I give you... the biggest #&@% carrier ever to have lagged a lag.

[Colonel_Panic]

1,060 parts and 800 tons on the pad, 270 tons fully loaded and fueled in orbit, more lag than a counterstrike tournament sponsored by AOL dialup.

~5,000 final stage ÃŽâ€v, 3,775 ÃŽâ€v with 4 fully fueled fighters, and somewhere around 7,000 ÃŽâ€v if you don't care about the fighters being fully fueled when you get to your destination.

This impressive frigate carries:

13 crew including 4 fighter pilots

3 single kerbalnaut escape pods

1 jettisonable 6-kerbalnaut crew module lander

4 SSTO fighters (creatively referred to as x-wings)

4 deep space ion probes

6 communications satellites

6 orbital kill vehicles (for defense against the space kraken, they say.)

2 skycrane deployable rovers

My beastly 6-core 4GHz machine with 32 gigs of RAM is no match for it, and it chugs away at around 2 FPS once fully loaded in orbit. I don't care though because it's friggin awesome!

This thing is so massive, that I had to invent a new, more massive refueling tanker with 2 XL tanks and 2 large RCS tanks to cut down on the orbital rendezvous trips. It turns out that docking with that flying hippo train at 2 FPS is not fun and takes a bloody hour.

Video:

I have the .craft file for the x-wing ready, but can't find a way to attach it to the post? is there a way to do this?

I'm still getting the bugs ironed out of the frigate, will upload that one once I do.

Edited May 14, 2013 by Colonel_Panic

[Flixxbeatz]

show-off, looks like another "hey, my PC can let me do this! how about yours!?" to me

You know you've reached the limit when your very powerful PC starts to give up. well done!

[dennislinux]

good one! impressive. can you give us a link without a launch vehicle, so i can launch it with hyperedit

[Lazarus78]

How about you upload the ship so others can mess with it?

[Shuttle]

That's a very impressive ship, I saved the screenshots to my KSP folder because it looks awesome too. What kind of AA did you use?

[Colonel_Panic]

good one! impressive. can you give us a link without a launch vehicle, so i can launch it with hyperedit

You can strip the boosters off it in the VAB if you really want, though it won't do a whole lot. Surprisingly it seems to be even harder on the physics engine when it's in space, though as long as you don't dock anything with it... I just kinda deal with the lag. I might look into some ways of optimizing the game to make it more manageable in the future if I want to do an actual mission with the thing.

How about you upload the ship so others can mess with it?

I will soon, probably next day or two. I need to finish ironing out a couple minor bugs first, and I'm busy with other things at the moment.

That's a very impressive ship, I saved the screenshots to my KSP folder because it looks awesome too. What kind of AA did you use?

8x but I don't think it's impacting my performance, since my GPU handles that, and the main issue is the CPU load of running the physics simulation.

If you really want I can take some better screenshots without the HUD later after I get those .craft files up. These were just kinda rushed while getting it up there.

P.S. Thanks, I put a lot of effort into making it aesthetic in the design phase.

Edited May 13, 2013 by Colonel_Panic

[Tristavius]

Out of interest, what image upload do you use? This seems to be a regular problem for me being unable to see some people's image posts... I suspect it's probably one particular image site being blocked by the United Arab Emirates.

[Spanier]

This thing never has 270t in orbit, it just features 2 orange tanks = 72 t. What part of this ship should give it 200 metric tons?

[bacondeity]

I have to agree with Spanier, even with the two other fuel tanks on the sides, it hardly looks like it is 270 tonnes, and if most of the weight comes from the fuel tanks, that makes it a wee bit less impressive. ;D

By no means is this gargantuan... thing... not impressive in general, but does it really lag that bad? My Bucephalus is, after everything is docked together and fully fueled (I actually never used any of the on-board fuel to get the pieces of the ship into space) 213 tonnes, and consists of 900 parts total. My computer is like a third as good as yours and I was able to shoot a movie with the Bucephalus and Hyperion (another 261 parts) together at like 5 or 6 fps.

bu-damn, it's still cool to look at. Nice work.

[HoY]

I can help you with the part count, by taking off some struts. you have the tri-couplers installed incorrectly and have needed to overstrut to compensate (probably wont save you any parts, but it will be more stable to launch...)

also, you dont need fuel lines from the tank to the tri-coupler. they crossfeed to engines properly(this is to refrence the LVN's not the Jet engines. I like the way you used the reversed bi coupler for the engines)

looks nice tho

one more little thing.... i know i have a lot to add lol.. you DO have mechjeb installed, so you are at least a little bit ok with mods..

