How to gain money and science with limited funds?

[adamgerd]

Funds: 97,929

Science: 38

Reputation: 6%

VAB Upgrade: 2

Launchpad Upgrade: 3

Slightly modded but I have only the initial tiers

I have a contract for an escape trajectory and a Lunar flyby but I don't know how I can do either with less than 100k and I don't know another way to increase my funds that I can currently use

Edited September 23, 2018 by adamgerd

[Aeroboi]

You can do a escape trajectory out of kerbin that meets the Mun SOI. So a single escape burn from Kerbin orbit can do both contracts at once. Especially if the parts required to bring along aren't that heavy. Some of the escape trajectory contracts require you to bring a radial decoupler along the way.
That means a small probe core with just a single smaller part will complete both contracts. For this you will only need a small rocket costing nowhere near 97k funds.
But you also have escape trajectory contracts requiring you to bring a heavy part along. It is better not to accept these contracts.

Can you post us a picture what you tried to build so far?
And what were the specifics of the contracts exactly?
edit: iirc there's no way early career to make money besides contracts and recovering stuff. But I don't play career that much so I'm not sure.

 

Edited September 23, 2018 by Aeroboi

[adamgerd]

21 minutes ago, Aeroboi said:

So a single escape burn from Kerbin orbit can do both contracts at once. Especially if the parts required to bring along aren't that heavy. Some of the escape trajectory contracts require you to bring a radial decoupler along the way.

Yeah the escape trajectory only needs a TD-12 decoupler present on the vehicle on an escape trajectory from Kerbin SOI

Specifics of the Contracts

As for the Ship, Its pretty inefficient since I aimed to complete the missions separately and man the Lunar mission and gain science from it, if I launch it unmanned and without science, I can already remove parts of it (not to mention no-reeetry)

Edited September 23, 2018 by adamgerd

[bewing]

Well, there are lots of minibiomes around the KSC campus where you can pick up science points if you need a few. There are tricks such as creating a rolling craft that allow you to travel around without having wheels, if you are willing to do such things.

It's a smart idea to upgrade your mission control -- that will get you five more contracts, and one or two of them will be very easy part test contracts. When you do those part test contracts, you can usually arrange to land in various spots around the KSC campus to do experiments at some of those minibiomes.

A 4-stage rocket with 3 thumpers below one thumper below one thumper below a hammer -- will easily accelerate a smallish probe to Kerbin escape velocity when launched vertically. And it costs less than 15 thousand kerbucks. Aiming it so that it passes through the Mun's SOI gets you an opportunity to collect extra science points there.

If you are willing to temporarily trash your "reputation" numbers, you can repeatedly use the "Bail Out Grant" strategy in the Admin building to get a small amount of money, if you really end up short.

 

Edited September 23, 2018 by bewing

[adamgerd]

11 minutes ago, bewing said:

A 4-stage rocket with 3 thumpers below one thumper below one thumper below a hammer -- will easily accelerate a smallish probe to Kerbin escape velocity when launched vertically. And it costs less than 15 thousand kerbucks. Aiming it so that it passes through the Mun's SOI gets you an opportunity to collect extra science points there.

 

Ah. Though without having an orbit, how do you aim it at the moon or do you need to go to orbit first?

[Aeroboi]

@adamgerd It also really depends on what parts you have unlocked. Bewing suggestion is a option and perhaps the only one applicable to your case. But since you have facility level 2 and 3 upgrades I assume you have already a few of the 45 science nodes unlocked.

If you have the appropriate ones you can make this >

That is a Reliant engine at the bottom. I would just launch this one straight up to the Mun. That is without trying to reach orbit first. If you wait for the Mun to go over the KSC and just burn straight up you will leave Kerbin at 4300 m/s getting you close enough to get into Mun SOI. Remember you don't need to get very close to the Mun to enter it's SOI. Entering it's SOI counts as a flyby. After you leave Mun SOI you will automatically be on a Kerbin SOI completing both contracts. As you can see there's a TD-12 decoupler at the top.

So that costs 7,750 funds to earn 120.000.

What a deal

[adamgerd]

21 minutes ago, Aeroboi said:

@adamgerd It also really depends on what parts you have unlocked. Bewing suggestion is a option and perhaps the only one applicable to your case. But since you have facility level 2 and 3 upgrades I assume you have already a few of the 45 science nodes unlocked.

If you have the appropriate ones you can make this >

That is a Reliant engine at the bottom. I would just launch this one straight up to the Mun. That is without trying to reach orbit first. If you wait for the Mun to go over the KSC and just burn straight up you will leave Kerbin at 4300 m/s getting you close enough to get into Mun SOI. Remember you don't need to get very close to the Mun to enter it's SOI. Entering it's SOI counts as a flyby. After you leave Mun SOI you will automatically be on a Kerbin SOI completing both contracts. As you can see there's a TD-12 decoupler at the top.

