What's your time split, building vs piloting?

[Reactordrone]

I'd say I spend the majority of my time flying. Just the transfer burn to the Mun frequently takes longer than it takes me to knock together a ship to do that mission. Even when I'm calculating delta-v for a new design that's still only another couple of minutes added to the design time.

[Sharpy]

4 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

hose 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.

That's me before I broke off KSP after building a huge thing that appeared a failure for unforseen reasons.

The save was abandoned after the departure burn to Duna.

[Mastikator]

It's probably around 50/50 for me. The rockets that don't see much piloting time also generally don't get much editing time either.

The ones that take the longest to design usually also take long to pilot, it's either an interplanetary "there and back again adventure"  for my kerbals, which takes an extensive amount of planning since I am using Kerbalism or it's a set of probes that is meant to orbit and land on every body. For example when I went to Duna for the first time I did it with a probe that detached 4 probes, 1 set to orbit Duna, 1 set to land and the same for Ike. Designing that took a bit of time but it took a while to set up one orbit, then land another, then do an intercept and orbit and finally intercept and land.

[SmashingKirby148]

Probably 60% flying 40% building. I got RemoteTech so I can train for 1.2 >:D

[LordFerret]

I can't honestly say percentage-wise how much of my time is spent doing 'what', because I don't keep track of such things. I can, however, confidently say - it depends on how far I've progressed in the game (or in my case, Tech Tree, as I play a Science game). Early on I spend a lot of time building, to get places to unlock Tech. Later on, I spend more time 'flying'. A good example would be the hours and hours spent driving rovers around on Mun and Minmus, etc.

[eddiew]

I'm going for 3 to 4... if I'm doing rocketry. I tend to spend longer in the VAB than on the flight, and even though a crewed mission spends more time on the ground, I generally put more effort into the vessel to match.

Example: this took about 6 hours of VAB time, split between figuring out the aesthetic, and then doing some welding to get the part count down (to 99):

Spoiler

Spaceplanes, 90% of the time is the hanger or test flights   Love doing them, but in all honesty, HOTOL is not a good move if you want your game to progress  

[septemberWaves]

Okay so, yesterday I started a career save with Kerbalism as a little side project whilst I'm doing my Extended Kerbol Grand Tour. Now I'm someone who spends most of their time designing spacecraft and planning missions anyway, but with Kerbalism, well, things just got a lot more complicated. I still haven't got everything perfect (and I haven't quite figured out where Kerbin's radiation belts are either so that may be a recurring problem for me until I find that out) but wow, I spent half an hour designing a one-kerbal rocket to Kerbin orbit to fulfil a contract for 30 days in space with a kerbal. That usually takes me about 5 minutes (or maybe a little more if I really want to go overboard with stylistic design choices).

[OhioBob]

I really have no idea, but if forced to put some numbers to it, I'll go with about a 3:2:1 ratio.  3 parts flying, 2 parts building, and 1 part testing.  Testing could be considered flying, but I separate it because some of my testing is just massive data gathering.  For example, I performed a bunch of aerocapture tests at Jool, Eve and Duna at different entry velocities and ballistic coefficients.  This was not a test of any particular spacecraft or of any particular mission, it was just to produce a data base for future reference.  The flying part is the time I spend flying actual missions to achieve goals, complete contracts, or collect science.

That's just the breakdown of my time spent with KSP loaded up and running on my computer.  I spend far more time outside of the actual game.  I have no idea of the breakdown, but I would guess that 90% of my time related to KSP is spent with the game turn off.  This includes time spent planning missions that I intend to fly, keeping notes, developing various spreadsheet and aids, developing and performing computer simulations to test and optimize vehicle and trajectory design, answering questions on the Forum, working on Mods (not only my own but also helping other people - mostly modeling atmospheres), writing Tutorials, updating the KSP Wiki, etc.  I think I just like the idea of the game more than actually playing it.

 

Edited August 30, 2016 by OhioBob

[suicidejunkie]

I'd say I spend about 90% Flying and 60% Building lately.

I slap together ships pretty quick in the VAB, and give the vehicles themselves plenty of spare everything, so they're good for extended use and reuse.

I spend a fair bit of time actually flying and driving, and I've done a fair bit of long distance aero flight at mach 1 for the surface based RT comms network.

However I've spent a lot of time lately building things with KAS while on EVA, which is really both.

[Superfluous J]

I literally have no idea what the split is. I do spend a LOT of time in the VAB though. If you cut out "testing" time as part of "piloting time" then it's even worse, as a lot of the time I spend not building, it's testing stuff.

