What was the most unnecessarily complicated thing you have done?

[InterCity]

Hello, guys.

I've built a new orbital station. Squad has added some new science bays, so i wanted to try them. I've built my core: it weighted over 10 tons. It was composed of Cupola pod, hitchhiker storage container and both new science bays as well as some solar arrays.

Since it was incredibly heavy, i needed to make a new rocket. I ended up at a HUGE asparagus-staged rocket. it took me about one whole day of construction (try-fail method ). After finally getting the space station to the orbit, i realized:

"why the hell didn't i split it into pieces..."

Did anything similar happen to you? what was the most complicated thing you have done and found a simpler way after?

[Themohawkninja]

Yeah, I decided to launch a whole station once as well. I don't remember why though, since I knew how to dock.

Although, as for all time most unnecessarily complicated thing, I would have to say trying to get this one ship I built to Duna. Due to the use of docked fuel tanks, and all the weight of the panels, I had to constantly manually run fuel from one tank to another to keep the engines burning. It had barely enough fuel to get into orbit around Duna, and I never brought it back (it's been long since deleted from KSP updates).

[BlackBicycle]

I routinely overengineer my stuff, so that is normal for me. I have to admit that launching small Minimus stuff with a launch vehicle that can easily go Dune and beyond is a bit of an overkill.

[RogueMason]

Hmm...

Ship one; a lag-fest that actually reached Jool, but I severely underestimated the fuel I needed, ultimately resulting in me bailing out all the landers in a last ditch effort to at last reach somewhere in the Jool system; Laythe, Vall, ANYTHING. The most I got was a lander called Ceres in a highly inclined and eccentric orbit around the gas giant.

The second ship... I swear it was a summoner of demonic lag. Towards the end of it's construction, it was just a construction project that I wanted to finish; it was no longer going to Jool. It actually blew up in Kerbin orbit when it fired its engines (no casualties, fortunately):

Both of these were in 0.18. Since then, I've scaled back considerably, and with far greater luck.

[Clockwork_werewolf]

I once Tried to build a ship to go to Duna and back only launching parts with an SSTO. The SSTO could only launch 13 ton parts and it is hard to make a part that has control, power, RCS, Thrust and 2 docking ports while also having a purpose. Eventily after 4 parts were added the kracken attacked and each part decided to go off at 5K/s in a different direction.

I eventually made an SSTO that could launch 30 tons parts but I didn't dare test the kracken again.

[roguelycan]

That is pretty much all of my designs. Here is a common checklist for most of my ships I design

-Can dock (in multiple areas)

-Can land in Atmo

-Can land in Vacuum

-Take off from both

-Multiples of all science equipment

-carries Satellite probes(for remote tech)

-Can support crew for several years(Tac Life support)

-Can attach multiple dropships/landers

-Can travel to anywhere in solar system

-Possible VTOL

-Acts as a mothership

-Can survive deadly reentry

These are the typical points I usually attempt with pretty much anything that is designed to leave Kerbin SOI. If I intend to use KAS or Infernal robotics it gets even more ridiculous.

The average payload I normally send up is roughly between 50-75 tons although some have been known to be larger. And I usually try to design them in a way as to be an All in One kinda spaceship. Either I will design the entire payload to attemp to land and takeoff in atmo or vacuum(often times attempting VTOL) or I will design some kind of multipurpose lander or a spaceplane. I am often left with mixed successes. It doesn't help that I use Tac lifesupport, remotetech, and deadly reentry so that adds quite a bit to my design issues as well.

Edited December 27, 2013 by Specialist290
Sequential posts merged.

[Thomas988]

My Dunar 1 spacecraft.

It has so many fuel tanks, so many unnecessary panels, so many useless drones, I still question the sanity of my past self.

Edited December 28, 2013 by Thomas988

[Kasuha]

I'd say all my designs are unnecessarily complicated because I build by guessing. But the most unnecessarily complicated was my first mission to Eeloo where I built a large ship containing among others five orange tanks docked together both vertically and horizontally and every time I emptied a tank I dropped it and redocked all tanks to keep the ship balanced.

[Andon]

A Mega-lifting rocket that utilized an orange tank with a LV-T30 surrounded by six LV-T45s on the "Aerodynamic Tail" thingy. Then asparagus staged with eight more of those monstrosities (Had to use radial attachment points + fuel tanks as decouplers for enough spacing!). It ended up in orbit at about 100t, carrying two of the side rockets (With fuel left over...) as well.

Then .20 came out and I tried something else.

[Spartwo]

Hundreds of tons,thousands of parts,an entire system of exploration,not enough fuel to get to Duna:P(even though that hind section is 12 jumbo 64s and 8 nukes)

[flightmaster]

I routinely overengineer my stuff, so that is normal for me. I have to admit that launching small Minimus stuff with a launch vehicle that can easily go Dune and beyond is a bit of an overkill.

Haha yeah I do the same things. It takes so much longer as well due to the lower TWR

[lajoswinkler]

*waiting for Whackjob*

[Geschosskopf]

In real life, certainly all of the top 10 most unnecessarily complicated things I've done had to do with women .

