What was the most unnecessarily complicated thing you have done?

[earth]

my 148 mainsail monster was a huge exxaggeration, but it can lift a dozen orange tanks to lko. i can provide the craft file, but beware its 1700 parts lol

[Whackjob]

I suppose my Munar landers are unnecessarily complicated.

But to be fair, you can probably use a random number generator to select anything out of my imgur account and have that apply just as much.

http://whackjob.imgur.com

[G'th]

What on earth is the purpose of such a contraption?!?!

[Spatzimaus]

What on earth is the purpose of such a contraption?!?!

To be awesome, obviously.

[Merinsan]

I've done 2 things which fit the bill.

The first was my attempt to do something useful with ion drives:

The entire thing was launched in a single launch. It had 43 engines and was still slow, although it had enough delta-v to get out of the Kerbol system. It only too several hours - I left it running and did something else.

The second was my attempt to make some sort of "capital ship". It took about 15 launches to assemble in orbit. It was a fun project:

It has an RCS refueller (also overly complex for this job) and a prototype short range fighter docked also. There was room for 24 small ships to dock.

It was somewhat laggy once it was finished.

On the maiden voyage, I lit the engines up, and immediately the mainsail broke off and floated away. It then became a fuel depot in LKO, which was too laggy to use most of the time.

[Whackjob]

On the maiden voyage, I lit the engines up, and immediately the mainsail broke off and floated away. It then became a fuel depot in LKO, which was too laggy to use most of the time.

Orange tanks appear to have fairly week end point connections. I tend to eschew those in favor of a pair of Rockomax 32s. They appear to have much better hold. And when in doubt, use trusses and struts!

[Blue]

Why build a rover capable of flying and landing itself when you could have a dedicated purpose rover with over 70 tons of complicated equipment to land it that then gets detached and thrown away later?

Well then again it won't look so unnecessary or crazy when that 30 ton six-wheeler is doing donuts on Tylo.

[Merinsan]

Orange tanks appear to have fairly week end point connections. I tend to eschew those in favor of a pair of Rockomax 32s. They appear to have much better hold. And when in doubt, use trusses and struts!

It wasn't breaking off the orange tank, but the RCS tank, and it would happen no matter what the throttle setting was. It was odd and I never could work out why it happened. In the end it was still impractical because it had a fuel flow problem as well. Fuel wasn't draining from all tanks, but somehow from 1 tank only - eventually it would be weighted asymmetrically. And without the mainsail, it was very slow...

[Spartwo]

All this to launch 1.5 tons:/

[Xacktar]

On the maiden voyage, I lit the engines up, and immediately the mainsail broke off and floated away. It then became a fuel depot in LKO, which was too laggy to use most of the time.

I laughed so hard at this. XD

[Spatzimaus]

All this to launch 1.5 tons

Pfft.

1.5-ton payload, 11848-ton SSTO booster.

Like I said before, a LOT of what we all build in KSP is unnecessarily complicated, or at least overengineered, because there's not much of a downside to going bigger than you really need. I mean seriously, you can make an SSTO with four or five parts, and a Mun rocket with not much more. And yet, people's first Mun trips are often using designs that could probably reach Duna if flown well...

[InterCity]

Overengineering is great, if you have a good PC. I'm so glad i bought my custom laptop with I7 3,4 Ghz, 8 gigs of ram and Nvidia GTX 680MX with two gigs. I can now build a HUGE lag machine and still be able to fly it well.

Overengineered stuff is good if you can't fly the thing well. I, personally, never reached kerbin's orbit with less than 5100 Delta-v, although wiki says that 4700 is enough.

[Spatzimaus]

Overengineering is great, if you have a good PC.

The Unity engine is still 32-bit, which limits you to about 4 gigs of RAM; any more won't help with processing. It also has no multicore support, so there's really not much difference between brand-new processors and ones from four or five years ago. Basically, at the moment it doesn't take much of a machine to hit the best performance on big craft, especially if you keep the part count down by using mods that add 3.75m parts, like KW Rocketry. Once Unity works its kinks out, things'll get a lot better for everyone with a more advanced machine.

(For reference, my own machine is almost 5 years old.)

I, personally, never reached kerbin's orbit with less than 5100 Delta-v, although wiki says that 4700 is enough.

That big craft I showed up there did it with just over 4500. It had 5550 at launch, and as you can see in the screenshot, it had just over 1000 left in a stable orbit; obviously, it has a lot less when I launch a big payload, but even with my 900-ton station as a payload that booster will still have ~300 left in a circular orbit, and an even larger payload is possible if it has its own engines to finish the circularization. It's one of the big reasons I like SSTO rockets like that one; all you have to do is tweak the throttle and slowly tip over, with maybe a 400m/s circularization burn at the end. Much easier than having to manage multiple stages.

[InterCity]

The Unity engine is still 32-bit, which limits you to about 4 gigs of RAM; any more won't help with processing. It also has no multicore support, so there's really not much difference between brand-new processors and ones from four or five years ago. Basically, at the moment it doesn't take much of a machine to hit the best performance on big craft, especially if you keep the part count down by using mods that add 3.75m parts, like KW Rocketry. Once Unity works its kinks out, things'll get a lot better for everyone with a more advanced machine.

