Major lag before collisions on brand new gaming desktop

[danman21]

Hello,

I'm relatively new to KSP, but absolutely loving it so far. I have a new Dell Inspiron Gaming PC (Dell i5675-7806BLU-PUS Inspiron Gaming PC Desktop 5680, Intel Core i7-8700, 16GB DDR4 Memory, 128GB SSD+2TB SATA HDD, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, Recon Blue, Windows 10 64-bit), and I've been very happy with how KSP runs on it... until now.

Now that I'm trying to build more complicated, large, multi-stage rockets, I'm running into major lag spikes, only right before collisions happen. The rocket I built has 4-5 stages, around 430 parts, with not much jerry-rigging (although I did put 5-10 parts or so "inside" of others using structural components & the move tool, etc.).

Any time a collision is about to occur (i.e. a stage bumps into the rocket on separation, etc.), the game freezes for up to 10 seconds while it calculates all the physics, then jumps ahead abruptly.

I have most of the large, core parts "auto-strutted", but I did try removing ALL struts and colliding the rocket, with no apparent decrease in lag time.

My PC is clearly handling the graphics aspect of the game well... it's the multitude of physics calculations it's not able to keep up with. Is this a known issue with the game? Interestingly enough, when I researched this issue online I found a whole bunch of discussion about lag & crashes, but not this specific type of isolated pre-collision lag.

Any help/advice is much appreciated. I can provide more details if needed.

Thank you.

[Chel]

Having a massive amount of parts (430 on your rocket) creates a strain on the game. All those parts hitting other parts and exploding will take the game time, it's pretty normal for that to happen with large craft regardless of how good your frame rate is