How long do you usually take to finish a KSP craft/project?

[Columbia]

It's inevitable that every ambitious KSP project - whether a Space Station above Kerbin or a KSP replica - takes a long time to finish. How long do you spend on one project on average?

It depends for me - If it's a KSP airliner/replica, it could take from 1-3 days (Or a week!) to finish, depending on the Kerbal-ness of the project, but some can take me barely 30 minutes if done right. If it's a space station, then that fares even longer - Could take up to a week of dockings and rendezvouses. Interplanetary missions are often long-term - sort of like a temporary base.

What about you guys?

[MarvinKitFox]

KSP craft... never more than about 2 hours, and that is for a "science Lab base on Gilly, 11 kerbals, must have 12000 ore on board, must be on wheels"

Ksp project?

Last time i spent *real* time on a project was for the Octo Migration Project...

Total time well under 800 hours.

Even as simple a thing as "how far can you get in 3 launches only" takes two or three dozen hours.

Heck, even just "on mission 1, gather eva reports from all KSC and nearby biomes" can take 3 hours.

Edited June 1, 2015 by MarvinKitFox

[Goddess Bhavani]

3 weeks for this craft, a forward swept variable geometry sub-orbital craft, which required construction and aerodynamic control techniques to account for dynamically changing CoL at different flight conditions, as well as countering the usual problems of aeroelastic bending inherent in forward swept wing designs. Infernal Robotics parts back then also had the structural strength of a wet noodle, thus requiring a system of strutting and multiple struts per joint to ensure proper stability under flight loads.

The craft, as I decided, would also use low tech engines and thus required quite primitive powerplant design - an array of ten scaled down basic jet engines provided acceleration up to Mach 1.2 whereupon a pair of LVT-30s sent the spaceplane to orbit. This is partly because back in the earlier days of Ferram Aerospace, the basic jets had quite a strong nerf.

If I re-created this design and simplified it with the latest parts, I'd shirley be able to achieve far greater efficiency. I think :3

Edited June 2, 2015 by pandoras kitten

[Falkenherz]

Two or three game sessions for me on average when concerning a single vessel. The overarching expedition goals in later career stages take much longer, since I usually involve multiple specialized vessels and have to also accomodate tech improvements.

I am not very far yet, shortly before my first Duna mission (althought the transfer window seems to be almost closed). Details in my blog.

[Feradose]

Ksp craft.. well, if its going further than minmus, is takes ten to twenty minutes. Projects on the other hand, take weeks and weeks for me and are not fun

[Red Iron Crown]

Very rare for me to spend more than one play session designing a single craft. Most of my stuff just isn't that complicated.

[Majorjim!]

It depends on the complexity of the build. I work very slowly and rarely plan ahead so it takes me good few weeks usually for a high part count craft. Exact hours taken I don't usually think about it so I couldn't say. I usually spend around three/four hours building when I play KSP. And not everyday when I'm working, most days I have off though.

I work in a very haphazard wayward way. I often completely rebuild things to improve them. In that regard I wouldn't say I was a good builder I am just very patient towards the end of making something that looks perfect.

[justidutch]

I built a station once that needed 15 launches to complete it. Each launch took about 45 minutes of my time, from spacebar to docking. But the design of the various pieces of the station took hours to get them just right. I find that I am enjoying the engineering challenge of building ships more than flying them, so that is where I spend the bulk of my time.

I'll start designing a ship, look at the clock when finished and find I've spent six hours without realizing it.

[problemecium]

A rescue contract in LKO? One day Kerbal time, twenty minutes real time.

A Mun/Minmus mission? Two hours real time, two days Kerbal time for Mun or seven days Kerbal time for Minmus (yes this is round trip. I use high-energy transfers for Minmus).

An interplanetary mission? Infinite because I haven't managed to complete one before a new version comes out in well over a year. xP

[Volix]

I tend to do lots of small specialized craft, so my build times for a single craft are pretty small. Maybe a half hour to build each rocket, then time to fly of course taking longer the further it goes. My most recent expedition to Duna used three craft in the same window. One went into a high polar orbit to carry my RemoteTech signal from Kerbin and relay it to the other craft, and one craft for Duna and Ike, each with it's own detachable lander.

On the other hand, I've finally gotten pretty good at the black magic known as spaceplanes, and these take much longer. My first spaceplane (0.24 FAR) took an entire day (10 hours or so) to build and tweak. Now it takes a minimum of an hour for a simple one, up to 10 hours still for especially large or heavy ones. Once built to my liking I tend to fly it to orbit and back a few times so I can get my flying to building ratio more to my liking (I like them both about evenly).

[katateochi]

I have done one project that took months, and spanned KSP versions. Usually if I'm building for the love of creating (rather than for a specific goal/contract) then I'll often spend a couple weeks on it. With those sort of craft the build/testing/re-building process is always longer than the mission time (and that's the kind of KSP I enjoy the most).

In career mode I tend to spend less time on the builds, especially for things that are just to get the set contract done. It can range from under an hour for the simple things, to a couple days if it's more interesting and I'm trying to complete several contracts with one mission.

[SaturnianBlue]

Usually I may spend only an hour building rockets, but given a project (such as my MESSENGER recreation), I spend over 30 hours building the craft. It may take a few hours building a sorta replica rocket, but far more for complex craft.

[Geschosskopf]

It's inevitable that every ambitious KSP project - whether a Space Station above Kerbin or a KSP replica - takes a long time to finish. How long do you spend on one project on average?

