Planning a large spacestation

[Chro]

Before building a spacestation it is vital to have a clear vision of what you want to build.

When i had some spare time but no access to KSP i drew some plans up of what i wanted to achieve. Given what i knew about the game and its physics i designed a modular base that i could construct in stages. The rough sketches helped me immensely, and i encourage you to do some planning if you want to build a large station.

http://imgur.com/gallery/9y4sm

[jarmund]

I concluded a while back that I need to do what you're doing, as my stations normally consisted of 2 docking ports on either side + useful stuff between them, then a lot of these docked together. Most of the segments still had their orbital insertion vehicle still on, as I don't like deorbiting fuel that could come in handy. The result: part count through the roof, cluttered with orange tanks and mainsails pointing in all direction, and a general mess.

I just haven't gotten around to building a station after that epiphany.

It would seem that you build your stations as far away from my approach as possible: You make a rough draft, you plan ahead, and you actually make it look good.

I won't claim that one of the methods is better, but.... well.... actually, I'm just gonna go ahead and say that your station looks great, while mine look like (and are) total crapfest. Nice work!

Are you going to extend it further?

[Norcalplanner]

Station looks great, but watch out for the lag monster. High part counts are not your friend.

[Asharad]

I have the hardest time getting big stuff to dock with each other. I can line them up, but they refuse to take hold.

[sedativechunk]

Station looks great, but watch out for the lag monster. High part counts are not your friend.

This. I have a very high end computer (custom built with water cooling) and stations lagged like a mother on my PC. It's kind of disappointing.

[Zephram Kerman]

The ground model has saved me from so many mistakes! I haven't ever bothered to put it on the launchpad, but just build the finished design in the VAB only.

Usually I skip the paper sketch, but not always. In a story, the ship was designed on a yellow sticky from Bill's office, and the dV map was drawn on a napkin from the KSC cafeteria:

I really wanted to add a coffee cup stain, but was interrupted by lazy.

[Warzouz]

Space stations can be very laggy. Strange thing is that everything goes perfectly until you add some more parts and the FPS and GUI response goes rapidly down.

I experienced that when assembling my space station around Laythe. Around 600 parts, It turned like hell. I had to install KAS mod to remove nearly 250 parts. Now with one of the staged lander not returned from Tylo (by design) and with few fuel tank disconnected, it's largely manageable. I also tweak the graphic options and resolution.

Here is a screen when the crew arrived at the station (13 assembled elements around Laythe)

(click to enlarge)

[Norcalplanner]

This one is the largest station I've ever built, or ever will build. 1200 tons in orbit around Laythe, and room for over 1,000 kerbals. But it runs at about 2 fps without any ships docked to it and was an exercise in frustration.

[Warzouz]

How many parts did you had ? Mine weights 400T for 900 parts, which I managed to reduce to 650, then 600 parts.

The big trouble wasn't the slow FPS but the non response from the context menus. It was very hard to simply get the menus to show. Transferting fuel was nearly impossible (and ultra slow when I succeed).

[eddiew]

This. I have a very high end computer (custom built with water cooling) and stations lagged like a mother on my PC. It's kind of disappointing.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one

Maybe welding is the answer? Aside from the docking ports, each ring could probably be a single piece - as long as you don't care about actually getting kerbals in and out of the hab sections ^^

[Zephram Kerman]

Welding helps a lot with CPU load, by reducing physics calculations. However, it does not help with GPU load, because the renderer still has to draw all those parts either way. Help is helpful, depending on where the bottleneck is for your system.