Speeding things up

[Doyley]

Hi all,

So I'm building some sort of mobile space station at the moment with detachable parts I can land etc etc.  I'm only about half way into building it in orbit and the clock is yellow and moving about 1/3rd speed.  I understand that there's a lot to calculate with currently 824 parts, but is there anything I can do to speed it up?  A few more parts and I wont have the patience to fly it.

Thanks

[Jas0n]

You can use this mod to make several smaller parts into a combined bigger part, so that the part count is lower. But the downside is that you can only do that in the VAB/SPH.

[Gargamel]

Welding will only take you so far, and I'm a proponent of that mod. 

Another mod is Konstruction.  That mod has special docking ports (not compatible with stock ports, intentionally), that will weld themselves together and disappear on demand, reducing your part count.  Use these for the sections that will never need to be undocked, and the Konstruction ports will disappear, reducing your part count by 2 for every docking you do. 

Learn to be more efficient in your station design. 824 parts is a lot of parts for a station.  You're going to have to start over, probably.  But that's no biggy, I've built a bunch of stations, over and over. 

Build yourself a "space tug".   Make the tug itself a probe with good RCS and a piddly-decent engine.   You don't need much, just some LKO manuevering.  Cap it with a docking port, I usually use a senior as most of the bigger station parts are also capped with a senior.  But end parts (like a cupola) can be attached to a port, and it will act like a decoupler instead.  Use this Tug to build your station. The tug and it's lifter can be saved separately, or as a sub assembly.  I find it easiest to save and then build onto the tug as I want a new module. 

Now instead of each module requiring RCS, engines, fuel, core, etc, you can limit it to the bare minimum of what you need.  So if you are sending up a Science module, you can load up your Tug, and on the docking port, cap it with a cupola, a couple science labs, and a Konstruction port.  You might need a couple few tiny rcs thrusters on the forward end of the module, if your Tug is having issues controlling bigger modules.  Enclose the module with a fairing, and you're ready to go.   Dock the module with the station, and decouple the Tug.  If you are in a career game, you can then recover the Tug, sandbox you can just deorbit it and be done with it.   Now each module will only have 5-10 parts each, allowing you to build much bigger stations, with far fewer parts.

[Spricigo]

There's also a few ways to remove parts that become obsolete (e.g. RCS thrusters after the module is placed), like:

KAS allow an engineer to remove it.

Extraplanetary Launchpad let you recycle

 

[Gargamel]

On 8/18/2017 at 8:10 PM, Spricigo said:

KAS allow an engineer to remove it.

 

 

This I did not know.  thank you for posting.   Gives me a reason to do more space walks!