Large part count lag

[Xraybroadcasterfromvenus]

Greetings and salutations, fellow kerbonauts!

I've purchased KSP a few days ago, after gleefully launching my kerbals up into space in the demo for a full day. I think I've passed the tests, as I've managed to land a terrified Bob on the mun and got him back home in one piece, and I managed to dock a bunch of awkwardly shaped objects of non-descript scientific purpose together while orbiting our lovely mudball.

Being the ambitious lobber of things into orbit that I am, I now started construction of a multi-piece space station- using quad docking ports as my OCD does not allow angles smaller than 90 degrees. Also I felt the need to reinforce the main structures with struts.

I've docked three parts so far, and the whole thing is starting to lag as soon as I approach visual range. This, of course, not only reduces fun, but also makes it quite difficult to dock anything else. I'm assuming this is due to an increasingly large parts count- I roughly estimate it reaching 1000 parts, and I'm not even halfway yet.

My workaround so far is using mechjeb to handle some of the docking, although he struggles with the quad ports.

My question is twofold:

1. What can I currently do about this large parts count lag, aside from, obviously, keeping part count down? I've tried decreasing graphics settings but this has little effect- as physics and parts are CPU-based.

2. What has the future of KSP got in store for large part count lag? Will it be drastically improved, or am I best to forget about my ambitious plans and stick to smaller ships for now?

For the record- core is 4GHz, 8GB of ram, using a Gforce GTX 560 TI, running windows 7 64bit.

Thanks in advance for your feedback, I'm looking forward to contributing my bit of insanity to this community.

[Xraybroadcasterfromvenus]

Made an astonishing discovery- there was in fact a construction on the station that was CAUSING the lag. For some strange reason, the quad docking ports were the culprit! I've modified all the sections of the station by replacing the quad ports with the new big port, lobbed 'em all into space, put them together, and the lag is back to normal levels. Very odd indeed, as the quad ports were perfectly identical and should've docked up properly.

The question still stands though.

[Procyon]

im guessingthe quads had struts to hold things together making for approx part count of 13 - 17 parts per coupler ( more if struts used to attach the coupler to the supporting part ). so a parts saving of 15 or so average for each docking port replaced by the one large dock. adds up quickly and you should be lagging again in no time

[EndlessWaves]

There's not much you can do about part count, indeed anecdotally it seems it might be scaling non-linearly (twice the performance ups your usable part count by less than twice). As far as I know the developers haven't speculated on what sort of performance improvements they think they can reasonably achieve in this area but I wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the game is built around 200-300 part vessels.

[Xraybroadcasterfromvenus]

Procyon- you are indeed correct, the quads did have struts, making a single dock worth 17 parts. I'd say your conclusion would be correct, if it weren't for my actions today: I've now hooked on an additional few modules, surpassing the parts count lost by the ports. The original lag really was very, very bad- enough to wonder if something was wrong. I can only suppose the quads developed minor differences during installation and subsequent loads, thus causing significant stress.

It matters little now though, I've switched to using the big ports, and am using a little mechjeb trickery to get the connection angle right.

Endlesswaves- that would be great. One can only dream of the fun it'd be to put together a 300-part mothership and taking it to the stars.

[Procyon]

from what I have read, I think I would consider using the quads for putting a ship together in orbit for the structural strength and the big docks for the stations to keep part count down. That being said I have tested the large on a powered ship and it seemed to work quite well. side mount items with lot of mass might go with quads or something.