What's your building style?

[Jouni]

My playing style changes over time. As a general rule, I may experiment with ridiculous things, but I never use anything too silly for actual missions. Currently it means that:

1. Keep things specialized and modular.

- I have four standard lifters: a SSTO for 5-tonne payloads, and rockets for lifting 15, 40, and 60 tonnes. A lifter should be able to get the payload into orbit, rendezvous with a space station or a construction site, and deorbit itself.

- If something doesn't ultimately need engines or RCS, it won't have them. Utility tugs are used to move and dock engineless modules.

- Interplanetary missions are either simple probes or reusable modular spaceships.

2. Kerbals are green.

- Rocket launches are wasteful and should be avoided when possible. For small payloads and crew transport, I prefer SSTOs.

- If something can potentially be reused, I store it at a space station.

- No debris in space. If something is no longer needed, it should burn in atmosphere or impact a planet or a moon at high speed.

- Nuclear power is bad. If nuclear engines or RTGs are absolutely necessary, the ship must either stay in space or land safely at Kerbin for disassembly.

3. Keep things reasonable.

- Simple designs are better than complex ones, even when the complex designs are theoretically more efficient.

- Rockets should look like rockets. Nose cones are necessary.

- Lander cans are not intended to survive atmospheric entry, so they won't.

- The minimum crew size for long-distance missions, where real-time communication with Kerbin is not possible, is three.

- Long-term missions should have at least one crew module (command pod, hitchhiker storage container, laboratory etc.) per kerbal. Otherwise the kerbals may start killing each other.

- A jet engine can use only one air intake.

4. Four is a nice number.

- A lifter can have up to four boosters around its main core. Asparagus staging is possible within that limit.

- A lander can have up to four radial engines or radially attached fuel tanks with engines.

- Up to four smaller engines can be used to replace one large engine.

[Mr. Entropy]

1. All manned missions must have LES.

2. The spacecraft is only as large as absolutely necessary.

3. If it can be reused or repurposed, then it will.

4. Redundant electrical systems are desirable.

[INTERKOSMOS]

All my vessels and other equipment must be practical, both realistic- and good looking. Not complicated, light designs are most efficient. I'm trying to aviod lefting debris at Kerbin orbit. And most important: we leave no Kerbal behind! Everyone must return home, no matter the costs.

[Shadoku]

I tend to, initally, go for simplicity and functionality over anything else. Once I've accomplished something a few times though, Rule of Cool takes over and I end up with rockets that look like this.

[Nick7892]

I usually have a big lifting stage on the bottom and a tower of engines for orbital maneuvers. Also the tower requires lots of struts.

[Madrias]

Mostly, I build spaceplanes. A lot of them. Simple strategy is that everything I construct in orbit has to make it there in a B9 cargo hold. Or a Firespitter Bomb Bay.

I'm not afraid of mods. Procedural Wings, B9, Firespitter are my big 3 must-haves.

Mechjeb is useful for my orbital crap, but I rarely use it for much else.

Yes, I do have a space station that I put together using pieces, probe cores, and RCS to dock those pieces. I'm proud of it. I also make sure any planet I intend to go to has a satellite around it, even though I don't use any mods that require it.

VTOL craft are desired, although completely non-essential to the job of ferrying crap into orbit. They're needed for landing on a world.

Probes must touch a planet's surface before a Kerbal can walk on it. This is to prevent a repeat of the Jool incident where we lost three brave pilots due to a surprising lack of ground.

[Whackjob]

Step 1: Decide to build something

Step 2: Overbuild it

Step 3: Repeat step 2

[kBob]

Oh dear, I'm following in Whackjob's footsteps, I have a decided tendency to overbuild and I'm never happy and overbuild some more...is there any hope?

[adinfinitum]

I like to go for a style that's like a near-future space program, where there is a sizable human presence in space. This means lots of space stations, and a ton of rendezvous and docking.

On top of that I really don't like to make rockets that don't look very rocket like, so any payloads I have are usually within a 5m diameter, at most.

