Career Mode

[Rocketscience101]

I've actually never gotten very far in career mode. I either stop playing for a while, or there is an update, and I just restart, either way, I've never gotten very far in career mode. But today, I just finished leveling up all my buildings.

I did this because of the sentinel space telescope. I had positioned one with a nuclear engine and two of the most powerful transmitters in orbit between eve and Kerbin, and was able to use the small amount of liquid fuel and the nuclear engine to make the small corrections required to complete the contracts. I just rinsed and repeated, completing some other missions every now and then to keep myself launching, but because these mission don't require me to launch a new telescope every time, I spent little to no money, and would receive massive paychecks. I am planning on launching more telescopes, between duna and Jool, and between Eve and Moho, to complete more missions. But right now I'm just waiting to get some of my more powerful rocket fuel tanks, to go with the large engines.

[Arsonide]

This was actually the intended use of that contract.

It all started back with the "Get Science in Orbit of X" contracts - players were spamming them, and repeatedly completing them using the same craft. That sort of felt like an exploit, so it was slated for patching up, as a lot of contracts have special logic to prevent exploitative behavior when applicable. The thing was that any time there was an attempt to "fix" this "problem", there was quite a lot of resistance to the idea. Players really enjoyed these repeatable contracts because back then there were no contextual objectives (like satellite adjustments or station expansions). They felt like these contracts encouraged them to build infrastructure and then allowed them to gain a repeatable source of income from that infrastructure. This behavior was never patched to my knowledge, but the payouts of those contracts were lowered slightly to reflect this.

So that sort of renewable income was seen as sort of a gray area, but SENTINEL had one thing going for it - it was an optional official mod, rather than stock, so players had to opt-in to this mechanic. This gave us a bit of wiggle room, and we wanted the contract to feel different than other contracts, so we heavily accentuated this renewable income. That is to say, if you already have a SENTINEL satellite in orbit where the contract designates, all you have to do is accept the contract, wait, and rake in the cash. This made it different than anything else in the game. It heavily encourages building infrastructure, in a way similar to contextual station contracts, or the CommNet mechanic does.

Obviously, the mechanic was popular enough to eventually be fully integrated into stock.

Edited August 9, 2017 by Arsonide

[Xemina]

I do that, I just give up because I never have good parts and It's harder with that restriction