After what milestone should you be able to call yourself an expert at this game?

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

You can call yourself an expert when you know precisely how to do it, but fail miserably at it

[Kasuha]

Wikipedia says:

An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain.

No single achievement or number of hours played makes you an expert. You are an expert when others think you are one. And you still may be an expert only in certain part of the game and there may be people who are more of an expert than you are.

Edited March 3, 2014 by Kasuha

[Xetalim]

Hehehehe, you are an expert when you design a rocket that gets into orbit with only the stock ion engines.

TL;DR You can't be an expert, there always is more to discover.

[pauix]

An expert at this game? The ability to unquestionably land on and return from the mun or minmus in the vanilla version of the game.

I'd say that landing and returning from Minmus/the Mün qualifies as "average". I can more or less do both things and I've yet to build a SSTO, dock or get an encounter with another planet.

[Comrade Jenkens]

I find docking easy but I still struggle with interplanetary.

I can launch huge functional warships into orbit though.

[problemecium]

KSP is a complicated game and therefore I'd say there's no being an expert at KSP, rather you can be an expert at various elements of it. I've recently decided to consider myself an expert at docking after successfully multi-docking nine ports at once three times while building my latest super-ship. But I'm definitely not an expert at aerobraking. Or planes.

[Streetwind]

One of my favorite quotes:

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." - Niels Bohr

[Red Iron Crown]

I think one a player becomes an expert when they stop thinking about how to make something work and start thinking about why it works the way it does.

Hours played is a very poor metric. It's possible for a rather dull but determined player to put in a thousand hours and not achieve orbit. Think of all the people who've been driving their whole lives and can't parallel park.

[magnemoe]

I consider someone an expert if they can reliably go to another planet, land, and return. (This does not include Eve or Tylo) Like if you can transfer to Duna, land and return without too much of an issue then I would consider you an expert because it involves everything you would ever need to know.

Yes, Tylo is hard in pilot skills, way harder if you also need to keep the weight down, if not its easy to build. Eve is an building challenge, not much harder to take off from than kerbin in pilot skills.

[Random Tank]

According to Skyrender's scale, I am Rank 1. Launching a 100 ton payload to Duna is a breeze for me; only need a quicksave to perfect the landing.

A true expert in KSP can dive to 500m altitude on jool, survive, and return to Kerbin

[Jouni]

10000 hours of hard work. After a few hundred hours, you may start thinking that you know something, but after a few thousand hours, you realize you don't.

Maybe I'll elaborate this a bit. That 10000 hours rule of thumb may be an exaggeration, because KSP isn't that complex game, but becoming an expert in the entire game and not just some individual topics still probably requires thousands of hours of practice.

I've been playing for a few hundred hours now. Steam says 330 hours, but the real number is higher, because KSP is one of those games you can play without running the software. There are still many basic topics I don't really know:

• I can build useful spaceplanes, and I can build spaceplanes that are easy to fly, but I can't do both at the same time.
  
• I'm really hopeless with rovers.
  
• I've never tried launching anything big. My largest rockets have been something like 500-600 tons on launchpad.
  
• I haven't built that many lightweight things either.
  
• I also don't have that much experience in optimizing ships for complex missions, such as the lightweight entries in the Jool-5 challenge.
  
• I can plan orbital maneuvers manually, but only if I can see the results on map. Maneuvers involving too many SoI changes, such as using gravity assist, and setting up encounters several orbits in advance are still mostly out of my reach.
  

Those are only things I know I don't know. There are probably some basic topics I don't even know to exist, because I haven't tried doing things where I would need them.

[possum]

I think it is when you can get to and return from landing on the Mun or Minmus without course corrections safely, with DRE.

[NotEmoHawk]

I don't think a particular skill or challenge makes you an expert. The ability to visit a planet or make a craft with specific characteristics only makes you an expert at that not the game a a whole.

ex·pert

/n., v. ˈɛkspɜrt; adj. ˈɛkspɜrt, ɪkˈspɜrt/ Show Spelled [n., v. ek-spurt; adj. ek-spurt, ik-spurt]

noun

1. a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particular field; specialist; authority: a language expert.