KSPX would do you wonders!

it has larger LVN engines that could replace the clusters you are using, and it has radially mounted Ant engines to replace the little ones on those probes. Less thrust, but those orange engines will eat up that toroidal tank in a matter of seconds. better off using rcs from a practical point of view.

Edited May 13, 2013 by HoY

[Colonel_Panic]

Video is up:

also finished fine tuning the x-wing. How do I attach .craft files to the thread? or can I not do that?

Thanks for all the feedback folks!

Out of interest, what image upload do you use? This seems to be a regular problem for me being unable to see some people's image posts... I suspect it's probably one particular image site being blocked by the United Arab Emirates.

Postimage. It's a convenient one for me that doesn't force-resize images, has really big upper limits, and can upload and provide links for multiple images at once... without creating an account.

This thing never has 270t in orbit, it just features 2 orange tanks = 72 t. What part of this ship should give it 200 metric tons?

Look at the MechJeb vehicle information in the lower right on that last screenshot. He says 273.34 tons, and I'm inclined to believe him. There is a lot of structure and extraneous parts for the sake of making it rigid and aesthetic. Plus that includes the weight of the probes, rovers, fighters etc docked with it.

I have to agree with Spanier, even with the two other fuel tanks on the sides, it hardly looks like it is 270 tonnes, and if most of the weight comes from the fuel tanks, that makes it a wee bit less impressive. ;D

By no means is this gargantuan... thing... not impressive in general, but does it really lag that bad? My Bucephalus is, after everything is docked together and fully fueled (I actually never used any of the on-board fuel to get the pieces of the ship into space) 213 tonnes, and consists of 900 parts total. My computer is like a third as good as yours and I was able to shoot a movie with the Bucephalus and Hyperion (another 261 parts) together at like 5 or 6 fps.

bu-damn, it's still cool to look at. Nice work.

I think it's around 100 tons dry in orbit without the fighters. The fighters are around 10 tons each (dry) so that would make the total dry weight around 140. The total wet weight is, as stated above, 273.34 tons according to MechJeb.

It does lag pretty bad, down to about 2 FPS once I had it fully loaded. It's like hitting a wall when you reach the limitations of the physics engine. I don't know why it lags this bad for me, as I've had other vehicles that lagged less on launch while having (I'm pretty sure) a higher total part count. It may be a result of just my particular structure and rigidity of the ship. You can see my video now above. Interestingly, my framerate does not go down while recording... though, video work was what this machine was designed with in mind.

I can help you with the part count, by taking off some struts. you have the tri-couplers installed incorrectly and have needed to overstrut to compensate (probably wont save you any parts, but it will be more stable to launch...)

also, you dont need fuel lines from the tank to the tri-coupler. they crossfeed to engines properly(this is to refrence the LVN's not the Jet engines. I like the way you used the reversed bi coupler for the engines)

looks nice tho

<

one more little thing.... i know i have a lot to add lol.. you DO have mechjeb installed, so you are at least a little bit ok with mods..

KSPX would do you wonders!

it has larger LVN engines that could replace the clusters you are using, and it has radially mounted Ant engines to replace the little ones on those probes. Less thrust, but those orange engines will eat up that toroidal tank in a matter of seconds. better off using rcs from a practical point of view.

I just overstrut in general. I like more rigidity and tend to over-engineer. I do try and limit the use of struts in the final stage, but on launch I subscribe to the MOAR STRUTS philosophy.

That's an interesting video, though, incidentally, almost exactly how I originally had this ship configured when I built the MK I. However it had a number of faults that I eliminated in later versions. With the engines rotated out in that configuration, the decoupling of the engine shrouds would actually destroy 3 of my engines as the parts impacted each other. I also tried the docking clamps like that originally, but they did not have the strength to hold up the weight of the rocket and resist shear. It detonated several times on the launchpad before I removed them. Finally, I had those adapters on the ends as shown, but it turns out they make a really really weak link with the jumbo fuel tanks, and would shear off and wobble like crazy no matter how many struts I added, so I removed those too and attahed the tanks directly to the tri-couplers. I am, however, still having an issue with 2 of my engines (the left and right LVNs in the center cluster) that seem to wobble freely on the tri-coupler and overheat as if they aren't directly attached like the others. I'm really perplexed as to what's causing it.

Actually I do need the fuel lines. I tried it without them first (on the side booster clusters... the middle cluster needs the lines because I feed from different tanks) and the engines wouldn't fire because they were fuel deprived. That might have been before I removed the adapters as previously mentioned, though (I had them on both sides)

I want to limit my parts list to as bone stock as possible. I make an exception for MJ because he's invaluable (though, less reliable lately in staging analysis in the VAB, so, if I can find a mod to replace him....) RCS for those satellites would require adding an RCS tank, and of present there's no RCS tank suited to the task of use in small probes like that.