How long do you spend on a build until you're completely happy with it?

[Draconiator]

I have one build that is constantly thwarting me at every turn it seems like, it's a Vickers Vimy-esque WWI-style plane, and no matter what I do, I'm still not happy with it completely.  The shape and power are now fine, but now it's fuel issues.  lol...grrr, it's close though, I can feel it!!!

[Capt. Hunt]

I usually keep fiddling with a design until either it flies or it's clear that it never will.

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

A new version of KSP usually ends it for me. 

 

[Freshmeat]

Anything between 15 minutes and returning several times over a month.

[Aaron Also]

On average, after several iterations, HOURS!  

That is the biggest draw for me of this game, the building. It brings me back to my childhood and being surrounded by hundreds of Lego bricks in a pile on the floor. I could build whatever I wanted, whatever my imagination could conceive. Today, I still have those same Lego bricks and several times more that have been collected over the years. They will be handed down to my daughter as she get's older and will hopefully inspire her to also be a creative free thinking individual. 

 

BTW: Getting a payload to orbit isn't hard, preparing for the mission entirely is what takes time and planning. 

[Urses]

5 to 20 minutes to start. 

5 to 20 hours Plan and build

50% visualising 

25% payload build and tweak 

5% lifter build and tweak

20% wondering and swearing why it goes kaboom.

Funny Kabooms 

Urses 

[swjr-swis]

For mindless fun, tests, proofs of concept: minutes, usually. Which proves I can work fast if I need to (thousands of hours of experience counts for something).

For 'final' (*) versions of 'serious' (**) projects: hours and days and weeks and months, over many many, many iterations. A cycle often restarted when a new version of KSP arrives.

 

*: final is incredibly relative in my case; I seem to be almost incapable of not 'tweaking'. Almost every time I reload an existing craft, I get stuck in the VAB or SPH for far longer than I intended, succumbing to further tweaking that started under the pretense of 'quick checking how I configured this last time' instead of launching after crewing the ship. I spend way more time editing than flying. I fully expect one day to roll out my last (tweaked) creation to the pad or runway, and find the Kerbin landscape completely transformed due to the natural evolution of the home star...

**: serious between serious quotes... I've spent more time on unlikely contraptions than on realistically designed spacecraft. It's a weakness.

Edited March 21, 2017 by swjr-swis
or <> of

[Alpha 360]

HOURS. I am working on a fully-functional SSTO, and I have been working on it for three hours! And I still haven't testing the docking capabilities of it (Plus another three hours)

Edited March 21, 2017 by Alpha 360
"Kouston, we have several problems, but that doesn't matter so we want to continue on with the mission."

[TheKosanianMethod]

I was making a copy of a design for an F-14 back in September. It wouldn't turn well, so I abandoned it for a while. Then I added F-15 ACTIVE canards, but I still am not done with it, it wobbles like a noodle.

[IncongruousGoat]

It depends on the mission. Some things (planes, LKO rockets, etc.) I can slap together in 5 to 10 minutes by eyeballing and rule of thumb. Bigger designs, especially ones where I have to do all the delta-V calculations by hand due to problems with KER, and where I have to do extensive testing, can take me days or weeks, and often will involve at least one complete redesign.

But once something's done I don't really touch it. If it works, it works.

[TheKorbinjer]

11 minutes ago, TheKosanianMethod said:

 it wobbles like a noodle.

LOL

[adsii1970]

Until it looks and feels done. Even if it takes a bunch of return trips to the SPH...

[cantab]

It varies. I can throw together a basic functional craft in half an hour, but three things can slow me down to take several hours. One is caring about looks, and then I fiddle with the gizmos a lot and place things just so. The second is where the functionality is difficult, and this really applies to performance aircraft such as SSTOs, it can take dozens of play sessions to get them flying just right. And the third is simple indecision.

It also depends on my mood. Recently I've been finding VAB work a bit of a chore to be honest. I want to fly kraken-dang-it!

[Mr. Peabody]

I'm a perfectionist by nature, so to me, unless a craft looks perfect as well as being functional it really bugs me. A good craft typically takes me about an hour to an hour and a half to create.

[eddiew]

I just spent about 2 hours designing a fuel freighter where the CoM doesn't move a jot during flight. Result, it has less than 1 kNm of torque on RCS and can be the active participant in a docking, despite weighing over 225 tons wet. It's minimal, but I find beauty in its efficiency. Also, only 48 parts so it doesn't add much to FPS lag. If I use it a lot, its easy handling and minimal impact will save me at least 2 hours of fiddly annoyance  

Though if anything, that's on the light end of my scale. If I'm doing SSTOs, they can go through several revisions, changing a little with each flight as I discover undesirable characteristics.

[katateochi]

I find that in career mode craft get churned out with a much lower standard and I slap them together in around 10-20 mins, then a few fail/tweak/relaunch passes and off it goes. I'm much less invested in the design quality in career (and I quite like having the need to run follow up missions to patch problems after launch).  

In sandbox style play, it's another matter entirely and I spend much longer on a single design.  With those craft I care much more about design quality and aesthetics and it gets rigorously tested to make sure it can perform all aspects of the mission. Rarely less than a day is spent on those, around a week is probably typical and there have been some that have been stuck in an OCD testing loop for months!

[septemberWaves]

I'm actually quite a quick builder usually. Whenever I install a new parts mod the first thing I do is familiarize myself with all of the parts. Then I have a good idea of what aesthetic options are available, which makes designing a lot quicker because I start out with an idea of what I want the vehicle to look like and I pretty quickly find the right parts to make it. A full series of similarly-styled launch vehicles takes me at most a couple of hours to assemble and test, and I can put together a pretty good Apollo-style Mun spacecraft in about 20 minutes (30 minutes if it's particularly detailed).

