I'm in the process of lifting module after module to my orbital stations - habitation, kethane refinery, docking complex, fuel depot, nuclear plant, solar panels, batteries, people movers, orbital tugs, etc... You know the drill. All good stuff to have in orbit. The thing is, once the station starts getting to 500 or so parts, frame rates drop quite a lot, and this got me thinking: What is your policy for organizing all these functions in orbit? Is it best to have a single big station with everything, or having multiple stations with ships going between them as needed - one fuel depot, for example, then a habitation module a little behind in orbit, or? Intuitively, I think one big station is the way to go - if nothing else, it makes fuel transfer a lot easier. But let's say that we just have to keep the individual station part count down. What would we do? (As a side note, I'd love for a "station mode" where rigid-body physics (the simulation of parts bending and twisting and so on) were disabled. Or at least that each section, delimited by docking ports, counted as one "station part". But that's neither here nor there.)