Hmm, I don't look at it the same way you do. What I do is decide on a large, general goal, such as "explore Duna and Ike, and colonize Duna." I then write down a list of objectives that lead to this goal. Once I have the objectives, I design the payloads necessary to complete each one. Usually each objective is accomplished by a separate payload although, for instance, a single SCANsat will do for both Ike and Duna if you do it right. Sometimes I set out to accomplish all objectives in 1 big expedition, sometimes I figure on building up to the final goal over several expeditions. The real design work is in the payloads, but in most cases they only take 10-30 minutes each. Then I just put whatever rockets under the payloads are necessary to get them off the ground off to wherever they're going, and launch them all. Then I wait for the transfer window, do all those burns, then get things to where they need to be once they arrive. Then I do what I went there to do, and maybe add onto it over time.

So anyway, I consider a project going somewhere and doing a lot of different things there. Such projects usually keep going until either the save becomes corrupted or Squad breaks it. It might be many years of gametime and months of realtime.

[Archgeek]

Far, far too long for me. I can work on an individual craft all night and not be done with it, and my Helios project is yet incomplete and has been under way since .20.

...Which reminds me that I should really fire up my .90 game and bring home the intrepid pilot of the experimental Xenon Tempest m1k, which went sun-diving and then a bit of trouble encountering kerbin again, though I finally planned a burn that'll work and saved it in kerbal alarm clock.

[Francois424]

An extremely long time.

A typical complicated craft needs hours of testing, paper-note taking and tweaking, and then a few more testing sessions.

Took me 2 months to get my Jool-5 ship to top shape, but then 1.0 happened and changed a lot of things.

Took me one month to finaly get my "Solar Cruiser" to shape (ion jool-5, "close-by probe" that can do most science and return them all... without any way to reset experiments as it was unmanned).

Took me another month to develop my light/medium/heavy launcher system for payload (lots of learning involved, and I understand now why ppl use the pump mod, far better than fuel lines)

Took me 2 weeks to tweak my rovers... etc.

But I don't have a lot of free time, so that 2 months must be something like 40 hours.

- - - -

Very hesitant to invest all my free time until aero has been finalized, SAS wobbling (re)fixed, and Win 64-bits so my modding habits wont crash the game over and over.

But at the same time, I really can't wait for that... and as such making easy ship builds to go to mun, minmus, and the duna system. Most of them I can make/test and launch in under 60mins now.

[Goddess Bhavani]

An extremely long time...

I often find taking my time with a build, and engineering every little detail makes for a more rewarding experience, than simply rushing to "make it work" and forget about it a day or two later. Two months is sheer dedication!

[Rdivine]

I am currently attempting to replicate the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept(HAVOC) put by the Advanced Concepts Lab for NASA. The plan is to build a zeppelin-like colony on venus' floating clouds, and i have spent 6 months making it work on Eve. Right now i'm about 50% there, given the new 1.0 update, i had to start over with the aerodynamics.

So i'll say, perhaps a year?

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK!

I've been working on my Joolian Exploratory Fleet since October! That's 8 months, and we're just leaving orbit now. (I'm still running 0.25! because of it) That's about 6 months of vehicle design and testing, followed by two months of launches and orbital construction, with the occasional "hey, what-if" forays back to design.

I expect to be in Jool in a couple of weeks. 12 interplanetary ships, 35 landers!

Then I'll be spending months there.

EDIT: This should have been a poll.

Edited June 2, 2015 by Brainlord Mesomorph

[KerBlammo]

Usually I can do a project in one session, but it depends. Sometimes I have trouble getting the launch vehicle right and then it will take longer.

I just completed an Apollo style Munar landing. It took me one session to get the two stage Munar Module right and the two more days to perfect the launcher.

After actually flying the entire thing last night I spent two hours building and flying a Direct Ascent Mun landing mission which went flawlessly (apart from the parachute burning up during re-entry killing Jeb, Bob and Bill on impact with the ocean).

[Acet]

I started working on a Duna kolonization project about a week ago when I designed and launched the science station for it. There will be a mining ship I'll put in Ike (or maybe a mining base), as well as a fuel transport. Also need to work on the Duna science lander as well as the Kerbin Emergency Return vehicle. I already have a scanner satellite design I can extend to map Duna's and Ike's resources.

Meanwhile, I'm moving a class D asteroid to Kerbin Low-orbit in order to provide the fuel for the fleet, maybe even make a nice orbital base from which to start the fleet's Kerbin-Duna transit. (I could've used my Minmus mining facilities to get the cheap fuel, but then again, what's the fun in that?)

Next Duna launch window is in little under a year.

I reckon I'll spend 1 or 2 more weeks on this project.

[A_name]

"Finish" a project? What's that?

[herbal space program]

At this point, I can throw together a Munar orbit rendezvous Munar landing mission in about 5 (OK maybe 10) minutes. My biggest station, which required docking of 12 separate large modules into a square closed structure, required probably 200 hours from start to finish, maybe 20 of which were spent actually building all the individual pieces:

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My Jool 5 mothership,which had the highest part count of any single thing I ever launched, probably took me about 8 hours to build:

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.

[ChrisSpace]

3 months and counting.

[T.A.P.O.R.]

A couple of minutes to an hour if I'm testing a Kerbin system craft, usually to figure out why it keeps disintegrating after launch.

I'll spend more for long range staffed ships, and I haven't ever finished an Eve land & return.

Mostly my craft are in the sub 300 part range as my poor old PC chugs pretty badly on anything bigger than that.

[Frank_G]

From a single 1 or 2 hour session to weeks. My Jool Grand Tour took 6 weeks and my Duna exploration took 3 months. The most time goes into planning, craft design and in case of the Jool mission, orbital assembly of the craft.