What's the Largest Rocket you've ever built? Interplanetary and Launchers Mostly

[zekes]

Oop, forgot about this monster - it's 2000 tonnes ATM, and is likely to get bigger. it flies, but not to orbit quite yet.

[mythbusters844]

Oop, forgot about this monster - it's 2000 tonnes ATM, and is likely to get bigger. it flies, but not to orbit quite yet.

http://i.imgur.com/I7SmVds.png

Oh my goodness, that is beautiful *sheds tear*

[bs1110101]

6.4 scale kerbin is fun!

[MGCJerry]

Not interplanetary, but this is my biggest functional payload, and biggest launch for something I intended to 'keep'.

Kethane Mun Base

166 Tons (mostly empty skycrane)

2 Mobile Miners (2 big drills each)

2 Mobile Refiners (4 medium converters each)

Return lander

On the pad. I don't remember tonnage.

It flew like an errant fart, handled like semi stuck in the mud but it made orbit, sent to Mun, got a decent orbit while scanning. Found a nice deposit, but on the dark side. Quick-saved...

Attempt 1: Landed but bounced and didn't recover, but dropped off 4 vehicles hoping they would be ok, but no the lander slid into them, only one miner vehicle survived. All 3 kerbals survived. Spent the next 3 hours trying to use KAS winches to right the 2 rovers that were intact but flipped over to no avail. My lander did not have lights so I didn't know how close the ground was until it bounced. Perfect landing spot, and the view was great. Very picturesque. I'm going to have to grill the guys in the VAB about not having lights on the lander. We have been through this before.

Attempt 2: Came in for landing. Didn't see the mountain until too late. Touchdown at 390m/sec. into the side of Mount Keth. No mining was done.

Attempt 3: Was very careful and chose the same octagon as attempt 1... Seriously, I was concentrating soo hard. No landing lights remember? got all nice and vertical, velocity good, no horizontal movement. Suddenly the whole thing picked up a huge lateral motion and the touchdown moment and crashed, Tried recovering like Attempt 1. Failed... Miserably. Gave up, I was upset.

Mission scrubbed. Going to do it in multiple landing missions. I can do precision landings easier than screwing with a huge single heavy ship. The new version will occur in 3 launches.

* First launch has a satellite (scansat & kethane), lander (return vessel), habitation module, 2 rovers (4 seat). 56 tons. 3 Crew. Properly lit. with an abort action for the habitation, satellite & lander. Why? Dunno, I play sandbox.

* Second launch will be crew (4), (big) mobile mining facilities, (big) mining rovers. 155 tons. Properly lit. No return vehicle.

* Last launch will be more crew (7), mobile science lab, Storage tanks and a larger refinery.

I cant rendezvous at all to save my life, so I will try to assemble a ship on the mun and explore past kerbins SOI pending the success of this operation. I've never landed on anything else only crashed on Duna (impactor, forgot atmosphere) and Dres (grinding the crack ended up being grinding the probe).

[cantab]

My new record is the refueller for my Tylo ship.

Pretty much as big as the VAB's interior. I hadn't planned ahead or used any VAB expansion mods, so it was a job fitting everything in. Stock and Procedural Fairings parts, around a thousand of them, I never noted down launchpad mass. Flew it in FAR with my 0.85x engine Isp nerf. I over-built it and I wouldn't be surprised if it could make orbit in stock. It had a few issues, like the boosters blowing up a couple of 14400 tanks from the core, but no big deal.

Fun fact: There are no control parts on the launcher. No reaction wheels, no fins, no RCS. The only control for the ascent is the thrust vectoring.

In orbit, having shed part of the second stage to save weight. 4000 tonnes, 300 parts, and not enough Vernors.

70% of the payload fuel sufficed to top off the refuellee's tanks.

