this.

Maybe if you're running a supercomputer! o.o

[Whackjob]

Maybe if you're running a supercomputer! o.o

It was an old alienware m17x laptop. I'm not gonna lie. It didn't run *fast*. Some of my launches have taken over one hour in real time to achieve orbit. Longest launch was two hours and twenty minutes, if memory serves.

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Probably wont be until the Unity 5 update you'll see big improvements.

Oh god! Can't wait.

If I can finally get a 10k part ship in orbit, I'll be pleased.

[Superfluous J]

I don't know if I've had over 500 parts but I've had well over 400 and while it was pretty laggy, I could still play.

My Jool-5 craft was 400+ parts and was SUPER laggy on launch but it turns out that lots of docking ports really hurts your framerate more than just raw parts does.

[Rath]

I fear when Zekes finds this thread (ps I can run up to 1300)

[Merinsan]

My old computer handled 800 part ships with no problem, it was pretty good (i7 with 8Gb ram (forget the speed)).

I'm not sure what my new computer handles, I haven't pushed it yet, but it's an i7-4790 3.6Ghz, 16GB ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX750Ti. Plus an SSD, which I run KSP from.

Once I get enough money, I'll be building serious space stations, that will be testing it.

[celem]

Theres a bit of a split in this thread between how many parts the player can handle and the machine can handle.

My laptop will handle about 500 before it starts to suffer noticably. By tanking all the graphical settings I can stretch this to maybe 750. At this im happy flying the design all day long.

It will launch 5,000 parts however, it just takes an hour to fly to orbit. I have much more luck letting kOS fly my ship when its so big that the framerate dies, manual inputs in a lagstorm are not conducive to correct flight. As long as the machine can get it onto the pad and load physics without dying, then its good to go. performance is another issue entirely, i have a couple of designs that I only ever launch overnight under kOS since they are painful to watch. The other benefit of this is that by giving up control to an autopilot I can minimise KSP and have it run in background, where its far far smoother.

Edited April 2, 2015 by celem

[Flixxbeatz]

I FREAKIN' TOLD YOU GUYS!

Whackjob should have his own poll choice. 500 is a gross underestimation.

[Warzouz]

I assembled a 13 mission space station over Laythe. When finished It had 950 parts... and a lot of lag. I'm a new to KSP and forgot about that. The trip went well as each part was shipped individually.

I have a lot of docking rings : 20 on the station core and 2 ont the each of the 12 pieces (30 to 35 total).

Every thing went smoothly until I reached 400/500 parts, then lag started. I'm looking to ways to remove parts directly on the station. I also added too many lights...

[eddiew]

Depends on the context... The part lag is vastly worst in atmosphere, so for me it's largely about launches and landings.

Rocket launch; maybe 200-250. Quickly blasts up past 30km and the physics lag falls off.

SSTO ascent; half that. You do not want a yellow/red clock when flying a spaceplane, since they'll just take ages to get to orbit, and you sometimes can't safely timewarp due to lift reduction. I've recently been digging B9 for allowing me to launch orange tanks to LKO with 100 part birds that fly like fighters

That said maybe I'm just fussy I have a good rig (i5 2500k @ 4.3GHz) and can generally get away with launching pretty big stuff; I just choose not to when it would be cumbersome and awkward to do so, and take special care to keep my craft and space stations down to the minimal number of parts to fulfil their purpose. Though sometimes I abuse 6 massless batteries instead of a single massy one

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There's also a question of;

- the parts you can handle before your clock goes yellow

- the parts you can handle before you see FPS lag

The former is there to avoid the latter, and can make it seem like you aren't lagging even when you are

[justidutch]

I am happy playing with 400 parts. More than that and the lag becomes too annoying for me. On launches, it helps to point the camera up so you're looking into the sky, the lag diminishes greatly when I do that. Same thing for re-entry. Zooming the camera out seems to help on launches and re-entry as well.