2. Military . a. the highest rating in rifle marksmanship, above that of marksman and sharpshooter.

b. a person who has achieved such a rating.

adjective

3. possessing special skill or knowledge; trained by practice; skillful or skilled (often followed by in or at ): an expert driver; to be expert at driving a car.

4. pertaining to, coming from, or characteristic of an expert: expert work; expert advice.

verb (used with object)

5. to act as an expert for.

[Ferrit]

A good start would be being named Scott Manley!

[LORDPrometheus]

When your signature is like mine

All done in .19 and repeated in .23

[qromodynmc]

I really cant find a milestone to be expert,for example I was able to go other planets,still I wasnt able to dock. So everyone has different things to focus,but I guess I can say if you can make grand tour,you are pretty good at this game.

[AeroAviation]

I would have to vote Eve land and return because it is insanely hard to do it and extremly rewarding after completion.

[Taki117]

I actually have a scale of KSP mastery I cooked up a while back, based on the Dwarf Fortress skill level system.

SNIP

Rank 1: Grand Master Player

Notes: Not much about KSP still flummoxes you. Orbital maneuvers are easy, getting to orbit is easy, missions almost always go off without a hitch, etc. Maybe some reliance on quicksaving and quickloading, but it's not really necessary for you.

SNIP

I think I fall into this category. I haven't tried and Eve or Tylo or Laythe return not because I can't, but because I have no real desire to. I know the math behind them, and I could build and launch something capable of it, but that's just not fun to me. (Also, I really like this scale)

[Superfluous J]

There is no one metric, though "Doesn't complain about how hard it is to get science" is one metric you could use

[Kerbart]

Well there's the Dunning–Kruger effect of course. Which means anybody who has "gone to space" (mind you, not into orbit) considers themselves and expert while others are not because "they still have to complete docking using the in-cockpit view only while doing atmospheric reentry"

“I watched two Manley videos all the way to the ‘fly safe’ part†is missing from the list, by the way.

[Nepos]

Some things in KSP I have somz leet skillz but others I really suck at it. I guess you can call yourself an expert when you can do all your mission from IVA view with your notepad of all you times for your burns pre-computed before launched (tee hee)

[DonLorenzo]

When I did an orbital rendez-vous completely on gut-feeling with no targetting indicators, relative speed indicators or maneuver nodes (it was around pol, so one of the easiest bodies to do it around, but still) because I didn't know how to select debris as target while in flight (yeah... that pro). That made me feel pretty accomplished, not so much because of the raw feat of engineering, but because of apparent internalisation of orbital principles such that they've become intuitive

[kahlzun]

You've played it enough you need to start handicapping yourself to make it interesting.

[Madrias]

I've learned this from playing KSP and being a part of the community: We all bring different strengths to the table when we play. I hear people who say SSTO's are hard, but I've not had any problems with it. However, I've built remote control aircraft out of 1/4-inch foam board, too, so I knew going in about Center of Mass, Thrust, and Lift needing to be very specific.

I hear people who say docking is hard. It's tricky, I'll admit, but there's only one thing to do: practice. Lob a couple of capsules with an overabundance of RCS fuel into orbit and practice your docking.

There are planets I struggle with. I have difficulty with ultra-low gravity, such as that on Minmus. Everyone says "Minmus is easy" but I've lost more ships to it than I have with Eve. Maybe I build differently, maybe the atmosphere on Eve helped me some, but I've found Minmus to be extremely difficult.

So to answer the original question, as to when you should be able to call yourself an expert, I say it is a combination of things, but mostly these:

-You have an intimate knowledge of the design of your basic lander craft and could rebuild it on a new save without carrying files over.

-You have, at least once, made a "challenge save" where all missions must be done with a certain handicap, such as "open cockpit" or "only SSTO" or "No launch over 10 Tons," or one I'm doing "Debris Sweep" where all debris must eventually be removed, including debris that lingers between worlds.

-You have, at least once, done an orbital transfer to any interplanetary world, landed, and came back.

-You tend to not need Quicksave, Quickload, or Restart Mission anymore, because the ship is engineered just right to make the mission.

and last, but not least

-You are still, above all, having fun. Yes, being an expert means being able to have fun.

[timsfitz]

When your signature is like mine

All done in .19 and repeated in .23

I'm new to the forums. I don't know what those patches mean.