Handling too many vessels?

[chd]

What do most of you do as you work through career mode and you accumulate more and more stations, bases, etc.? Ultimately I expect it's a performance issue, but more immediately it makes the list in the tracking station annoyingly long.

Do you just terminate bases and stations that you don't need anymore (after making sure no one is on them)? Or do you let them pile up as evidence of your expanding dominance of the universe? :-)

[Vanamonde]

Are you aware that you can filter the kinds of craft which are being displayed? If you put the mouse at the top edge of the screen in map view, a set of buttons drops down. L-click to toggle individual choices on and off, or r-click to select that one while de-selecting all others. 

[Spricigo]

Well, I accumulate more and more stations/base/etc because I design it to used over and over. So, I thing it's the evidence of dominance thing for me.

For the annoying long tracking station list, I use filters and a few mods too.

 

 

[bewing]

I play this game like a memory test. And I usually start forgetting which ship has to do a burn next, long before my tracking station list gets crowded. And then a new version of KSP comes out, and I have to start my career over anyway!  

[OHara]

8 hours ago, chd said:

Ultimately I expect it's a performance issue

It is, but only after you have the game running for a long time in one session.

Craft not in the current scene don't slow down physics simulation of the game,
but of course load/saves take longer because the file is bigger, including the persistent-file being saved at each scene-change,
and you start to run out of memory (link to bug report) after many loads and saves which will eventually slow everything down, until you restart KSP.

I have played the same career save since version 1.0, so now my tracking station is very full, and I like the ... personality that has built up in that save.  My favorite mod to organize it is Tracking Station Evolved.  It is challenging, in a fun way, to plan flights so that no debris is left in orbit (or you can delete debris in the tracking station) and I do retire bases that are abandoned and no longer interesting.

[Fierce Wolf]

My early game stations are named "excrementsstation 1", "delete me 2" and the great "stupidsat"

[jimmymcgoochie]

With enough vessels in a save, the whole game starts to slow down- loading and saving takes longer and the game itself runs a little bit slower especially if you're using the CommNet as the game still has to keep track of every vessel's position and what it can connect to, even in the background. If you don't need a vessel it's best to delete it to reduce the size of your save file and make the game run a little bit better.

For keeping track of many active missions at once, I use Kerbal Alarm Clock- an indispensable tool that will alert you when a vessel has a maneuver to avoid those 'whoops missed the node and my probe is now going interstellar' moments. I also use 'Tracking Station Evolved' which adds the ability to sort vessels by their SOI, vessel type or their total MET (or time to the next node) in the tracking station. Most of the missions that I don't want to look at much but might still be useful I labels as relays and then turn the filter on so relays don't get shown on the map; an imperfect solution, but it works.

[Popestar]

I can't wait until I have this problem.