Are craft in hard (or harder in custom) better than ones built in easy?

[Grand Ship Builder]

while making a save file on custom (harder than hard) i though of the question in the title.

so like craft designed in hard are designed for it, making it work better in easy, not vice versa

[Vanamonde]

No, the ships you make work the same way at all difficulty settings. 

[Sharpy]

They will perform the same. The part performance doesn't change. AFAIR, the only two parameters that do change craft performance (resource abundance and reentry heating) don't change between Easy and Hard, and the first only affects ISRU work time anyway. Reentry heating is the only parameter that affects the actual difficulty of craft building.

 

"Easy" crafts may be made using less optimal configurations from economical point of view. Like load up on PB-NUKs instead of smartly placing gigantors, or going with LV-N where Terrier is perfectly sufficient. But they fly equally well, or even better, they just affect your wallet adversely.

[Pecan]

If you look at the options under difficulty there is actually one that would affect ship performance - re-entry heating.  A ship that survives with that maxed should be far more robust at 'normal' levels but, conversly, would be higher-mass and more expensive in the first place, as it would have to have more/heavier heat-shielding.  Accordingly it would perform worse in all other situations where cost, dV and TWR are the major concerns.

All the other difficulty options just make it harder to get things in the first place (higher costs, lower rewards) or magnify the cost of failure (permadeath, no quicksaves, no reverts, etc.)

ETA: If you want to build good ships, stick to sandbox where you have all the parts available and can use the optimal ones for the design requirements.

Edited August 27, 2016 by Pecan

[Deddly]

Hi! I moved your question to Gameplay Questions for you.

Craft will work in any difficulty setting. But something that survives reentry in an easy setting might burn up in a harder setting, because reentry heating is more unforgiving.

Edit: Two identical threads merged