What's the highest mass you've ever put into Kerbin orbit with a single ship?

[Annikovka]

Mine was a 350t SSTO, it barely made it to LKO

[loknar]

Yeah I agree

We can argue if Whackjob's ship has lifted off Kerbin or if Kerbin was technically pushed aside by Whackjob's rockets...

[magnemoe]

The Jool lander. everything went into orbit except the 32 solid fuel boosters.

[Meltro]

I'm a sucker for really well thought out and phrased questions.

Sure. Whenever I build big, there's a certain beast I have to slay. I call it resonant stress calving. Struts are GREAT at keeping things from moving. The problem is with the really large scale structures, during launches and thick atmospheric decelerations, is that significant stresses can build up. I can't say for sure, but I imagine the stresses reflecting back and forth from one end of the craft to another, like in those physics games where link get redder the more stress they have. Struts don't have any give to them. If they give even a little, they snap. And the number of struts used seems to not have much effect on the resonant stress calving. While I was toying about with making handmade lander gear, I went with trusses instead of girders. During one of the many tests I did where I never even bothered to take pictures, I had one drop test going where I had a significant weight being dropped onto a prototype set of heavy lander legs. The feet survived, even down to the "toes", with nary a snapped girder anywhere. However, components I just had strutted on had sheared clean off. Adding more struts did nothing. Then I suddenly noticed that parts of the lander legs had as few as one strut, and they held up fine. I realized that a combination of girders and struts can hold parts fast and secure, but still flex a bit under fantastic stresses.

So, from there on out, girders and struts.

Sir, you have opened my eyes. I too am limited by the 'resonance', which I think is the best possible way to describe what happens with high part count ships. It has been my downfall getting more than 12 tanks into orbit. I suspect I'll have 30 going up within the week. Or waste another month on various designs.

[SunJumper]

I usually limit myself to 50 tons, due to hardware/skill issues...

[Landge]

I built this...

Click in the pic to view the mission log.

I don't remember how much it weighed but it was over 1500 parts.

[NGTOne]

Certainly. What mod are those tanks and engines? Is that novatech? What is the thrust and ISP of those engines?

The big tanks/engines are the 7.5m set from Gaby's Quick and Dirty Miscellania. The upper stages are KW Rocketry (I'm currently designing a Mk2 version that uses NovaPunch instead of KW, with the goal of being able to reach all corners of the Kerbol system - still going to use GQDM as a booster, though). Thrust on the big ones is 15000, and their Isp is 265 at sea level and 340 in vacuum. Not terribly efficient, but puts out a lot of brute force (perfect for launching those large, ridiculous payloads).

[JiWint]

-snip

Use (img)file.ext(/img) only using [ and ] instead of ( and )

Whackjob is whackjob...

[allmhuran]

Not much point comparing mod to stock (lol @ 2k+ tons earlier in thread, as if there's any equivalency), but this one went up purely as a proof of concept / tutorial for the "thrust plate" design technique. 750 tons or so. Maybe 800 with the staged LVT30s seen in the picture (those are also orbital at this point so I guess you could hold onto them if you wanted)

I believe others have since gone bigger with this idea, it's fairly simple to do... just build further out! (Design "tutorial" can be seen on my youtube channel, and a video of the launch, because pictures != legit)

Edited October 7, 2013 by allmhuran

[Rage097]

Welp. Time to start memorizing the mass of my craft. In the mean time while I go number hunting...

[Hodo]

Largest is a 200 ton SSTO, when full.

[regex]

119 tons with a fairly reasonable parts count including payload (300?). The lifter was asparagused and all stock except for those KSPX 3/4 tanks, I love those. I think I could get 150 tons using the same two-points-on-payload method and not kill my laptop on lag.

[Hodo]

Oh I forgot about my heavy lifter SSTO...

Why carry one orange tank when you can move two.

I give you the SP-400.

And yes it can get both of them to a 90km orbit without using any fuel out of them.

[AlamoVampire]

i dont have a picture of it right now, but my record is 960 tons using the novapunch parts on a heavy modded saturn V style core with 4 small dual nozzle boosters of which I cannot remember their names right now. big big rocket, was fun lol

[Moar Boosters]

Not sure how much this thing weighs.... 400tons maybe?

It was lifted apollo style, with only pakcake staging. I've built a few giant asparagus designs that get way more into orbit, but they're ugly and aren't fun to build.

[acealeam]

Before seeing this I was just thinking, wait until WhackJob sees this. Then I see the first post, haha.

[Captain Sierra]

120 tons roughly. Had to do a custom launcher because of size. My normal asparagus was just shy of lifting it and it was almost 3 orange tanks high so I had to do make a modified launcher to accommodate it.

The payload was two full fuel cans and a heavy tug to haul them. Launcher put them into a nice parking orbit and make the kick burn to the rendezvous. It was not able to finish the velocity cancel so the tug had to do it.

EDIT:

I do have an untested heavy lifter that I want someone with a good computer to run a nominal capacity test on for me.

Current part count was somewhere between 350 and 375. It does use Mobius Rocketworks.

Edited October 7, 2013 by Captain Sierra

[-Velocity-]

I'm currently at about 750 tons (maybe 550, 600 tons payload) with this thing.

The top third of the rocket is the payload, in this case, the rear half of an interplanetary "supertanker/carrier". The rocket uses a combination of vertical and asparagus staging. It can get a 500 ton payload into orbit with 3000 tons of rocket. That's a pretty good payload fraction... I think... I get it by using a bunch of smaller, more efficient engines instead of fewer big but less efficient engines. At launch, this sucker initially starts with 210 engines burning like 25 or 30 tons of fuel per second.

I've tried to go bigger, but between incredibly low frame rates, constant memory overflows/leaks and subsequent crashes (mostly caused by the 32 bit inexcusatable), and the rocket falling apart on the pad, it's too painful of a process for too little gain... as I don't really have a use for anything larger anyway.

Edited October 7, 2013 by |Velocity|

[Astraph]

My personal record so far is a ~80 tonnes remote refueling machine (featured in my MMEEC project). But yeah, how can this compete with those flying block of flats fuel tanks :0

Here's the screen, just for the record:

[AlamoVampire]

Lets hope they up to 64bit support in .22

[Awass]

My personal record so far is a ~80 tonnes remote refueling machine (featured in my MMEEC project). But yeah, how can this compete with those flying block of flats fuel tanks :0

Here's the screen, just for the record:

Ikr. I can barely comprehend how Whackjob put that much stuff into space. I am humbled.

[Whackjob]

Ikr. I can barely comprehend how Whackjob put that much stuff into space. I am humbled.

I only get that stuff into space through brute force and willful stupidity. I build that which the rest of you have the common sense to avoid. That's all.

[arq]

I build that which the rest of you have the common sense to avoid.

That sounds like a sig, to me. Or something for a custom flag.

[Rockfire]

About 50t, I refuse to use asparagus monsters or mods.

[Awass]

About 50t, I refuse to use asparagus monsters or mods.

What's wrong with asparagus? They're yummy.