What's your time split, building vs piloting?

[Sharpy]

Today I came to a conclusion, that to me KSP is a rocket-building game, not a rocket-flying one.

The only time I spend a considerable time in space is when I botched the design, and either keep trying to dock something that really, really doesn't want to move the way I'd like it to, or I try to stick a landing because I botched the lander design. But normally, I spend at least 70% of the time in VAB/SPH polishing the designs and inventing new contraptions.

 

How's that with you? People who took Elcano challenge surely have a different experience. The rest?

[Majorjim!]

For me, yes, KSP is a rocket building game too. 

 I would say 95% of my time is building and the rest flying said builds. It does make for some fancy craft though. ;-)

[Signo]

I share your same feelings with more or less the same ratio - 70/30.

[swjr-swis]

About 90:10 building to flying. I guess I'm an engineer at heart.

Every now and then though, I do spent most of my session flying, for hours and hours at a time. Almost invariably this happens with atmospheric craft: I end up very pleased with a design and how it flies, decide to slap on some external seats (despite the probe core) and take Val and the boys on a sightseeing trip to one of the poles or to see the temple or the old KSC... only to discover that with the kerbals in the seats it won't go any faster than 100m/s or so, but now I made up my mind and this trip is happening, darn it.

[katateochi]

I'd say 70-80% of my time is spent building, and most of the time out of the VAB/SPH is in testing rather than flying an actual mission. 

[LN400]

It totally depends. If I need a first-in-a-series design, then a lot of time goes into building, or if I need a one off design. Most of my designs are in series/mass production with only minor adjustments though and once I have 10-15 of those scooting all over the place then most of the time goes to seeing that the burns happen in time, not to mention collect science and planning future burns. When things get busy in space I can easily spend a day or two in real time doing nothing other than flying.

[Magzimum]

Probably 80-20 building-flying. In the early career, I could just click together some simple designs, so I did quite a lot of flying. Now, I have ambitious plans with motherships/tankers/landers, and I end up doing far too much designing.

[septemberWaves]

Lately I've spent a lot of my time building and testing vessels. However, these are vessels that I then move into most other saves that I use, so that I don't have to redesign everything each time (I always use the same launch vehicles, for example). I have a lot of interplanetary transports and freighters that are all built from the same modules, and the time I spend flying them is significantly more than the time I spent designing the modules.

[XB-70A]

- Building : 85%

- Piloting : 14% comprising : - Launch/Runway acceleration failures : 0.1%

                                             - Ascent and fail to reach the target orbit due to, misconception, fuel shortage, in-flight-ka-booms : 8.9%

                                             - Perfect flight : 5%

- And nerves crisis : 1% (usually after more than 15 concepts and/ or inflight failures)

 

But finally pure pleasure : 100%

[Sharpy]

8 minutes ago, XB-70A said:

- And nerves crisis : 1% (usually after more than 15 concepts and/ or inflight failures)
 

Yeah, a couple of my 'flight' game time is all fake. After many nerve-wrecking tries I finally finish some maneuver (successfully or not), I stand up from the computer and go read a book or get a tea, or take a walk to a nearby fastfood for a snack (24/7, bless the fate; nothing like a 2AM kebap after orbital insertion) ,  and the game just runs with the ship left at 1x speed.

[Curveball Anders]

I think it's:

Building; 30%
Failing: 50%
Tinkering: 15%
Flying (and most often reverting for more tinkering): 5%

 

 

 

[Terwin]

Early game is probably close to 50-50, half my time flying and half my time building/designing.

Late game is is closer to 10-20% designing and 80-90% flying.

A lot of this is due to using standard designs.

I have 'scan-sats' that I launch to every planet out to about Dres(early versions just go around the Kerbin SOI, but once I have nukes, I have a standard design I can send to any planet where a pair of gigantors provide > 3ec/sec
My most recent change to this was add in 3ec worth of RTG and remove the solar panels for a deep-space version.  (probably 10-15 min at most) and I will launch at least 2 of this version(Eeloo, Dres, possibly jool).

Before that I created a 'deep space' version of my low-g Autonomous mining station(4 drills, ISRU, Nuke engine, fuel tanks and lots of clipped ore tanks (~1300 units each of liquid fuel and ore with 660 of oxidizer for the vernors and ships that need it)).  It has a claw on the front for 'docking' and belly and tail landing gear(it mines on it's belly but lands/launches as a tail-sitter, thus the vernors near the nose), by adding ~65EC/sec of RTG.  Already launched one of these towards jool for future missions(it can launch from Vall, Eeloo or Dres fully loaded  Might even manage Moho, but have not checked )

Just getting those platforms distributed to Ike, Gilly, Eeloo, Vall, Pol or Bop, and Dres will take far more flight time than it took to design them.  Same thing with the Scansats, one design, many destinations.

