What was your biggest payload you have launched into orbit?

[HafCoJoe]

1200t pre-patch: http://imgur.com/a/4RRFT

But with the new parts and massively increased structural stability, it's much much easier. I don't know if I want to sink the time into it again, but breaking 3000 should be fairly easy.

That is insane.

[NecroBones]

I'm not sure actually. I'm going to guess somewhere in the 200-300 ballpark. With the new SLS parts, I made a lifter for a 200-Ton payload, and it works great. My benchmark is to get a payload into a 150 km circular equatorial orbit, with a small margin of fuel left in the last booster stage, around 25% or so.

Example screenshot. This is a 200 ton payload, and the lifter meets the requirements above:

[benburch]

Wow, I thought I was doing good to loft a completely full orange tank with nuc rocket attached!

[Themohawkninja]

~75 tons. It was a refueling craft that had two full orange tanks plus some struts, RCS, solar panels, and a Sr. docking port.

Made fueling my huge constructed craft much quicker.

[ProGamerGov]

With the new rockets I can barely get my space crane into LEO. I then have to send up rockets and fuel to move it.

[NecroBones]

Example screenshot. This is a 200 ton payload, and the lifter meets the requirements above:

http://necrobones.com/photos/screenshots/KSP/KSP%202014-04-03%2023-56-59-33.jpg

After starting to keep track, a heavier version of this tug is now my heaviest payload, at 274 tons for the tug (about 1988 tons on the pad).

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

My heaviest payload was 650t grand tour ship, (it failed, along with my 6 previous attempt, none of which made it past the mun )

Now with ARM parts, it's a 900t asteroid (I landed it near the Launchpad and got a SRB powered rover to nudge it under a rocket supported by launch clamps, the rocket had a claw on the bottom, it grabbed the asteroid and took it to HKO)

[The Destroyer]

About a 600 ton, 500 part Mothership. Launched all at once. But that wasn't the impressive part. The impressive part was the 5k ton launcher than nearly breaks apart due to its size.

To

To

The landers could even redock and return home but I wanted a base.

[Jouni]

My biggest payload was the 506-tonne heavy asteroid tug, which was probably four times bigger than my second biggest payload.

I didn't build a custom lifter for it, but used four of my standard SLS-2 rockets and one SLS-4 rocket with added winglets.

[cantab]

So far my stuff has been pretty little, with a couple of 25 ton ships being the biggest. The Space Hotel USA in .23 went into an inclined Medium Kerbin Orbit on a rather shonky lifter. It could almost certainly have put more into equatorial LKO, but I never tried. The Tycho 1 spacecraft in .23.5 also weighed about 25 tons and was launched to LKO by a somewhat more elegant, though still not fault-free, lifter.

But I'm going to work on a modular lifter design soon, making more use of the new parts. I'm thinking 125 tons to LKO, for at least one configuration, is a good target - that's three orange tanks plus ancillaries.

[sojourner]

My first rocket with the new parts topped out at 638tons for the payload. That was using 2 stages, no asparagus. Asparagus staging with these new parts should easily lead to 1000+ton payloads. Now just to figure out what to do with all that capacity....

[Boris_T_Roach]

With the old parts (0.23)

a 120 ton nuclear drive unit delivered to a <200km LKO, where it would be docked with another orange fuel tank and a bunch of 32 tanks, usually making for about 240-260 ton refueling tanker depending on configuration (eg extra tanks for the boost out of LKO, mini rovers a a payload etc)

With ARM I can deliver the drive unit and the orange tank with its docking ports into a 300km LKO as one unit, then send up all the other fuel tanks as a single payload.

Meaning it can be built in 2 flights instead of the 5 or 6 it normally takes

Boris

still takes 20-30 mins to get it out of Kerbin's SOI

[Moar Boosters]

1855 tons with a non-asparagus launcher.

Here's the launcher.

[ayana]

About 200 tons as an experiment. But that's with FAR and without fuel lines. Haven't been motivated to make an actual mission with all that capacity yet.

[-Velocity-]

I had a big heavy lifter (maybe about 3000 tons) that could deliver about 500 to maybe 700 tons to LKO. Unfortunately, 0.23 brought part incompatibilities that broke it. I replaced it with a smaller but MUCH simpler rocket that masses like 2200 tons (sans payload), and can deliver 400 tons to a 250 km X 250 km orbit.