My old record was 10000 tons on the pad and 1500 payload, but more parts: https://flic.kr/p/oGAHXJ

[lazarus1024]

I can't think of the largest launcher I've ever made. Been a long time since I've made a truely stupendous one. I am a big believer in orbital assembly. Probably only in the 500 ton range. For an interplanetary ship, around 250 tons. A BIG beast to get to Moho in one go. Carried a medium-small space station, a small permenant ground base with rover and return ship (to head back to the station). In addition two ground probes to determine the best landing site as well as a return ship (using the drive stage with the return capsule attached).

[cantab]

I'm kind of the other way after my experience with my station, and indeed the very Tylo ship I built that refueller for. High part counts have a much worse impact on docking than on launching, and big ships tend to not be agile like small ones, so if I insist on flying something that heavily lags my PC I'm going to do my darnedest to launch it in one piece.

[Cocox]

Lurch told me you rang.

http://imgur.com/a/vtr4I

A nice selection of some of my works.

#EDIT: Also, come on! That thread title is about as Whackjob-bait as it gets.

If you ever apply to NASA, don't put these in your application.

On the other hand, the Japanese might give you a chance..

[NecroBones]

Man, some of these things are monstrously huge.

We should almost split this thread into two... one for stock-parts, and one for mod parts (and tweakscaled parts).

[Frozen_Heart]

I've built some pretty big rockets to launch one off payloads but this is the largest I use on a regular basis. I've just rebuilt it with the new wing parts but I've been using an almost identical version for a long time.

Just over 500 tons on the pad. Takes 80 tons to orbit. Also unlike 90% of the rockets here it looks nice... Completely stock as well.

This is it without any payload.

[dfg26]

I call this monstrosity The Towering Infernoâ„¢. Does it deliver huge payloads to orbit? No. Does it take large amounts of crew and equipment to another planets? No. Does it have any other purpose than being big? No. Did it crash my poor laptop dozens of times? Yes.

This thing weighs 12501 tons, has 1491 parts and enough struts to build a replica of the Eiffel tower. It does take take off, believe it or not:

Here goes the first stage:

Last stage. Final velocity was 13430 m/s.

Edited December 28, 2014 by dfg26

[Borsek]

This is built out of 7 parts - the front tug, the karbonite miner in the back, the middle quad docking module, 2 laythe landers and 2 tylo landers. Needless to say, I needed mechjeb to dock the modules, due to a part count above 2k when on scene. The whole thing was assembled in HKO (700k for timewarp), and was supposed to go to jool. Due to the instability of the craft (it didn't fall apart, however the sideways modules started swinging, the back was swinging left and right, etc.) I had to resort to using hyperedit to bring the thing to jool, and deducting a bit more fuel than I would have needed to keep things realistic. I suppose I could have strutted the whole thing with KAS, but every docking procedure took about 2h after the first 3 due to lag, and I CBA controlling kerbals around this thing at 5SPF and non-responsive controls.

I have since detached all the landers, and had 3 successful missions (one kerbal got stuck in the science module on tylo, and the return ship flew back without him; at the point of detachment, he was about 500m in the air, in a mk1 lander core - you can imagine the results). In the meantime, a plane was on its way to laythe, to rescue another kerbal on the surface - on the poles. That was THE WORST plane possible, however, it got eaten by the kraken during transfer with a tug, so I, again, hyperedited a plane into laythe orbit, and tried to land it. Landing it took me about 2h, since it kept going crazily unstable in the atmosphere. I later figured out it was a terrible design, and have since made many small, but extremely efficient planes. Getting the plane off the surface was even worse, since the north pole on laythe is completely flat - it took a combo of mechjeb, time-manipulation for crazy force application, RCS and reloading. When I got the plane into orbit, I decided enough was enough, and stopped for the day. It was hella fun though. If anyone wants to see the plane and other parts I used for the mission, there's a zip here (bonus points for trying to land the plane on laythe - it's possible, but frustrating to the max): http://www.filedropper.com/joolbaseterribleplane

The station was about 2k parts (about 3.5k altogether with launch phases), also, both laythe landers kept their kerbodyne tanks for a while on the station, due to them having fuel that was transfered to the rest of the structure before the trip to jool. More parts = more lag, hooray!