In KSP, it was probably sending 24 ships to Jool at once only to have them all obliterated when most of the mods they were built around had game-breaking updates for 0.23.

[Firenexus13]

*waiting for Whackjob*

i was just about to say that

anyway, it's when i went to the minmus for about the 2nd time. when i decided to go apollo style using an experimental (and later found to be EXTREMELY unstable) 2 ships. so then i and bob, billy-bodfred and desdous Kerman to it.

Then the mechjeb failed during the automated decent.

R.i.p: bob, billy-bobfred and desdous kerman.

Edited December 28, 2013 by Firenexus13

[Ravenchant]

Oh wow, there are some inspiring tales to be found here

The most unnecessarily complicated...hm... I'm guessing my current mission. I never sent any kerbals out of their home planets' sphere of influence yet (I wanted to reliably pull off interplanetary transfers before)... so naturally, the first ship about to do so is a fragile 100+ ton beast carrying three auxiliary craft.

Here's hoping things won't go horribly, horribly wrong.

[Spatzimaus]

There are a lot of "unnecessarily complex" designs in KSP, and I don't just mean all of Whackjob's constructs. You don't really need giant designs, but it's always fun to see a huge space station or gigantic booster. I've got an 871-ton space station in Kerbin orbit (lifted in a single launch) whose job as a fuel depot is easily performed by mobile vessels a tiny fraction of its size, without the issues its high part count gives. But it's still just a neat thing to see a huge framework with greenhouses, all sorts of connectors, etc. as the centerpiece of your orbital works.

The same goes for rovers. You can do just fine with a tiny one-man (or unmanned) rover, but I've got a 400-ton behemoth designed as a mobile Kethane refinery. It's not even necessary if you need the Kethane, since I also have a 25-ton rover that fills the same role, but that doesn't make me want to mothball the thing, because keeping something that big from ripping itself apart is a challenge all of its own.

So I'd bet a lot of people have over-engineered designs, because in KSP there's very little downside to building something too large. (Except for spaceplanes.) We just don't often think about it, because once something's in orbit you don't really need to think about the inefficiency of your designs.

[Ravenchant]

lifted in a single launch

*picks jaw up from floor*

[Aragosnat]

Yeah. IT is amazing what people toss up. Untill recently I could not have a part count higher then 215 without causing some serious low FPS.

[Moar Boosters]

Why send stuff up with simple rockets, when you can build gigantic spaceplanes!

[Spatzimaus]

*picks jaw up from floor*

It's what I was saying about scale. 871 tons sounds like a huge station, but the booster masses almost 12000 tons, so honestly I could make it even bigger without the lift capacity being a problem. It uses my heaviest SSTO booster, 41 linked 3.75m stacks (KW Rocketry), as shown here just after launch:

The booster has a delta-V of about 5550m/s, which is enough to put the station directly into a 100km orbit and still have enough fuel to safely de-orbit the booster. Very easy to fly, as it has no staging, and there's no debris involved.

The station, when deployed:

But I don't use it very often, since it doesn't actually provide any capability in LKO that I don't also get from much smaller (and therefore easier to dock with) depots. It's got ~750 parts, so lag is a serious problem when docking. Once we get multithreading in Unity then things'll get a lot better, of course, but in the meantime I tend to use my much smaller 250-ton mobile refineries as fuel depots instead. That's what I was saying about overbuilding; I could have made the station quite a bit simpler, which would have made it more useful without compromising its basic utility, but that wouldn't have been as fun to design.

The "Brick" launchers I use, as seen in the above pictures, are built for exactly this sort of design. They're relatively low in part count, have tremendous lift capability, and their more-or-less flat tops mean that I can attach any payload without stability issues. Given that, there's just no reason for me to try assembling a station in orbit from parts, when I can just lift the entire thing in a single go. That's a big part of why my stations got so big in the first place; my spaceplanes are very efficient, but the heavy rocket constructions tend to be a bit bloated when you have no reason not to go bigger.

[Brotoro]

...In KSP, it was probably sending 24 ships to Jool at once only to have them all obliterated when most of the mods they were built around had game-breaking updates for 0.23.

Oh noooo! I wondered what happened to the fleet.

[InterCity]

Oh my god...

I'm starting to feel like a practical n00b

[Dean Harper]

I once launched a fair sized space station into orbit in a single piece. That isn't the overly complicated thing, the needless complexity came when I tried applying the same idea to a Mun base. It contained a command module, two hitch hiker cans, multiple rovers, multiple solar panels, spare fuel, a full suite of science equipment and docking ports for future expansion.

The first few attempts at launching it went horribly wrong and the one time I got it to the Mun, well, it hit the surface at an angle with a speed of about 100m/s.

[rdfox]

I'm probably going to come off as pathetically underachieving here, but I recently built a vehicle to use the FASA Atlas-Agena booster to put four separate soft-landing probes on either the Mun or Minmus, for Science purposes, in a single throw.

It's an impressive mess under that payload fairing...

[Markus Reese]

for me, is this. Interplanetary rocket for land and return onto a high gravity, but also was done roleplay style with probe returns on section booster stages. In addition, I did it all "aerodynamically"