What kind of player are you?

[Legendary Emu]

I play as as builder and modder, maybe a bit realist.

[jdmgto]

I'm a manager.

I enjoy building my spacecraft and watching them fly but my greatest joy is going into the tracking station and seeing dozens of ongoing missions. Comm satellites in orbit, mapping satellites doing their business, my Duna mission marching across the gulf, my moon bases doing high quality science while my moon stations whizz by overhead, the Kethan rig on the Mun, the automated resupply tug aerobraking back into Kerbin orbit after dropping off a resupply canister on Minmus. Knowing that they are all going about their business, doing their jobs, that each is taken care of, rescue plans in place, ships standing by in orbit or on the ground where needed. I enjoy building space ships but I want to run a space PROGRAM.

[Lazro]

Builder, Modder, Space Geek, Astrophysicist.

However, I am capable of doing things without Mechjeb, including docking, interplanetary, landings (not the pinpoint kind on atmo planets though )... pretty much anything. I use Mechjeb so I can mess around with other stuff when it's doing space in the background.

Not heavily modder, I remove modpacks (le gasp) if I deem them too confusing or useless.

Cassini-Huygens. Lunokhod. The Explorer satellite. Sputnik 1, 2, and 3. Lunar surveyor. Lunar prospector. The Phoenix mars lander. These have all been done by me. I am heavily space geek.

I was wedged in the middle for the last one, but decided to go astrophysicist. Really, I'm more of a cinematic: I look for good shots, then screenshot. While I'm not necessarily efficient, I try and I learn in the process.

Edited June 23, 2013 by Lazro

[SuperWeegee4000]

When I saw this thread I immediately thought "What kind of player are you? How do you launch the things you do?" to the tune of "What Kind Of Pokemon Are You." Yep.

Anyway, I do spend a significant amount of time in the VAB (I can't spaceplane) creating primarily unmanned (and the occasional hopeless manned space station attempt) rockets and then fly them up and watch them either never make orbit or just sit there useless. I don't use mods, but in the future that could change. I guess I'm still too new to the game (read: my signature; owned the game for all of three days) to really pinpoint my primary play style.

[Klingon Admiral]

I kind of evolved from the beginning of my time with KSP. My first days in the demo where a lot of fun and very informative ... now I know why the engines should point downwards.

Over the months, I now have become a builder, slight modder, clueless astrophysicist (phase angles do not match? MORE boosters should solve this!). Currently I am working on a somewhat realistic space program, currently featuring a manned Apollo-esque Minmus landing and plans for ressource operations on the Mun. Additionally, I might add my case of OCD ... orbital debris will NOT be tolerated (Kerbin though is increasingly becomming littered with parts of spaceships that didn't blow up at crash).

I haven't really dabbled in interplanetary missions yet, there were only a atmospheric probe to Eve and 2 atmospheric probes + satellite to Duna (in 2 launches). All of these missions featured a munar gravity assist, though, but I was too bad for aerobraking at the time.

[SDIR]

Mostly pilot, although I spend egregious amounts of time designing and perfecting things before launching them manually.

You should also add a category of stunt man or daredevil or Oppa Jeb style, for those that launch rockets haphazardly and somehow manage to save the crew, as well as grim reaper for killing the crew for fun/not caring about their deaths.

Edited June 23, 2013 by SDIR

[Panichio]

I gotta say I'm probably The Builder/Space Geek.

[AntonioAJC]

Pilot / purist / neither space geek nor sci-fi (At least, not the way you described them) / astrophysicist / Role player

Role player: Role plays as an empire/nation/faction in the game that tries to colonize and build bases on other worlds in the name of your empire/nation/faction (Kind of the description intended)

Edited June 23, 2013 by AntonioAJC

[technicalfool]

Me?

Probably a gestalt amalgam of all of the above. Depends on what I fancy doing today!

[AstroDoc]

I like playing a role.

Some time ago I made out I was the swaggering ultra-rich CEO. I made my employees take me from planet to planet (bringing fuel ships out to me with which I could dock, then getting them to take me to the next planet on). I'd then leave the employee stranded there while another one would take me on to the next destination.

Then I played the more considerate heir to the CEO's financial empire, and I sent ships out to retrieve all the stranded employees.

Recently I played the 'make it lighter' engineer, ensuring every part of the payload and lifter was the lightest and most efficient for the job. I wanted to make a lander for each planetary body (or a few of them anyway) which had the least fuel possible in the lander craft, for landing and getting back into orbit (eg my post on the thread 'Have you landed on Tylo?')

Now I'm the hand-rubbing bean-counter, trying to do certain missions for the absolutely lowest cost I can manage (eg my post on the thread '100% reusable space plane to orbit and back', which showed my 12th version of a spaceplane SSTO which got the cost of a Kerbal-in-orbit rescue mission down to 64 Kerbal currency)

AstroDoc

Edited October 29, 2014 by AstroDoc

[LethalDose]

I would qualify myself as an engineer and explorer. I'm always trying to get vehicles built as small as possible to get new places on the cheap & efficient.

