What was the heaviest payload that you launched to orbit?

[moogoob]

"well you could make a new craft and just make it one of the tanks, then check its mass. "

I COULD... but I keep forgetting. :p The laptop I post from was made in 2009 and can barely run KSP. My desktop is downstairs. C'est la vie.

[Mazlem]

Doh, I voted wrong, should have been 1000+ tons.  I was looking at my single-launch space stations and forgot about my miner - Boston 07 is 6,434 tons (plus a couple booster engine clusters make it 6,562 on the pad), and about 1,400 tons after making orbit.

[Vezbot]

On 2/17/2020 at 11:29 PM, Starhawk said:

In 0.90 I sent three kerbals down to Eve's surface and home again in a Mk 1-2 command pod.

The craft in orbit was close to 1300 tonnes.

The mass on the pad of the whole thing was almost 9000 tonnes.

The Eve lander was 737 tonnes.

Happy landings!

 

At least it works!

[jimmymcgoochie]

I don't know what my heaviest launch in the stock system was, but yesterday I launched a ~250t payload to a 150x150km orbit in JNSQ which is 2.7x larger than stock Kerbin. The launch rocket was almost entirely stock with only a 1.875m SRB from BetterSRBs and a 5m probe core from NFLV coming from mods, 5x Mainsails on stage 1 and 5x Vectors on stage 2, made orbit with 6m/s left in the second stage  at a speed of about 3700m/s.

No part clipping or sticking parts inside other parts required either, which makes a change from my usual launchers, but I did use the old trick of sticking fuel tanks on top of the SRBs with crossfeed enabled on the booster decouplers to get some more delta-V.

 

[Demordrah]

552.528t into 100k Kerbin orbit.  It was a fully loaded fuel depot.  Normally, I launch my depots empty, and fill them up later, but my need for this depot in Kerbin orbit exceeded my then present need to put it there efficiently.

The launch vehicle was ... interesting.  The first stage had 60 engines on it.  In total, it was 381 parts, 4,187.407t on the pad, and cost 2,380.217 to launch.

It was a satisfying display of brute force, but my Playstation was not happy about it.

[jimmymcgoochie]

I knew I could do better, so I did: 7kt rocket, 1kt payload into a 200x200km orbit- IN JNSQ. Orbital velocity there is higher than the escape velocity of stock Kerbin. The original Black Hole managed 750t to a 750x750km orbit but some upgrades made the Supermassive version put a whole thousand tons up albeit into a lower orbit.

Eight 5m side boosters plus a 7.5m core made well over 100MN from its 43 LFO engines but the TWR was only 1.3 at liftoff. It was hideously expensive (over 2m) but a combination of NFLV oversized probe cores and StageRecovery meant that all 8 side boosters and the first stage core all got recovered by (simulated) powered landings and I brought the second stage down myself once the payload- a thousand tons of ore because it was very heavy and very very cheap- was deposited in orbit so the overall cost was relatively low.

Thanks to the KSTS mod I can now re-use that launch profile to put kiloton payloads into orbits of up to 200x200km for under 600k with a cost per ton of under 600 at full load. Saves a lot of effort trying to build interplanetary ships or space stations piece by piece in orbit when you can build them in the VAB and then put them in orbit in one go instead.

[Spricigo]

Just over 0.5kt. 

Krakatoa 

I'm reworking my "toolbox", and planning to design launch vehicles for bigger payloads. But given the limited game time I currently have, Krakatoa will still be my biggest rocket for awhile. 

[Spricigo]

On 2/21/2020 at 9:12 AM, AHHans said:

I wanted to know how big people let their payloads grow before they think about using other solutions to reach the same goal - like splitting up the payload, or refueling in orbit. Not in the least because I noticed that even my biggest launch wasn't really all that heavy compared to what I had orbiting the different planets

Krakatoa is an exception (As I assume tankers in general are). It is big to allow everything else to be smaller. My regular payloads grow to maybe100-150t mostly because I don't need anything bigger. 

[Grogs]

I think my biggest one was the mother ship for my Jool-5 mission. It weighed in at 1414 tons.

 

The lifter mass was 11,354 tons. It had all the aerodynamics of a brick and I had to fly it like an Eve ascent - straight up until 20,000 meters before starting a gradual gravity turn.

 

Because of the steep ascent profile and low TWR of the Nerv engines, I put it into a 500x500 km orbit. The central booster had about half its fuel left (which I used for the first periapsis kick). Counting that, the total payload to orbit was 1586 tons.

[DunaManiac]

The Propulsion Module of my first tylo Mission, Beryl 2. The rocket together weighs 1,426 tons, and the payload weighs 267 tons. The rocket is almost as tall as the VAB, which reminds one of how small the VAB can seem sometimes...

[Lord Aurelius]

It's been awhile since I've played around with superheavy launchers (most of the time they're a solution looking for a problem), but I intentionally built a 1000t payload out of large fuel tanks and docking ports and launched it to see if I could.

The problem with stock parts and this size of vehicle is that the decouplers start to become weak links. Sure, it's possible to strut around them, but you're still at the limits of the physics engine and putting a huge amount of force on a rather small point that's not really strong enough for it.

Edited July 23, 2020 by Lord Aurelius

[linuxgurugamer]

Stock plus mod, I did the Retro Solar Rescue challenge.  Two launchers, the smaller was about 5,500 tons, the larger was about 20,000 tons.  Total delta V in orbit when the two parts were docked was about 60,000 dV.

Rescue 1:

Here are the Imgur albums showing the whole mission:

Launch of Rescue 1

https://imgur.com/gallery/5s5wc

Launch of Rescue 2, crew cabin and docking:

https://imgur.com/gallery/KwbAe

Main mission, from orbit to splashdown:

https://imgur.com/gallery/9Q7ml

Edited July 23, 2020 by linuxgurugamer

[HyperDraco]

Got bored, so I built an All-in-one Ultra heavy lift rocket (for me at least, this community can be quite wild as far as I know) and sent exactly 500 Tons of the Baguette fuel tanks into High Solar orbit.

I'll see if I have any pictures and post them on soon

[Xyphos]

back in my early days of playing (v0.90) I used to make ridiculously huge rockets with absurd payloads so I've gotten over 1000t to orbit before.

however, my heaviest payload to orbit via reusable SSTO is 81t via https://kerbalx.com/Xyphos/Work-Horse-XXL

EDIT: I probably should update that vessel to 1.10 without Making History due to the recent fairing update

Edited July 23, 2020 by Xyphos

[Spricigo]

56 minutes ago, Xyphos said:

 

EDIT: I probably should update that vessel to 1.10 without Making History due to the recent fairing update

Is taking longer than I anticipated to see crafts using open farings on KerbalX. 

[HyperDraco]

7 hours ago, Spricigo said:

Is taking longer than I anticipated to see crafts using open farings on KerbalX. 

It really is, considering how useful they can be. For styling or practical and aerodynamic purposes.