 

I also launched my seond kerbaled Duna mission last night, with less than 10 min of design work updating the ship from my first mission(swapped out the nuclear reactor as unneeded and added a Mk1 crew cabin so I had enough capacity for a contract)

[Snark]

Wow, this is really interesting.  It's pretty clear that just about everyone who's responded is not just spending more time building than flying, but a lot more, as in "very little time spent actually flying".

I'm the complete opposite.  I spend 80%+ flying.

That seems... odd to me.  I don't think of myself as having an unusual play style... I wonder how I'm different from most folks?

I've been playing KSP long enough now that I slap together rockets very quickly; it feels as natural as breathing by this point.  Flying the mission always takes a lot longer than building it.

• Something simple, like "rescue a kerbal from LKO"?  I've never timed myself, but I'd be astonished if it takes me even one minute to put that rocket together-- probably more like 30 seconds-- for a mission that takes several minutes to fly.  (And in any case, that one's a standard design that I build only once-- after that it's just re-launching the same ship, practically no VAB time at all.)
• Build a mission to Duna?  Okay, that takes me a few minutes to put together, but the mission takes a lot longer than that to fly.
• Assemble a massive Jool-5 mission with multiple probes, landers, yadda yadda?  Okay, maybe I spend an hour honing that design.  But then I spend many, many hours flying and exploring the Joolian moons.

Part of it may be that I really love flying spaceships, so perhaps I unconsciously design my missions in a way that maximizes my flying time:  missions that require a lot of piloting and futzing around, especially if I've engineered my ship so it's heavily optimized to try to do the most with the least (which I also tend to do, because of being an OCD optimizer).  I don't overengineer-- I just barely enough engineer, which means the piloting needs to get creative and labor-intensive.

I also don't use any automation mods like MechJeb-- why would I?  I like flying my spaceships, and an autopilot is specifically designed to directly rob me of the thing I love most, so it's the perfect antithesis of what I would do.    Probably for similar reasons, I don't use any "labor-saving" techniques in my careers.  Build an orbiting-tanker-and-little-lander mission to go to the Mun, land on every biome, and strip-mine the whole thing for science, so that the whole mission takes a lot of my time to complete?  Great.  Build an orbiting lab where I just stuff it full of data and hit timewarp and scads of science pours out, removing the need to go around and strip-mine things for science?  No, not gonna do that, precisely because I like the strip-mining stuff.

So, yeah, I spend the vast majority of my time flying rather than building.  And that's in spite of the fact that I don't do much ship re-use.  In my typical career, I basically have just one re-usable design that I launch again and again, and that's my "rescue one kerbal from LKO" ship (I do that a lot, because I populate my space program exclusively with rescued kerbals).  Other than that, I build a custom ship for each mission.  I take my time on it, too-- I'm an engineer, I like building things.  It's just that I find that actually flying the mission takes a lot more time than building it.

[Leafbaron]

For me it depends, In the early stage of the game (career) I spend most of the time building. However as I progress through the tech tree, I get a few rocket designs that are capable of doing several things with small tweaks to design here and there. So once I get designs to do specific things like Kerbal AAA (rescue craft), Probe cores, Manned lander pods etc... I spend the majority of the time flying. I prefer exploring space rather than being cooped up in the VAB/SPH. 

[Columbia]

3 minutes ago, Snark said:

snip

That depends on your playstyle. Do you go interplanetary frequently?

I often invest like 1-2% of my time in flying things, and 99% is building. There are instances where flying something takes way longer than building it though.

[Red Iron Crown]

Made this ages ago, still applies:

[Snark]

36 minutes ago, Columbia said:

Do you go interplanetary frequently?

Virtually all my time is spent interplanetary.  It's hard for me to imagine playing KSP any other way. 

The only time I spend in Kerbin orbit is during the early stage of my career, when that's all I can get to.

The only time I spend on Mun/Minmus is during the mid-stage of my career, when I'm guzzling science and building out my tech tree so I have the tools to say g'bye to the Moderately-Sized Blue Marble.

Once I get to the point that interplanetary missions are feasible, I spend pretty much all my time doing that.

Part of this may just be a result of just how much time I've sunk into KSP over the years.  I've spent a lot of time in Kerbin orbit, and on the Mun and Minmus, so they're kinda old hat by now-- and, more to the point, present very little challenge.  There are no launch windows to consider, no fancy trajectories to design, no creative-engineering-to-get-really-high-dV needed.  I can design, build, and fly a mission to Mun or Minmus practically in my sleep.

