Copy and paste in VAB of multiple rocket parts

[Rocket Farmer]

TLDR pull off a big post strutting piece of your ship and set it to the side. Hit Ctrl z and it is replaced in its original spot but the group of pieces you set aside is still hanging in the VAB greyed out. Attach that grouping to your ship. Rinse and repeat. With smart use of symmetry you can build large rockets quite quickly (ie 200+ struts where you only placed 8 of them yourself and the rest are copies)

Don't know how many people use this but for me it has been a great timesaver.

Last night I was building a new pancake 21 main sale booster with 3 tanks on each booster and about 10 struts per booster. Building it 1 piece at a time would take quite awhile and even with with symmetry would be a pain.

So instead I put the first tank up and then built a complete booster assembly (including struts) that attached to it. I then detached the whole built booster from the original tank and put it to the side. I then hit Ctrl z and the booster was replaced but I still had the one I moved out of the way. I then attached it. Rinse and repeat with smart use if symmetry and 5 minutes later I had the 3x7 pancake rocket design I wanted. Best of all are rockets are strutted identically so you shouldn't have random failures from one poor strutting spot.

[Sangi]

You can also use the Alt key instead of hitting Z to undo. Hold down alt and click on the part that you want as the root for the piece that you are copying. It will make a copy of the entire part tree with that as the source.

[regex]

Hold "alt"and click a piece. Marvel as it is duplicated.

[rryy]

I used to do that technique until I found out about the alt+click trick to copy stacks, which is much faster.

[AnalogAddict]

Be wary of copy pasting with struts, sometimes struts connect incorrectly after being placed from a copy which in turn causes one of your main boosters to shoot off into space as the rest of your rocket careens out of control. That is just my experience, and may be helpful in diagnosing your failed masterpiece.

[kylania]

How would you do this with multiple parts? Like there is a nice lander craft how would I import that to be able to put another rocket under it from a different craft file or do I have to build one or the other piece by piece again?

[regex]

Like there is a nice lander craft how would I import that to be able to put another rocket under it from a different craft file or do I have to build one or the other piece by piece again?

You can literally open up both craft files in a text editor and copy the parts from one into the bottom of the other (backup the destination file!). Before doing this you should move the part being copied to the side or somewhere easily accessible, and then watch for weird behavior once you move it because it will become "unattached". There's also a mod to do this, I think it's called subassembly loader, but it's so easy to just open text files that I don't bother.