How big will ships get?

[SunlitZelkova]

How big will ships get? Is there any indication of dimensions in the trailers and stuff we have seen so far?

I also wonder if certain parts will be restricted to the orbital VAB or if we will have the option of building our interstellar craft the “hard” way. In real life, while Orions were first proposed to launch from the ground, there were also proposals to assemble them in orbit using Saturn Vs.

I am hoping they are not restricted at all, just as plane parts can be used in the SPH and VAB in KSP1. The same goes for BAE, it would be fun to try to manually deliver large colony modules to the surface of different celestial bodies.

[MechBFP]

29 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

How big will ships get? Is there any indication of dimensions in the trailers and stuff we have seen so far?

I also wonder if certain parts will be restricted to the orbital VAB or if we will have the option of building our interstellar craft the “hard” way. In real life, while Orions were first proposed to launch from the ground, there were also proposals to assemble them in orbit using Saturn Vs.

I am hoping they are not restricted at all, just as plane parts can be used in the SPH and VAB in KSP1. The same goes for BAE, it would be fun to try to manually deliver large colony modules to the surface of different celestial bodies.

Ships will be able to be as big your computer/patience/frame rate allows.

Also the dev's have specifically said they don't plan on limiting things, although that won't stop certain engines from having absolutely terrible atmospheric performance.

[Basesixty]

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I also wonder if certain parts will be restricted to the orbital VAB

The developers have confirmed that some craft can only be built in orbit, BUT they have not indicated that it is linked to certain parts but rather size.

[The Aziz]

Remember the huge interstellar ship from the trailer? There are Kerbals for scale.

Some ships/parts will be simply too big to fit in surface VAB, or rather, too big for a launchpad. That's where orbital assembly comes in.

[Ahres]

Using an orbital construction yard I don't think there's any limits. But there is a hard limit on crafts built in the VAB.

[Davi SDF]

Definetly big enough to be considered self sustainable, and then, after reaching a planet, becoming the main space station for a while.

[SciMan]

I'm one of those people that would like to be allowed to "try" to launch literally any module from the surface, without a restriction of launch vehicle physical size.

However, if they are going to limit launch vehicle size, that doesn't totally restrict me either. I can always just clip parts into each other so that the thing is "small" enough to fit on the launch pad yet still weighs like 10 kilotons. Because I know I'm not smarter than a game developer, I'm thinking that we'll end up having BOTH an absolute size limit, and a maximum mass limit.

Perhaps those limits will be able to be increased without having to resort to orbital construction. Perhaps not.
Either way, my supply ships that launch from Kerbin will be built with the intention of hitting one or both of those limits, as closely as possible, in order to minimize the number of resupply flights needed to accomplish any given task.

And if I end up transitioning to sending supply ships and the like from one of Kerbin's moons (from one of the first colonies I set up), then if there are constraints to what I can launch from the surface of that body then I'll be making sure I hit those limits as best I can as well, for the same reason.

I really doubt that there will be anything like a self-sustaining orbital station around any body save perhaps Jool or another gas giant planet, because there's just simply no available resources without venturing to the surface of a planet that actually has a surface you can land on (be that a planet-spanning ocean due to most of the planet's mass being Water, or by the planet's surface having large areas of solid ground you might be able to land on).

EDIT:
Of course, as far as the size of ships themselves, yeah they're gonna get pretty big. Likely big enough that if we were still using the same physics range numbers from KSP 1, we'd run into some interesting issues. I'm thinking kilometers-long ships weighing multiple 10s of kilotons, at the least. Of course they will be limited to remaining in orbit, and sending smaller craft to the surface, but the idea is that the gigantic craft can carry enough supplies to "jump" right past the "start" where you're landing relatively small modules to make a colony, instead landing large resource collectors right from the start so you don't have to wait for the colony to grow slowly by it's own "bootstrapping" process.

Edited March 14, 2022 by SciMan

[SunlitZelkova]

12 hours ago, MechBFP said:

Ships will be able to be as big your computer/patience/frame rate allows.

I meant part size. Sorry for the confusion.

I.e. 2km diameter payload fairing.

[shdwlrd]

25 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I meant part size. Sorry for the confusion.

I.e. 2km diameter payload fairing.

I don't think there will be anything that large. Possibly spherical tanks @ 150-200m in diameter, or some engine bells @ about 250-300m in diameter. I can't see any structural parts being more that 20m in diameter and 100m in length. You could build a ship/station that is 2km in any dimension(s), but it would be multiple parts. 

[t_v]

I think that the largest diameter that spaceship parts will have is 30 m at maximum. Counting from the VAB interface, we can get 5 tiers up from “small” which is currently 1.25m diameter. This gives us a max size of roughly 10m at 3X-L, which I wouldn’t expect to expand to more than about 30 meters. 

[magnemoe]

On 3/14/2022 at 3:06 PM, The Aziz said:

Remember the huge interstellar ship from the trailer? There are Kerbals for scale.

Some ships/parts will be simply too big to fit in surface VAB, or rather, too big for a launchpad. That's where orbital assembly comes in.

Is I the only one who saw that ship, and thought: like this but as 1+8 asparagus  

[jimmymcgoochie]

On 3/14/2022 at 2:06 PM, The Aziz said:

Remember the huge interstellar ship from the trailer? There are Kerbals for scale.

Some ships/parts will be simply too big to fit in surface VAB, or rather, too big for a launchpad. That's where orbital assembly comes in.

It took me a while to a) find this thread and b) get the right screenshots, but to expand on this point a little:

Note the two Kerbals for scale here, and the cuboid-shaped girder they're floating beside. There are four segments in the girder, each of which looks about as long as two Kerbals are tall.