I may also be a burgeoning astrophysicist, but frankly I don't have time to set up gravity assists off multiple planets. I can still usually get transfers done really efficiency.

[Beowolf]

Builder, spacegeek, and sometimes roleplayer. Also a math geek, and I wouldn't even consider playing KSP without an information and calculator mod like MechJeb or Engineer. I started my first game, flew literally one mission, quit and went looking for a mod that did delta-v and TWR calcs, and would display my apo/peri on the main screen. Thankfully that was easy to find.

[Engineer of Stuff]

I feel like an explorer. I don't care so much for the science, it's just the feeling of being there and having fun somewhere new. But I still like the science, exploring doesn't feel right without it.

[Slam_Jones]

I'm 20% Builder, 80% Pilot. If i used MechJeb, i'd never have learned rendezvous or landing or basically anything important...

100% purist. Maaaybe a little mod-curious, but the way I see it, the game is how the dev's want it to be, so why change that.

50% sci-fi, 50% space geek.

0% astrophysist, 0% realist... I don't know what to call it, but I typically just launch rockets, see where they will go, (and if they aren't going where I want) then revert, time warp, and launch again.

[Pecan]

I'm the sort of player who doesn't like bringing Kerbals or forum posts back from the dead.

[Stratzenblitz75]

99% builder, 1% pilot. I consider my self a decent mission planner, but I'm an absolutely atrocious pilot. I need at least 5 quickloads for pretty much everything (usually much more).

Also 100% mods over here! I can't play without FAR, KW rocketry, B9-Aerospace, Deadly Reentry, Astronomer's Visual Enhancements, ect.

[Captain Vlad]

I'm mostly a pilot. Any builder tendencies are only so I can figure out a way to make the craft do what it's supposed to do in a way that pleases the pilot half more. More of a purist than a modder, though I have no objections to mods, I just don't want to fool with installation etc. I fit neither definition on space/sci-fi geek, though I'm definitely a sci-fi geek IRL. I'm more of a space tourist than a realist or astrophysicist.

And I know that, like Jeb, forum posts are never truly dead.

[r4pt0r]

I have great design ideas at work, then I get home and go to bed, then I get up and don't play ksp before my next shift, then I get great design ideas at work, then I get home and go to bed....

[Overfloater]

Why does "the pilot" contradict "the builder"?

I spend "hours shut away in the VAB", but then hand over the controls to NO mechjeb or anything! O_O i go 100% manual.

I could fit into "the purist" category, but recently started playing RSS again...

[LABHOUSE]

Space geek and builder but when I start piloting I don't stop until mission is done.

[magnemoe]

Mostly an builder, use a lots of mods some OP, if it serves my purpose like extraplanetary launchpads.

Also like the logistic, has anybody launched resuply missions two weeks after the main mission? An 2.5 km/s Duna burn followed by an slow life support resupply probe.

Using a mass driver let me do an 300 m/s move of an class E asteroid, downside is that the burn was 4 hours, done over remote control of home computer while at work

Yes I use mechjeb for most burns.

[GoSlash27]

I'm an "engineer". I work out a plan to accomplish the mission objectives, then spend a ridiculous amount of time designing the "perfect" vehicle for the mission. Once I've got the vehicle designed to my satisfaction I build it, test fly it to work the bugs out, then finally fly the mission to see how accurately the performance conforms to my expectations.

-Slashy

[MoreUmpf]

80% builder , 20% modder

When I'm playing KSP I'm spending most of the time in the VAB building a craft and optimizing it to a maximum, then testing and also most of the time reverting back to VAB for further optimization

Also my current KSP install contains roughly 25+ mods because I always think that I could really enhance the gameplay with whatever mod I recently discovered.

[Tsevion]

I'm a bit of a builder/planner/astrophysicist and purist... I run stock or close to stock (Stock parts and physics) I use informational and quality of life mods.

Mostly though, I'm a Mad Scientist... I like to push at the very edge of what is possible. How light (<2t), or few parts (3), or cheap (5k) can I get to Mun? Can you fly with no fuel whatsoever without abusing infiniglide (2 different ways)? Can you build a non-cheating Eve SSTO (no )? How badly CAN you abuse infiniglide (Zeppelin, Eve SSTO)? Can you do a "surface" return mission to Jool (yes)?

Whether it's challenges posed here, or on Reddit, or if it's just ideas most people would discard out of hand... I like to try.

[EladDv]

i'm the mad military designer- i build stuff to destroy them and other things! also i spend a lot of time at the VAB and i love planes i also love to fly missions but often fail because i forgot to open the solar panels.....purist is my second name for the past half a year but before that i tried RSS and other realistic mods