EDIT: The station is 1.7k tons, but this is topped by the 0.25 mission to duna, where I made a 6.5kt, 1250 part craft, to get 1kt into orbit, to get 300t to duna, to get 33t back... the return rocket consisted of 6x strut+legs, 6 boosters and 6 small engines, on a base of orange tanks + mainsail (8k dv), pictures below:

*note: Altogether, the rocket has about 16 or 17k dv, however, due to improper staging and root at launch, only about 9k is shown (not taking into account the 8k of the return stage). In any case, I overengineered this by a large margin, but it was about 10h into the game, and I had no idea of the smaller is better concept, and I tend to overengineer anyway - in case something goes wrong, or half my rocket explodes at launch, it'll still get the job done. Also yes, I did ascend duna with my landing stage, and firing the 'duna launch' boosters took me on a trajectory outside of duna's SOI.

OVERENGINEERING FTW! Also, do I at least rival whackjob?

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited December 28, 2014 by Borsek

[Overfloater]

Currently this:

it's for x6.4 RSS, puts 328t into orbit.

[Camaron]

This thread has some of my largest to date.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/78944-Meet-the-2-200-Ton-Titan-Thirteen-Fuel-Lifter

[LABHOUSE]

Tallest is my Saturn v (taller than vab, never flew, but I have a screenshot of it on the pad).

Widest is my first duna mission.

Heaviest is my sts.

[OhioBob]

I don't like really big launchers. The largest I've launched to date is a 2-stage expendable with a liftoff mass of 458 t, of which 80 t is payload.

[Red Iron Crown]

I don't like really big launchers. The largest I've launched to date is a 2-stage expendable with a liftoff mass of 458 t, of which 80 t is payload.

That's a really impressive payload fraction for two stages. Were jet engines involved?

[zekes]

"Largest" would have to be my 8,000 ton Cira VI.

CIRA VI

Designer: Zekes

Status: COMPLETED

Cost: $3,189,410.00

The largest Zokesian Lifter yet, the Cira-VI has a massive 40 engines in the first stage, and is capable of putting over 800 tonnes of pure cargo into LKO.

Simply stage to fly. I recommend making the launchpad indestructible, or it probably will blow it up on launch.

Download: https://www./?8j35l61x6gy726c

[Jason Patterson]

The image quality is pretty poor, but this is my biggest vessel ever. A ship to land on and return from the surface of Eve in a single launch using only 0.18.3 demo parts. I can't recall the tonnage, but the part number was right at the limit of breaking the game. If I added more, the game simply wouldn't include them when it launched the vessel. It took roughly an hour to reach orbit due to lag.

[zekes]

The image quality is pretty poor, but this is my biggest vessel ever. A ship to land on and return from the surface of Eve in a single launch using only 0.18.3 demo parts. I can't recall the tonnage, but the part number was right at the limit of breaking the game. If I added more, the game simply wouldn't include them when it launched the vessel. It took roughly an hour to reach orbit due to lag.

^fixed it

[foamyesque]

I think this was my all time largest with stock parts. Certainly it's the one with the most engines.

[Captain Sierra]

How did that not break the runway on takeoff? Oh wait, thats a much older version before you could break it. If you recreate that, would it break the runway? (you should probably use skippers for part count)

[Yukon0009]

this was just the third stage

[OhioBob]

That's a really impressive payload fraction for two stages. Were jet engines involved?

No jets. The first stage uses a cluster of five Rockomax Mainsails and the second stage uses a single Kerbodyne KP-2L. Below is a picture, without payload.

It may look like I'm using asparagus staging, but that's not the case. The four outboard engines are rigidly attached (no decouplers). The propellant feeds from the center tank to the outer tanks. When the center tank goes dry, the center engine cuts off to lower the TWR. The four outboard engines continue to run until they drain their individual tanks (in about 38 seconds), then the entire first stage drops away as a unit.

I ran some computer simulations to try to optimize the TWR and ascent trajectory. I think that's the reason I'm getting an impressive payload fraction.

Edited December 30, 2014 by OhioBob

[sal_vager]

Show us your biggest rockets! Stickied for January