When I start to plan a mission or project I break it up into all the little pieces that go into the journey, so it gets broken up into launch, orbital construction, travel, and landing. There also needs to be a place to transfer to each stage of the mission, so I usually make a small station for kerbals stuck in layover between flights and landings/launches.

Because of this I usually end up designing a reliable tug/construction vehicle, which also helps to minimize part counts on stations and multipiece ships because the components don't need their own RCS or power. Since I don't like to launch very wide payloads, this also means there's going to be a lot more docking and moving pieces than if I launched things in one piece.

It would probably be easier to just build a ship that can take off, travel to a planet, land, and return. That's just not as much fun to me though, I just love to idea and feeling of having my kerbals take a ride up to the nearest spaceport, hang out a bit, hop on the next ship to Duna or Laythe, get off at the station and take a ride to the surface, then repeat it all over again, wherever they may want to journey.

[UmbralRaptor]

Kerbal Excel Program, sadly. I spend so much time designing craft that there's relatively little flying.

Actual craft are surprisingly small, and tend towards stock.

[Xaiier]

Maximum utility. Forget looking nice, maximum performance must be eked out of every part.

I also spend most of my time on highly experimental ideas. I've not left Kerbin in weeks, but I've built monstrosities that whackjob could call his own

[GusTurbo]

Build for aesthetics, refine to usability.

[Xacktar]

1. Build something for an actual purpose in the game.

2. Notice something odd/strange about the launch/flight/explosion.

3. Create something monstrous for concept testing.

4. Find an even stranger glitch on the monstrosity, Goto step 3.

5. Break out of the loop and go to sleep.

6. Wake up at 3AM with the blueprint to a new monstrosity, Goto step 3.

[spinomonkey]

1: Make it as efficient as possible.

2: Build an infrastructure.

I've always been really inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey

[Ironwatsas]

Aside from design experiments, I tend to stick with a fairly pragmatic design approach.

For Orbital Designs, I typically try to find a middle ground between size -/- detail. If I'm building something excessively large like a Space Station, I try to keep part count per module down to avoid lag later on (as the Inari-KSS-4 showed, this is critical). Smaller designs I generally go for some degree of detail. I also like to keep weight down to maximize Delta-V. That isn't to say I won't sometimes use part clipping or advanced engineering techniques to make things look neat. I do also prefer use of structural trusses to seperate sections of a larger craft.

Most of my booster stacks are radially mounted semi-onion/asparagus staged. I have three large lifters conveniently packaged as subassemblys rated for ~15, 30, and 60+ tons. Anything heavier than that is going up in pieces. For probes or small craft, I tend to use a fairly small stack with tri-symmetrical or mini-asparagus 1m parts. I rarely launch anything TOO huge because, more than likely, it will flip out and/or crash my game. I also like to use 1x1 metal plates radially around my main engine as a shield to keep the boosters from smashing it when they fall off.

I've thus far stuck to a few basic design templates for probes. The Kon-1D pattern which is typically a Stayputnik atop a truss adaptor atop the fuel, Arranged bi-symmetrically. Next we have the Moho pattern, which is usually as possible flat, with solar panels arranged Tri or Quad-symmetrical, a single transmitter dish centrally mounted forward, and little visual clutter.

I generally only use basic mods like MechJeb and Kerbal Alarm clock. I've been trying different ones but I've been running into 64 bit limitations here and there. Currently I've been using Spherical/Toroidal Fuel Tanks and KAS. The former are very useful to simulate gravity sections or a similar aesthetic. I've never been into B9 aerospace. It's marvelously crafted, the parts are beautiful, but they sort of feel 'too advanced' than stock parts, and more importantly, cause frequent crashes due to RAM overruns.

The only other mods I have are cockpit replacements.

[KerbMav]

Where career is to fast I often pace myself to give it a more step by step approach. I do not use many parts mods and try to get plausible designs whenever possible, follow the rule "what makes sense" and mostly live without to much asparagus.

The only real part mods I use are KSPX, mostly for the structurals, ProcWings, and now and then B9 (which should be a bit more modular during installation, it is just so many parts!) and I might use a mod with parts for nicer station building now and then.