(For reference, my own machine is almost 5 years old.)

I know that Unity (and thus KSP) doesn't support multithreading. I also know that it's just 32-bit. What i meant is that more complicated craft = more lag. Running KSP on a 2GB RAM machine is just... hell.

That big craft I showed up there did it with just over 4500.

Good job. How do you determine ascent path? Because this is probably what i am doing wrong. If i use MechJeb, i can do it with 4600.

[Spatzimaus]

Running KSP on a 2GB RAM machine is just... hell.

Oof. Yeah, my 5-year-old machine has 4GB, and KSP uses more than half of it, so I'd hate to think of what'd happen on a 2GB machine.

The thing is, a bigger craft isn't always more complicated, especially if you use those large-part mods. That 12000-ton booster has exactly 800 parts (mostly struts); the 900-ton space station it was designed for has 750ish of its own. Combined they slow down my machine pretty badly (to about a 4:1 time ratio), but it's still playable since you don't have to do much.

And that's the extreme case. That booster consists of 41 linked rocket stacks, but I've got smaller versions with the same basic design. My 9-stack version, for instance, has only 233 parts and can handle anything up to about 200 tons. I've started to use it for practically everything because it has about the same part count as the smaller, more complex asparagus setups I used to use.

How do you determine ascent path?

Just a lot of practice; after a few hundred launches you get a good instinct for this sort of thing. Thanks to the Flight Engineer mod I'm pretty much always at optimal thrust, and can keep an eye on apoapsis and such without constantly flipping back to orbit view, so it's not too difficult to slowly tip over without coming up short. In a perfect world I could probably get the delta-V cost down to ~4000, but all my boosters have ~5500 sans payload so it's just not important to save any more. I just need enough to put my payloads into a circular orbit, flip around, and de-orbit with the remainder of the fuel.

[Spartwo]

I know that Unity (and thus KSP) doesn't support multithreading. I also know that it's just 32-bit. What i meant is that more complicated craft = more lag. Running KSP on a 2GB RAM machine is just... hell.

Close Explorer.exe before you start playing.Make sure to reopen it after.I manage to have 300-400mb free with hundreds of parts.

[InterCity]

Today i came up with one even more insane thing:

Here's the vehicle assembly building image of it:

At the LaunchPad: for some reason it didn't collapse

Actually, it collapsed not much higher.

So i've gone back to VAB, adding more struts as well as more crew (A total of 19).

The second launch actually gone well.

Until one of the booster stage engines vanished for some reason.

I decided to continue launch.. and Heureka!

A cocpit view. Notice the second stage debris.

Finally, at orbit

All this stuff was inspired by WhackJob's creations, don't forget to check his stuff out. The rocket's height was exactly the height of VAB

[Fidelacchius]

Hmm the most unnecessary complicated thing i have done...

I tried a 3 man return mission from Eve.

That should explain it enough >_<

I hate that purple *******

Edited January 3, 2014 by Fidelacchius

[3mon]

Has to be the IKSS Olympus. Sitting in LKO, housing 76 kerbals with 1778 parts, it serves no real purpose other than to drop FPS to the floor and melting the rocket CPUs of the daring kerbonauts trying to dock with it (also explodes occasionally, but that's another story heh )

Just docked that trasversal axis in the middle with the 2 science labs and it nearly took me an hour lol

Edited January 2, 2014 by 3mon
typo

[Cakeofruit]

I thinks that landing-docking,

because i've broke my poddle engine on my kethane miner i had to land on the docking port.

[Dangerous_Beans]

I thinks that landing-docking,

because i've broke my poddle engine on my kethane miner i had to land on the docking port.

i'm impressed, that is way beyond my landing skills.

the most needlessly complex thing i have done was a 5 part Jool probe. it would launch from Kerbin and fly to Jool as one ship, then split apart and fly all over the Jool system. at least that was the plan, in practice the damn thing broke up on launch every time. in the end i launched 5 separate probes and that worked perfectly.

[Warmblood]

Jool Mission, 2 parter.

Hab module, 2 planes, 2 rovers:

Jool station, spaceplane docking port, and outer moon mission (Vall outpost, Tylo lander, exploration ship) on the front:

Result of hab landing (best out of 15 tries)

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

I have build a rocket with asymmetric placed engines and tweaked it into Orbit. Check it out

Sorry for the bad english though...

http://www.twitch.tv/malfunctionm1ke/b/492918134

[Captain Sierra]

Enough delta V to haul that kethane tanker module back from Jool full. Was meant as a tanker, which was gonna get turned into this amazingly huge chain ship which would be able to colonize jool in a single shot. Unfortunately, .21 broke saves so this mission was lost. I have not yet attempted it again, but I will.

[Katojana]

a rocket in the spaceplane hangar, and a spaceplane in the rocket assembly building