I don't really care that the payload is smaller, as the new rocket has less than HALF the parts as the old one (1600 parts with the old rocket vs. only 750 with the new one), and most of my big payloads in the past were like 70% fuel by mass. Now that we can launch empty fuel tanks, I can send up spacecraft that will be like 2000 tons when fully fueled, in a single launch!

EDIT:

And this was why I gave up on the super-big rockets, and am sticking with heavy lifters <= 3000 tons. Here is my attempt to make a 5000 ton heavy lift rocket (design goal- ~1000 tons to LKO). I DID make it stop exploding, but I could never get the fuel to flow correctly, so it would always get out of balance and crash. I really, REALLY hate the fuel flow system in KSP.

If we ever get a better fuel flow system, it will be much, much easier to build asparagus-staged rockets.

Come to think of it though, I could always make a custom fuel tank mod. All I would need to do is like, rescale the largest KW rocketry or Novapunch fuel tanks by a factor of 2, increasing their volume by 8, and increasing their empty mass by 8. What limits me most is the small sizes of even the biggest fuel tanks available in KW rocketry and Novapunch. It's really tough to make an asparagus-staged rocket where there are lots and lots of fuel tanks in each asparagus stage. The fuel just refuses to flow in an asparagus fashion.

Edited April 7, 2014 by |Velocity|

[TheHengeProphet]

~75 tons. It was a refueling craft that had two full orange tanks plus some struts, RCS, solar panels, and a Sr. docking port.

Made fueling my huge constructed craft much quicker.

This, except I also had four 2.5m RCS tanks and a space tug with three LV-Ns, seeing as I was using them to make a grand tour ship in orbit, so... I'd venture to say maybe 90 tonnes. Converting my old lifter to ARM parts has made things slightly more efficient, but less controllable. Just last night, though, I swapped out the double oranges for a single 14400, and that flew with much greater stability.

[Redshift OTF]

I am currently working on a stock practical lifter that can lift 1000 tons into a 100km orbit.

The bit on the top is the payload. Having some problems with the stack decouplers not firing at the same time even though they are in the same stage.

[Moar Boosters]

The bit on the top is the payload. Having some problems with the stack decouplers not firing at the same time even though they are in the same stage.

I had the same thing with my big rocket as well. I think there must be a bug with these new decouplers.

[Jouni]

I had the same thing with my big rocket as well. I think there must be a bug with these new decouplers.

The new decouplers are physicsless, probably by accident. To fix this (and many other problems), edit GameData/NASAmission/Parts/Size3Decoupler/part.cfg, find the line with "PhysicsSignificance = 1", and comment it out. Be prepared to add struts, as the interstage connections become much less rigid.

[Technical Ben]

Not the biggest, but I put this up in 2 launches. One for the core/transport with full fuel, and one for the 4 fuel pods. Docking the 4 pods was fun, it was done radially and not sequentially/parallel (I have videos ).

After starting to keep track, a heavier version of this tug is now my heaviest payload, at 274 tons for the tug (about 1988 tons on the pad).

http://necrobones.com/photos/screenshots/KSP/274-ton-asteroid-tug.jpg

Gee wheeze, oh gads. This game is both beautiful in engineering, and beautiful in rendering (has something updated, it looks really slick now ).

[Redshift OTF]

The problem I have with the new stack decouplers is if I have 6 in the same stage they only decouple one at a time when space is pressed. Even if I use MechJeb to decouple them they still don't go all at once causing stability issues and sometimes RUD. I'm modifying my design to not use them which makes the lifter more simpler anyway.

[TheDarkStar]

I launched an interplanetary craft with a 200 ton core, once (pre-0.23.5). I usually go for the lowest mass rather than the highest mass, so it will probably be a while before I send up a Whackjob-like 2000t payload.

Edited April 7, 2014 by TheDarkStar

[Merinsan]

I did 5 orange tanks before 0.23.5, using stock only, which is 180t.

I just looked up the new big fuel tanks and they are 82t, which I've already managed to put 2 into orbit without even trying. That was the transfer stage - the payload would have been about 30t, which is 192t. When I actually get around to trying, I expect to be able to do about 1000t.

[NecroBones]

Gee wheeze, oh gads. This game is both beautiful in engineering, and beautiful in rendering (has something updated, it looks really slick now ).

You might be noticing the clouds. That REALLY adds to the realism. It's the "Environmental Visual Enhancements" mod.

[Whirligig Girl]

when counting it was 170 tons using KW Rocketry and FAR for a science fair project, but I think I've made heavier lifters when building something specifically for the payload.