I reduced my mods to what I would call the "really needed basics" - mostly mods that make my life easier: Kerbal Engineer, AlarmClock, EditorExtensions, FuelBalancer, CrewManifest - or more difficult: RemoteTech, DeadlyReentry - or add more "tech" and "things to do": KAS, Robotics, Kethane, ScanSat - as well as more real: FAR, ProcFairings - and "pruttyerer": TextureReplacer, Chatterer.

(In .20 (the version I started playing with) - so in sandbox then - I landed Kerbals on Laythe and probes on Eve and Duna, visited Mun and Minmus regularly - but then concentrated on space station building and a few planes. Career holds me back a bit more - also my "everyone gets home" policy. Only yesterday did I start a manned mission outside Kerbins SOI again, eight guys on their way to Duna.)

[The Destroyer]

Here's how I design my interplanetary vehicles

On top, is a 2 stage or apollo stlye vehicle.

Underneath it is a transfer stage, I tend to use liquid engines more than NERVAS because better TWR=Less boredom

Then, a "get into orbit" stage. This typically also has fuel left.

The first stage is a large, usually 4x liquid booster feeding (could be asparagus, but meh, I got plenty of fuel), typically 2 km/s of delta-v

I either go big or go small. No middle marker!

[Silverchain]

Mostly iterative. I constantly update three designs: a full interplanetary spaceship which can go to and return from most places despite my low navigational skill, a spaceplane/rover, and a simple lift rocket that takes 20 tons to LKO onto which I pile whatever random junk I want in orbit.

After that, I throw together random spaceplanes quite often, and I sometimes borrow other people's designs from the Spacecraft Exchange to try out.

I try to prettify things if I can do so without sacrificing performance (e.g. adding the little gold torus fuel tanks looks nice without doing any significant harm) but there's a utilitarian feel to my designs.

[Dirty Bob]

My style is to have no plan and see what happens.

[TimePeriod]

If it fly's, I'll use it. To the kraken with rules & regulations.

[Rickenbacker]

I generally try to build as light and as small as I can. For the orbital/interplanetary operations, at least. To get stuff into orbit I have a few pre-built HUGE boosters that I just stick under everything. If they have fuel left, I leave them in orbit, making sure they have a docking port so that future flights can use them as impromptu refueling stations.

[Thomas988]

I aim for resource efficiency, structurally sound and well-operating spacecraft.

[Fox967]

Build big, build heavy, cost and safety be damned! The more mods i have and the bigger the engine, the better.

Ironically, i've never lost a Kerbal. Theres been some close calls (a few days ago, Jeb was flying a rocket upwards and i got too keen with the gravity turn - the rocket ended up doing a 360 degrees rotation, at which point i fired the engines again and continued on, both Jeb and me laughing maniacally).

I do wish that i could make wonderful contraptions like Scott Manley, or TheWhiteOwl, but when i try, they never work out.

[iNUKE]

Most efficient and easy to launch IMO:

asparagus built on pyramid shape rocket.

The outter ring with 1 tank per engine

the quantity of rings depends on the main ship to lift mass

[John Crichton]

I used to simply stick stuff together before running random tests.

Now I check out what TWR and DeltaV is required for the trip and then build around that...and power consumption needs of my Kethane refueling lander.

Right now I'm building an interplanetary ship able to take off from Kerbin and then reach every moon in the entire system. No return trip, just a one-way trip because I can use my Kethane lander to refuel at my destination.

The stats I came up with are:

Interplanetary ship DeltaV (with lander on board) 13400

Lander DeltaV 3400

Lander DeltaV incl. 50% add-on to refuel interplanetary ship 6800

That would allow me to get to Tylo, touch down with my Kethane miner lander, and then refuel the interplanetary ship. If I use a carrier rocket from Kerbin, I could shave off around 4500 DeltaV from the interplanetary ship.

All figures take into consideration a 10% safety margin...but they might still be wrong as I calculated stuff in a hurry while at work