Belgurath

@Capt. Hunt I too think that it's partly already the case. I know it weights by mission type already - I'm 99% sure of that - but the location aspect (what I want) I don't recall hearing anything about before, let alone having been actually implemented.

I have a whole big thing I wrote but lost to a cookie bug, so I'll summarize: Suggestion #1: Please rework the contract weighting algorithm to be a matrix of contract types on one axis, and contract locations on the other with the weighting in the cells (not simply contract types as I believe it is now). It would make the game a lot more enjoyably playable if I could keep cancelling "build a station orbiting the Sun" contracts and have fewer of them show up, but still get the same number of "build a station orbiting the Mun" contracts (I also like shuttling passengers back and forth to Kerbin orbit and the Mun, even though they pay less than, say, Duna passenger missions, and I don't like that where I send my passengers at best totally random, and at worst determined semi-randomly by my reputation requiring that I sacrifice reputation to get contract locations I want). Suggestion #1.5: An alternative to #1, or perhaps in addition to it, would be giving players the ability to write their own contracts, but then have a random chance (depending on reputation and/or number of successfully completed missions there already) that a company will offer to fund the job. Either way both ideas #1 and #1.5 are so players aren't railroaded into doing missions they don't necessarily want (in particular because of where they are) or else forced to lose reputation by cancelling contracts left-and-right until the random generator happens upon the rare one they actually want. I love contracts, and I do like some randomness, but I still want a little more input into the contract selection/generation process than I'm currently allowed, and I think changing the weighting type-list into a weighted type-location-matrix would be a huge improvement to me and other players. Suggestion #2: Please add more filters to the Tracking Station, specifically celestial body filters (I assume this would be relatively easy to implement since most of the code presumably already exists for filtering and adding new filters, the new celestial body ones though would just use a "getSOI()" method instead of a "getVesselType()" method to make their selections). I love the filters that are already there, I think their functionality and what they do is absolutely perfect, I just want the additional ability to filter out missions I have idling on/around, say for example, the Mun so they're not cluttering up my Vessel list when I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of maneuvering for a colonization flotilla during Jool-orbit insertion. Thank you Squad and Devs for all your awesome work to make Kerbal, quite possibly my favorite game, a reality and your continued dedication, effort, and community engagement. I think these suggestions would hopefully be easy to implement, and that they would definitely have a large and positive impact on the player experience. Keep up the phenomenal work and I'll keep my fingers crossed that these suggestions are both easy enough to make and good enough for players that I might see them in a future version.

Looking at what's already in place in vanilla (and even in mods) I wanted to make two suggestions: comets and long-term science. My ideas for making comets are pretty basic - we already have debugged functionality for asteroids, entry effects, smoke-trails, and sun tracking. Just combine the component methods in such a way as to make a new kind of asteroid that spawns on a highly elliptical orbit and is constantly giving off smoke-trails in the direction opposite Kerbol and/or has grey or blue entry effects pointing away from the sun. There are already awesome exhaust effects too that could be nice - cover the surface in small Ant-engine sprays, or have large exhaust sparks (like SRB's have) emanating from it. As I say, shouldn't be too hard to implement. If I ever find the time to learn how to mod I'll do it myself, but in the mean time (when I'm busy) I figured I'd throw it out to the community and Devs. Second is long-term science. My main complaint with the game is that there's no reason to stay anywhere - not on space stations, not on surfaces, nothing - you just fly new places, plant a flag and grab some dirt, then head for home. Something like what Interstellar had would be ideal: a way to continually generate science that has a multiplier based on location. Clean, simple, a reason for staying. Perhaps make more experiments that each generate just a little bit of science, but that in total create a lot (like a hybrid of Interstellar's continuous science generation lab facility and First Contract's or Magic Orbital Science's varied experiments - magnetometers, telescopes, solar particle detectors, etc). Make it so that they get an additional multiplier if there are Kerbals aboard the parent vessel, so we can have both limited autonomous and manned packages. Also the science variable definition within experiments could be tweaked to have no constant value, but rather accumulate data up to a certain maximum (assuming the Kerbals have finite computer memory to store the data in before transmitting) and then use the usual multipliers for data transmission regarding how much gets recovered from transmitting the data and how many data packets/electricity to use to send it with. Of the two I think comets are most exciting and would quite possibly be the easiest to implement (again, a pretty simple idea that basically just makes new use of existing code). Duration-science is better for keeping Builder/Engineer-type people playing (there's already no problem for the Pilot types who like to fly more than they like to build) and would possibly require more work. Already though, excellent game with lots of fun, and I definitely approve of the direction things are moving already with expanding the contract system and such (again, more things to do concurrently over longer time-spans). Keep up the amazing work!

Today I built a deep space transfer shuttle for my crew - has about 13k dV BEFORE refueling when sitting in a 250 km parking orbit. If we say I suck at piloting, which I don't, then we can assume ~ 4,300 dV per round trip to and from Duna means that I should be able to get three round trips out of it BEFORE I refuel, which I could easily do by just leaving another one in Kerbin parking orbit and docking after each trip to top off. Designed it so I could do "regular" and "emergency" crew transfers to and from Moho or Eeloo with a single vehicle without refueling - refueling is nice from a long-term-mission/multiple-mission standpoint and/or if you want to be doing a lot of moving around an SOI, but you have to add in all the support missions to build the refueling infrastructure and that gets tedious for fairly simple go-land-return missions, which is all I have planned for Moho and Eeloo - need some Easter Eggs or interesting geology there to make it really worth my while to visit for more than just a cursory mission.