You design style of choice?

[Red Dwarf]

I've always liked the idea that ships in space don't need to be sleek, or have hull panels or anything like that. They can have fuel pods and engines and structural components sticking out every which way. The Apollo landers are designed like that. They're built to work, not to be pretty. I built my Big Damn Jool mothership with that principle in mind.

I never got it out that far, unfortunately. I didn't keep track of my mods, like an idiot, and couldn't load it once the game moved to a new version. C'est la vie.

[Slam_Jones]

Lately, with RSS, I've been going for the "minimalist payload" approach. Try to have as few parts as possible, unless a lighter-weight part can be used. (I.E. a couple cubic octagonal girders instead of the standard-size ones)

Otherwise, well, they're not very stylish. Just kinda... basic. At most I'll pimp em out with colored lights or something.

[PrivateFlip]

Basic and pragmatic would best qualify my design style. Although I do not go for bigger is better most of my crafts are also often overdesinged, meaning the lander is a considerably bigger than necessary pushed by a transfer stage which is again is somewhat bigger and carries to much fuel for the mission. Better safe than sorry.

[OhioBob]

I prefer a high-efficiency, minimalistic approach. Determine the minimum requirements needed to complete the mission, add a reasonable margin, then custom design a spacecraft that can perform the mission using the least parts/mass/cost as possible. I tend to get more fun out of squeezing the most out of the least then I do in building big hulking behemoths. I try to make my spacecraft look as good as possible, but not at the expense of efficiency.

At this point I have no interest in aircraft or spaceplanes, though that may come latter. I like simple expendable rockets, usually two-stage or two-stage with SRBs. Although I usually custom design my payload for the specific mission, I have a fleet of pre-designed launch vehicles saved as subassemblies and named according to their lift capacity. I designed my launchers to optimize TWR and give me the biggest payload fraction. After I complete construction of a payload, I'll attached the smallest launch vehicle that can deliver it to orbit. The launch vehicle just gets me to orbit, all the delta-v needed to complete the mission from that point is designed into the payload.

So far I haven't performed any missions that have required huge massive payloads (though I'm planning some), but when I get there I'll probably favor a multi-launch/Kerbin orbit rendezvous approach. I think designing for and performing orbital assembly would be more fun than building some asparagus-staged monstrosity of a launch vehicle. The biggest launch vehicle in my current fleet can deliver 80 tonnes.

[CalculusWarrior]

In my designs, 'coolness' is king. Everything must look nice, so only I spend far too long in the VAB clipping parts through one another. I also tend to shy away from asparagus lifters, preferring good ol' serial staging. Interestingly, I haven't really touched the 3.75m parts for a while; my typical payloads are ~20t, easily lifted by my medium 'Delta IV Heavy' style ships.

[OhioBob]

In my designs, 'coolness' is king.

Any pictures to share?

[Basilo1146]

Relatively sleek, but with all sorts of knickknacks stuck to the outside for function.

See:

and

[Steambirds]

I like enormous rockets, but I also try to keep them (vaguely) in the realm of sanity, sometimes sacrificing one aspect of my rocket for sheer cool-factor.

[GreeningGalaxy]

At least for my bigger transit vehicles, mainly those I make with KSPI, I have a pretty solid set of rules for how stuff goes together that I stick to.

I do pretty much everything in the cylinder-with-radials style, and rarely use side-mounted cylindrical things (like engine pods) unless I'm building something smaller. I'm rather fond of six-way symmetry with basically everything, and tweakscale is my best friend.

I labeled some of the key design features frequently seen in my largest ships, in this case my latest Thalassa 3A torchship:

Edited December 16, 2014 by GreeningGalaxy

[UmbralRaptor]

Style? I need a style? If it flies good, it looks good.

[InterCity]

As a rocketeer, I'm fairly conservative. Everything looks like the good old Ariane III or stuff. But that doesn't apply to the spaceplanes thanks to the stock sloppydynamics:

Let's say that this wing design is one of the more sane ones (even though this thing is just a proof of a concept for a much larger thing with much more fuel, this one needs unlimited fuel cheat to reach space). Some of my designs look like all they need is a warp drive

[GreeningGalaxy]

Style? I need a style? If it flies good, it looks good.

This is pretty much the basis for my designs, but I still find myself adding small stylistic elements to my larger designs, like strut-caging undersized inline parts or doing everything in six-way symmetry. Or adding antimatter ejection systems to everything I build with antimatter, which is honestly all but useless.

But yes, I have noticed that my sense of aesthetics is directly and majorly swayed by my sense of practicality (or rather, how well the ship ends up performing in-game, which I guess has no real bearing on practicality in real life, does it?)