So I like going out into the solar system, where there's more variety to be had, and I can invent endless interesting (to me) and challenging (to me) missions.

I know that this is one of those areas where individual players differ, a lot.  I remember having my mind blown a few months back when I saw this thread:

My immediate knee-jerk reaction was to go "pfffft, don't be ridiculous, that's stupid, of course most people go flying off to the planets, it's what KSP is about."  Then I went and read through the thread-- which was long, and had many thoughtful posts-- and goodness gracious, that was educational.  I was astonished, because I guess I think of myself as open-minded and unprejudiced, and apparently I'd gotten kinda complacent without realizing it and was foolish enough to think I had a handle on "what it means to play KSP."

I was... very wrong.

Lots and lots of KSP players play the game without ever going interplanetary.  And have thoughtful reasons for doing so, and it doesn't mean they're noobs, or that they somehow "can't handle" the complexities of KSP.  They simply happen to have a different set of priorities than I do.

It was a real eye-opener for me.  It's a great thread, I'm grateful to @KerikBalm for starting it, and IMO ought to be required reading for anyone who has trouble understanding other players' viewpoints.

Anyway... I can imagine that someone who spends all their time in Kerbin's SoI would probably have a much higher proportion of building than I do.  I'm just guessing here (since I don't happen to play that way myself).  My guess would be that in such a situation, the piloting would lack much variety (there are only just so many ways to get from surface to Kerbin orbit, or to transfer between Kerbin and its moons), so a player like that would pour more of their energy and creativity into ship design rather than piloting.  But I could be totally talking out of my... well, not my mouth, here, since I've never really done that play style myself.  So I should probably pipe down now and not try to theorize about something I don't actually know anything about. 

[magnemoe]

Think I use most play piloting in this game as I use a lot of reuseable motherships and standardized designs. 

[Sharpy]

37 minutes ago, Snark said:

 

• Something simple, like "rescue a kerbal from LKO"?  I've never timed myself, but I'd be astonished if it takes me even one minute to put that rocket together-- probably more like 30 seconds-- for a mission that takes several minutes to fly.  (And in any case, that one's a standard design that I build only once-- after that it's just re-launching the same ship, practically no VAB time at all.)

 

Personally - I spend some 2 hours making all the finishing touches to a versatile rescue probe that can save anything from LKO, then pack six of these on a rocket, and launch into LKO. In ten minutes I have my rescue. Next time I have a rescue contract, it's again five minutes maybe.

Quote

Part of it may be that I really love flying spaceships, so perhaps I unconsciously design my missions in a way that maximizes my flying time:  missions that require a lot of piloting and futzing around, especially if I've engineered my ship so it's heavily optimized to try to do the most with the least (which I also tend to do, because of being an OCD optimizer).  I don't overengineer-- I just barely enough engineer, which means the piloting needs to get creative and labor-intensive.

That's probably the difference. I don't optimize to do the most with the least. I optimize to handle anything Kraken could throw at it, and survive.

And on top of that, good looking!

Sometimes I scrap a design entirely after an hour of tweaking when I see I'm going nowhere. Sometimes I take a long time to make a decision that is completely arbitrary from engineering point of view, but important for the looks.

Like yesterday, I was sending my Sentinels, Asteroid Day mod probes.

The task is trivial. Get a probe core with reaction wheel, slap on it a battery, an antenna, the telescope, a solar panel, and some toy fuel tank and engine. Put it on a lightweight booster, put it in orbit, then send somewhere below Eve.

I think I spent three hours trying to find which solar panels to use (went with two 2x3 on the sides, and two 1x6 diagonally on top), spent good 15 minutes looking for a good place for the dish antenna from the mod before giving up and finding the 2nd tier antenna on top looks decent, I spent half a hour thinking up the propulsion. Flea? Dawn? Spark? Oscar B, toroidal or that tiny MK1 from the beginning of the game? Went with toroidal and four spiders, which made the probe compact, as they lean under the corners of the telescope and don't extend downwards. Two 400-unit batteries went under the shield of the telescope, after a much deliberation on placement of the round battery brought nothing. Then I decided I'm not sending one, I'm sending three, and launcher design began. Tricoupler? Nah, they won't fit. Radial? Lame. I decided to use ablator-depleted heatshields as structural elements, separators and node duplicators, and stacked them vertically, I set up staging, covered everything in a fairing, added an extra separator on top to strut the payload to the fairing, then spent another fifteen minutes thinking up a graceful launcher. Decided for a Terrier with a small tank, a Kickback, and a few Hammers.