Spaceplanes and other vehicles which need to be well-balanced do take longer to perfect, but even then I can almost always do it within 2 or 3 hours. A large amount of that time ends up being spent testing them out to make sure they fly properly both when fully fueled and empty.

I do often keep going back to a design and tweaking it, but the total time I spend on any one spacecraft generally doesn't exceed about 3 hours (modular vehicles may take longer but that's only because I have to design them whole and then attach each module to a launch vehicle independently).

Edited March 21, 2017 by eloquentJane

[nascarlaser1]

For small things like space stations (a.k.a a command pod and some food that never gets deorbited )  and mun landers, till it works .

For BIG things like my new mother ship I'm building out of many mods and lots of parts? Uhh... I cant remember when I actually started building it..... was it 3 months ago, or maybe it was 4..... I really need to put a timestamp on these things

[Numerlor]

20 minutes without testing than I give up on it for week and after taht something like 1 hour for bigger ones

[Kaiser82]

I read spacecraft exchange, get inspired, boot up KSP, screw around with whatever my idea was, quit and timewarp for cool kerbal names. It takes about 30 minutes.

[Reusables]

Forever, I can't make anything aesthetically fine(or at least not absurd). The best I can get is always a well optimized craft (performance-wise).

[Aegolius13]

A rocket for a fairly basic mission - a couple minutes.  And as long as it meets mission requirements and doesn't horrifically offend my sense of efficiency or aesthetics, it's good to go!  And at this point I tend to have my general design concepts like "Mun lander" or "small space station" mostly memorized.  Booster systems too are pretty uniform, based on the payload size.  

A significant craft like a Duna mothership or autonomous miner/refinery - probably the better part of an hour. 

A really complicated mission like a Jool 5 or Eve lander/ascender - probably 5-10+ hours of iterative design and testing over several days  

Spaceplanes also generally fall into that last category.  For some reason I'm much pickier about optimizing them than I am about most rockets -- maybe the fiction that they're "reusable" makes me feel more committed.  

 

[Araym]

It's about 4 months that I'm after some "WW2 fighter replicas" for a modded KSP install:

- first took days to find references and build the basic parts (wings with B9 procedural wings, fueled, to resemble the tank in the wings... then finding the good parts for the fuselage and cabins...)
- then it took weeks to guess why in my series (for example) a "slow" turnfighter like a Mitsubishi A6M Zero flew faster than a P-51 Mustang...
- then i decided to download Unity and KSP curve generator to check the engine curves...
- then i researched some performance of the engines and planes in real life...
- then I needed to figure out how transplant them, someway, in KSP...
- then I had to uniform some engine from different mods...
- then I had to figure the pressure atmosphere to fix the atmosphere curves (running an hovering rocket wint infinite fuel cheat on with a science barometer part to take readings) of Kerbin at different altitude: it led to a chart that span from sea level to 30km altitude, with increment viarable from 100m (up to 1000m), then 250m(up to 10000m), then 500 (up to 20000m) and then 1000m up to 30000m...
- then the speed curve (using mach velocities): the above method doubled, to use mechjeb ability to calculate the speed of sound at the same altitude...
- then.......... I'm still tweaking engines up to now, from the whole time 1.2 and minor patch was up, at the point I could maybe be ready JUST to have them fly for the release of KSP 1.3... and basically then having NOTHING to do with them, as I do not use weapons to make them fight (Kerbals are pacifist in my install) and I'll have them just sit in the SPH forever......

(Side note: my brother, not a player but just one that shared his time to watch me playing, keeps repeating to me "... but that game become just a game of planes: it was much pretty when you launched all those rockets and space stations...")

... that is an example to "my creation experiences" X°D

Overall, being playing since... uhm... dunno... KSP 0.13 (??? AT LEAST... I remember that version for sure), it's probably the situation of a "veteran" already arrived to explore everything, searching to create a "personal perfect KSP" to start then the "ultimate career", or basically, like @Aaron Also my OLD behaviour of an eternal peter pan grown in the '80s with a whole tons of LEGO (I made my parents spend tons of money in almost all the main LEGO Space sets... and my flags clearly shown that...), now using what I see as the "evolution" of them.
Not building for anything useful, but just for the fullfilments of building itself...

Edited March 22, 2017 by Araym

[Razorforce7]

If I build purely on the basis of functionality it would take several minutes to 30-45 minutes depending on what I'm building.
Some builds however...

Like very complex spacestations in the VAB. I like to build the whole station and then put many segments into subassemblies. I then reconstruct the whole thing over to test whether everything fits. Then I hyperedit in space to see if I got everything right and then I reload and actually launch the segments on my launchers. This can take hours, even days.

Or,

My spaceplane designs can be huge. First making a sketch design, then building it. Then I don't like it and rebuild it.
Then I hyperedit the vessel through all the test phases of its intended operations. Like reentry, earodynamic stress, part stress. Checking and changing action groups. Control surface and gear wheel settings change.
Playing part of the mission and then see how I can perfect the craft.
Where can I put gimbal of, how much control surface deflection do I want.
Do I need/want wing incidence or AoA for that matter or not.
How safe is my craft? Is it stable during takeoff, ascent, high atmospheric speed, vaccuum, reentry and landing.
If not, design....sign....redesign.....redesign.

Above list could be 10 times longer my brain tells me.
I can create a SSTO to orbit in several minutes.
But some of my designs litteraly take a month or even longer because I'm mr perfectionist.
Some builds I never finish.

[Urses]

20 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

Until it looks and feels done. 

@adsii1970 You have a realy interesting Definition for "never"

Edited March 22, 2017 by Urses