Contracts and New Vessels

[Enorats]

So, I have a contract to visit several different places (it's a grand tour). I need a "new" vessel. The thing is, I just spent like four days building a giant ship in orbit piece by piece. It was designed to be able to take me just about anywhere I want to go and return to be refueled and used again. Needed it to be fairly large because I'm playing with USI-LS and have a modded solar system that's a good deal larger than stock.

My question is this: Can I dock a simple pod or w/e to my transfer vehicle and take that to the places I need to go to complete the contract, or will the process of docking it make it no longer count as a "new" vehicle? I don't particularly want to make an entirely new ship to take to all these places, particularly as I was planning a shakedown cruise to the moons anyway and my first long voyage is planned for the third destination in the contract.

[Streetwind]

Docking combines two vehicles into one, and that means that one set of everything that's duplicate data - such as for example the mission elapsed timer - gets thrown out. That means that anything you dock to your old vessel will inherit that old vessel's data instead of keeping its own.

You could potentially still use your large mothership by editing the savefile and manually setting it to be younger than the date you accepted the contract on. It wouldn't really be cheating, because technically that mothership is still "new", in the sense that it never flew a mission before, right?

[Curveball Anders]

Stumbled on this issue when I had a contract to send a 'new' station to Minmus.

Being cheap I tried to pre-load the lab by snarfing up as much science data as possible during the trip.

But once it it's correct orbit the contract didn't fire and after some head scratching I noticed that everything was ticked off except 'new'.

After some investigation it turned out that it stopped being 'new' after I'd done an EVA during the trip ...

[something]

Yeah once had a similar issue: I accepted the contract while the vessel was on the launch pad. Contract didn't fire as the vessel was no longer "new". In the end I manually edited the contract to be completed and added a certain amount of funds to my account. My lawyers then argued that rolling a rocket out of the VAB certainly did not make any difference to its state of being new or old and furthermore there wasn't any specification stating whether new meant "after signing" or "after requesting" and it hence was totally legit to build the vessel while negotiating the terms of the contract...

[archnem]

Yah, the "new" requirement for contracts really crimps alot of playstyles.  I generally just alt-F12 it because career mode needs some serious reworking anyway, so I don't even feel guilty for "cheating".

[Enorats]

Hmm. I sent up the pod I'd planned to use as a descent vehicle at my destination, then flew it by both moons before setting up a rendezvous with the mothership. After docking the "new" requirement is still lit up and both moons are checked off. Guess I'll see later on once I've got an ascent vehicle and ground base ready for the crew. Playing without reverts and with a deadly life support mod means I'll have to take things slowly and carefully, but so far it seems the contract will complete.

[Warzouz]

I used to change the date in the save file. IIRC, it's a sequential launch number.

 

I've a potential similar issue : I've a Eve window in 400d. I've a flyby mission to do. I'm ready. BUT, I suppose the contracts will trigger sending space stations, new sats and so on. I would like to profit from the window and send directly a full space station with com sats (a big mission).

If I send my big mission : i would not benefit from contract funding. and If I don't, I would have to wait again a long time, locking the game progression.

That contract progression is more of a hindering... I don't understand why we don't get multiple explorations contracts.

I think I'll cheat my way through it by editing the save file.

 

[Jarin]

Easier than savefile editing, the alt+f12 menu lets you mark a quest as completed, so you can just do that after you've completed every other quest criteria.

[Enorats]

Just completed the contract. Sending a new pod up and docking it with the ship I started constructing before accepting the contract actually worked. Wasted a bit of delta-v because I needed to undock it and redock with the descent vehicle I'd sent already to get USI-LS to reset my hab time, but it got the job done.