Then in ten minutes the first probe was underway.

Quote

I don't use any "labor-saving" techniques in my careers.  Build an orbiting-tanker-and-little-lander mission to go to the Mun, land on every biome, and strip-mine the whole thing for science, so that the whole mission takes a lot of my time to complete?  Great.  Build an orbiting lab where I just stuff it full of data and hit timewarp and scads of science pours out, removing the need to go around and strip-mine things for science?  No, not gonna do that, precisely because I like the strip-mining stuff.

I strip-mine more thoroughly Two days to design a Jumper Lab. A long cargo bay, with lab, all the science, ISRU, enough nuclear power (tucked into a fuselage, a "reactor") to run the big ISRU and its drills, a neat cockpit for the engineer, cooling panels, engines on both ends, and a lot of Vernors on the bottom, so that it can *jump* to the next biome and doesn't need to turn around - I switch to the other engine for braking. And little glowy lights on top, to show which engine is active, plus action groups that switch them.

Currently, I'm at the second biome, slowly finishing it off, offloading the science every couple weeks - the lab is on Minmus fior some two years by now. So, a lot of engineering - and a craft that does its work so excellently that I hardly ever need to visit it.

It does have some benefits. Some modifications - interplanetary propulsion and an MK3 passenger cabin. as required by contract, and a very similar lab is currently on its way to strip-mine Ike.

 

[regex]

I'd say I'm spending as much time flying as in the editor but then, RO/RP-0 demands more attention be spent to details and ensuring everything is accounted for. In vanilla/stock, I usually spend far more time flying because I can literally slap something together and call it good.

Edited August 25, 2016 by regex

[Ten Key]

I'd say I'm probably 70% flying and 30% building. Once I have something that works, I tend to have a "drive it till it dies" mentality. It's not the most efficient approach, but there's something about wheeling an old war horse out to the pad for "just one more mission" that I find appealing.

[ElWanderer]

I spent a lot more time designing/building when I first started, especially in putting together a Jool 5 mission. A lot of time was spent in an Excel spreadsheet trying to work out lander designs.

Now, though, I would say my time is roughly 5% in the editor, 20% flying (which is mostly automated) and 75% writing kOS scripts. Oh, I forgot to allocate time for reading the forum/reddit...

[Overland]

With a former top speed of 31ms..life was short..the typical run being 80km as a round trip..life was short..drives long if lucky

Since the change from heavy narrow bodied diesel electrics to RTG powered sure footed land trains with a top speed of 15ms..

Things survive longer and drive for hours

Here lies the beauty of locomotive classes..grab a class leader..fire up cooltext for some class numbers..

Add a few extras mission specific like extra headlights or some KIS boxes

Choose cargo type from sub assembly

Click launch

1004 is born.. And realtime hours are spent driving

 

This is why im proudly a land train driver.. Time acceleration is never used and each kilometer is earned.

[Corona688]

I seem to flip-flop between building a lot of things and flying a lot of things.  I can spend a lot of time flying a successful design, and spend a lot of time refining a design that's not quite what I want.

[JadeOfMaar]

10 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Made this ages ago, still applies:

That's me too. Though the red slice could be about the same size as the yellow, and a larger green slice.

 

10 hours ago, Snark said:

Lots and lots of KSP players play the game without ever going interplanetary.  And have thoughtful reasons for doing so, and it doesn't mean they're noobs, or that they somehow "can't handle" the complexities of KSP.  They simply happen to have a different set of priorities than I do.

Anyway... I can imagine that someone who spends all their time in Kerbin's SoI would probably have a much higher proportion of building than I do.  I'm just guessing here (since I don't happen to play that way myself).  My guess would be that in such a situation, the piloting would lack much variety (there are only just so many ways to get from surface to Kerbin orbit, or to transfer between Kerbin and its moons), so a player like that would pour more of their energy and creativity into ship design rather than piloting.  But I could be totally talking out of my... well, not my mouth, here, since I've never really done that play style myself.  So I should probably pipe down now and not try to theorize about something I don't actually know anything about. 

Your theory sounds solid here. I'm among those who hardly go interplanetary. My unique set of priorities generally include: plotting giant stations or stylish aircraft that handle well in Kerbin's atmosphere, or things that operate in Duna's atmosphere, on fuels other than LFO....and exclude actually/seriously flying to and landing on Duna (or anywhere). I'm exceedingly fussy about getting things just right and that holds me back.