[bengee777]

  "90% of the time is spent in lag while running on windows xp, the other half is spent goofing off"

*did I get away with the old meme reference?*

[Choice // SLOTH Airlines]

Weird enough, i make planes, then i end up flying them around the planet landing at kerbinside airports, so maybe my b/f ratio is 20/80 even though i have the option to travel to the whole solar-system, i choose to stay on kerbin

Edited August 29, 2016 by Choice // SLOTH Airlines

[Norcalplanner]

In sandbox, 60% VAB and 40% flying. In career, it varies over time, but probably averages 50/50. I rarely use standardized lifters for different payloads, generally building a custom rocket for each one; however, once I've dialed in a particular design (such as a ground-to-LKO taxi) I'll use it over and over.

[DunaRocketeer]

For me the time split is highly variable. Right now it's highly skewed towards VAB, but that's because I'm ironing the bugs out of a new launch vehicle. Once that's done it'll become my new standardised lifter, and the split will then favour flying time.

[maceemiller]

It used to be more time piloting when I first started playing......just knock something together and get it up to space! After a while it reversed. I spent 80% of my time building then 20% trying to make the mission work (a failed Jool 5 mission comes to mind, must redo that ) Now its about 50-50 as ive adopted my granddaughter whos 4 soon so time for playing hads evaporated somewhat. 

[nosirrbro]

That... Is really hard to say.

 

It varies vastly and without a stopwatch and a calculator I couldn't give you even a ballpark, at least for globally.

One thing that is important in this subject is that I play sandbox, unlike almost everyone who had posted in this thread, and that is important. I don't do the same exact mission, like rescuing Kerbals or getting science around Minmus, 20 times over and over again.

For one, I do a lot more planes (not spaceplanes) than most, since in career they are mostly useless. For them, it's at least a 95% building time, probably closer to 98% most times. For most of the time I'm not going interplanetary, but even then it changes quite a lot. Am I base or station building? Rendezvous takes a while and I probably get 40:60, but even then sometimes my plans are extremely grand and take forever to design. Making satellites? 90:10. It changes a lot. Interplanetary trips are probably about 50:50 build-fly on average, but even then it still changes. 

 

I guess... If I had to make a number I'd say 80:20 building-flying.

Edited September 1, 2016 by nosirrbro

[Jarin]

I lean towards building. At least partly because even my flying tends to be mostly building. I love setting up communication networks and remote logistics outposts, and much of my flying time is dedicated towards those goals.

[Sonny_Jim]

 

On 31/08/2016 at 5:13 PM, maceemiller said:

It used to be more time piloting when I first started playing......just knock something together and get it up to space! After a while it reversed. I spent 80% of my time building then 20% trying to make the mission work

I'm pretty much the polar opposite of that.  When I first started playing I would spend quite a bit more time building, tweaking designs, looking up tutorials and tips, checking dv/TWR figures.  Now that I've got a handle on all that I spend much more time flying than I do building.

Before I would ruthlessly optimise my craft as much as possible, now I'm just like 'Meh, moar boosters' and I'm more likely to use less 'efficient' parts just because they look cool and fit the spacecraft design better.

[TheDestroyer111]

Right now for me it looks like this: 60% or more fighting with outcomes of KSP having no proper game engine, 15% building, 5% actual test flights, 20% actual missions.

But if KSP had a proper game engine, it would look like this: <1% fighting all the Krakens that survived KSP getting an actual engine, 20% test flights, 50% actual flying, 30% SPH/VAB.

I think this problem of people designing more than flying happens because while most replica building people make replicas WRONG: ones that are hard and frustrating to build and test, which work and look (in this order) totally different than real ones, and just fly like krap. My replicas are simple, each one is dynamically unique, and just work (save for replicas of vehicles which just don't work IRL ) so it doesn't take so long to build them, and I can fly them many times without getting bored.

[steve_v]

41 minutes ago, TheDestroyer111 said:

Right now for me it looks like this: 60% or more fighting with outcomes of KSP having no proper game engine, 15% building, 5% actual test flights, 20% actual missions.

LOL, that was my day too. ~60% "play" time spent tracking down stutter issues due to Unitys bogus garbage collector.

Excepting mucking about trying to get the thing to run properly, about 50/50.

[theend3r]

For rockets: 60/40
For (space)planes: 80/20

I have quite a lot of experience, so I build fast and don't forget many things. Building planes with FAR still takes a lot of time and testing, though.

[HafCoJoe]

phfff good lord... probably 90% is time spent in the SPH/VAB (About 70% SPH, 20% VAB), and 10% is actually flying it or testing it for 30 seconds on the runway.

[Samszee]

60% building, 5% launching and reloading to stage correctly, 4% flying, 1% blowing up, 20% trying to find out why i blew up and 'fixing' it, 10% flying. That final 10% is all I need.

[Alpha 360]

It matters what mode you are playing, if it is early science or carreer, rockets are simple to build and take ages to fly. I spent about an hour and a half on a early minmus mission I remember, and the lander took about fifteen minutes to build.

In sandbox though, I would say 90% of the time is spent designing, and 9% of the time is failing. You get the point that succeeding in ksp a rare and awesome thing for me.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

90/10 Building/flying.