Now look a couple of seconds earlier in the trailer to see the full ship:

See those tiny structural bits on that ship? Those are the same girders!

It's only by having these two images side by side that I really realised just how

MASSIVE

that ship actually is. If Kerbals are just one metre tall including their helmets, that engine is fifty metres across, minimum; the radiation shield in front of it, probably over 100m wide.

Assuming that engine is in fact 50 metres in diameter, I'd estimate the ship's total length is at least 300 metres.

So to conclude: How big will ships get in KSP2? Very, very, VERY big!

[darthgently]

On 3/14/2022 at 8:24 AM, MechBFP said:

Ships will be able to be as big your computer/patience/frame rate allows.

Also the dev's have specifically said they don't plan on limiting things, although that won't stop certain engines from having absolutely terrible atmospheric performance.

So I wonder if the concepts of "Loaded" and "Unpacked" will have anywhere near the same definitions if they exist at all.    "Unlimited" is hard to comprehend from a programming POV

[shdwlrd]

50 minutes ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

It's only by having these two images side by side that I really realised just how

MASSIVE

that ship actually is.

You can tell the size by the SSTOs on the nose of the ship. They are a typical 30-40m length for smaller SSTO space planes. (Let it sink in that you can barely see them in some of the screenshots.) Yeah, that ship is about 1km long.

[The Aziz]

Ok so artificial gravity rings are about 7 girders in radius, if they're the same size. One girder is 1.1m long.

Now the rest is just guessing based on nothing but quick photoshopping, but it appears that the ship is about 15 gravity rings long. Which leaves us with a number of ~230 meters for the whole ship, give or take.

[Davi SDF]

On 3/18/2022 at 3:45 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

It took me a while to a) find this thread and b) get the right screenshots, but to expand on this point a little:

Note the two Kerbals for scale here, and the cuboid-shaped girder they're floating beside. There are four segments in the girder, each of which looks about as long as two Kerbals are tall.

Now look a couple of seconds earlier in the trailer to see the full ship:

See those tiny structural bits on that ship? Those are the same girders!

It's only by having these two images side by side that I really realised just how

MASSIVE

that ship actually is. If Kerbals are just one metre tall including their helmets, that engine is fifty metres across, minimum; the radiation shield in front of it, probably over 100m wide.

Assuming that engine is in fact 50 metres in diameter, I'd estimate the ship's total length is at least 300 metres.

So to conclude: How big will ships get in KSP2? Very, very, VERY big!

And we are not even talking about space stations here, cause that thing is ULTRA MASSIVE

[magnemoe]

On 3/18/2022 at 8:42 PM, shdwlrd said:

You can tell the size by the SSTOs on the nose of the ship. They are a typical 30-40m length for smaller SSTO space planes. (Let it sink in that you can barely see them in some of the screenshots.) Yeah, that ship is about 1km long.

We have this shot from the front of the starship, it show an bridge who I guess is an 3.75 narrowing down to an 2.5 meter docking port. 
The modules just in front of the fuel tanks are probably material storage, similar is used in mods. You can see more of them arranged six together at the station. 
The large cylinders just below the rotating module is unknown, the station has more of it. 
Assume its related to kerbals, living area, labs, workshops or life support supplies.  

[Minmus Taster]

On 3/18/2022 at 2:45 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

It took me a while to a) find this thread and b) get the right screenshots, but to expand on this point a little:

Note the two Kerbals for scale here, and the cuboid-shaped girder they're floating beside. There are four segments in the girder, each of which looks about as long as two Kerbals are tall.

Now look a couple of seconds earlier in the trailer to see the full ship:

See those tiny structural bits on that ship? Those are the same girders!

It's only by having these two images side by side that I really realised just how

MASSIVE

that ship actually is. If Kerbals are just one metre tall including their helmets, that engine is fifty metres across, minimum; the radiation shield in front of it, probably over 100m wide.

Assuming that engine is in fact 50 metres in diameter, I'd estimate the ship's total length is at least 300 metres.

So to conclude: How big will ships get in KSP2? Very, very, VERY big!

I wonder how big you can actually make them, I'm guessing at least twice that.

[SciMan]

I don't know about you, but if they allow it, I'm going to be building ships so large that I'll need MULTIPLE of those gigantic engines to push it from star to star.

I won't be doing "asparagus staging of interstellar engines" mind you, but I may have some designs that have an acceleration stage and a smaller deceleration stage, kind of like the original BIS Dadelus proposal did.

The only thing is that each one of those stages will have SEVEN Dadelus drives to them, arranged as 1 central surrounded by 6 on the perimeter.

[jaf]

with the recent release of ksp 2 episode 5 

 how big are the ships going to get

[jaf]

How big do you think stations will be in ksp 2?

[intelliCom]

1 hour ago, jaf said:

with the recent release of ksp 2 episode 5 

 how big are the ships going to get

At least bigger than the VAB, as Tom Vinitas said in the start of the video.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

[Truebadour]

There is in theory almost no limit to how big a station could get. The limit will be set by availability of resources, time and of course by your computer struggling to keep with your constructions.

But if I had to guess, I'd say that building something bigger than 500 meters long would be overkill. Will people do it? Sure (I know I will). Will it be useful in terms of game progression? I'm not sure about that.

 

We've already seen concepts of space stations with interstellar ships docked to them :

Keep in mind this screenshot comes from a 2020 video, things have changed since then.

[WelshSteW]

5 hours ago, jaf said:

with the recent release of ksp 2 episode 5 

how big are the ships going to get

MASSIVE

[darthgently]

At least one of the types of the the new big engines doesn't fit in the current VAB, if I heard it right.