So that costs 7,750 funds to earn 120.000.

What a deal

Huh, shouldn't have overcomplicated it, my unmanned launcher used 4 SRB's on top of all that

Edit: Though I haven't figured out how to launch it when Mun is straight up since when I fast forward, its already badly positioned when I stop it

Edited September 23, 2018 by adamgerd

[mystifeid]

Here's one for six thousand. A thumper and two hammers. Those AVR8 fins are expensive and you only need three. This one also includes a superfluous battery so you could take that out and make it a bit cheaper again. Still escapes Kerbin's SOI (with a decoupler). No steering required.

3 hours ago, adamgerd said:

Edit: Though I haven't figured out how to launch it when Mun is straight up since when I fast forward, its already badly positioned when I stop it

You need to lead the Mun a bit. Here's the current position (on the right) and the intercept position (on the left) of the Mun when the rocket above hits the top of the atmosphere . I'm missing it on the right so I could lead it by more and still get a fly-by.

Edited September 23, 2018 by mystifeid

[adamgerd]

3 hours ago, mystifeid said:

Here's one for six thousand. A thumper and two hammers. Those AVR8 fins are expensive and you only need three. This one also includes a superfluous battery so you could take that out and make it a bit cheaper again. Still escapes Kerbin's SOI (with a decoupler). No steering required.

You need to lead the Mun a bit. Here's the current position (on the right) and the intercept position (on the left) of the Mun when the rocket above hits the top of the atmosphere . I'm missing it on the right so I could lead it by more and still get a fly-by.

 

Will try it but looks good and 6,000 for 120,000 is a very good profit margin

 

Edit: Haven't managed to gain such a high altitude

Edited September 23, 2018 by adamgerd

[bewing]

7 hours ago, adamgerd said:

Ah. Though without having an orbit, how do you aim it at the moon or do you need to go to orbit first?

mystifeid's pic sort of shows the method. You go into map view and look at it from the top. You don't even have to lead the Mun -- you are moving so fast that the Mun doesn't move very far by the time you get there.

You draw an imaginary line from the center of Kerbin through the KSC launchpad, to show yourself the trajectory of a "straight up" launch. When that line goes through the Mun, you launch. That will get you close enough.

When you are in map view, if you rotate the view so that the Mun is at the top of your screen, then all you have to do is wait until KSC is at the "top" of Kerbin, and you know you are aligned. This method also works well when you need to set an angle by eye. If you want to lead the Mun by 90 degrees, then you rotate the map view until the Mun is on the right edge of the screen, and burn when your ship rotates into the correct position.

[IncongruousGoat]

I dunno how much use it'll be to you, but if you want advice on how to do things with no facility upgrades, no cash, and no tech I highly recommend checking out the Caveman Challenge thread:

Again, I don't know how useful you'll find it, but if nothing else you might learn a thing or two about how far you can go with low tech and an un-upgraded space center.

[adamgerd]

31 minutes ago, IncongruousGoat said:

I dunno how much use it'll be to you, but if you want advice on how to do things with no facility upgrades, no cash, and no tech I highly recommend checking out the Caveman Challenge thread:

Again, I don't know how useful you'll find it, but if nothing else you might learn a thing or two about how far you can go with low tech and an un-upgraded space center.

Possibly, I might just decide to restart, since I failed to create a lunar flyby already 3 times (maybe its just not having played it in a long time and being pretty bad in the first place, but it seems like its more punishing now then it used to)

[adamgerd]

I did learn a few important things at least: a) Never overcomplicate a craft when a smaller craft works fine and b) Don't upgrade if you really don't need to

[Zosma Procyon]

I move asteroids and ferry tourists for kredits personally, and I have cheated (I know I'm awful) to gain needed kredits in the past, in times of fiscal calamity. Use the debug menu to spawn contracts, accept them, and complete them without ever actually reading them. I haven't done that in an in-game decade or three. 

Recently by pairing down my standard rescue craft design to a single use rocket with a Klaw and a few parachutes attached to it, I've found the one-star Kerbin orbit rescue missions to be surprisingly lucrative. The trick, it turns out, is to not leave the shipwrecks/derelicts the new Kerbals are stuck in in orbit. Rather than sending up a craft with a habitation or cockpit module, you send up a rocket with a klaw to grab and deorbit the shipwreck with the Kerbal still inside. Once you've grabbed the wreck, make sure to switch the control point to your rocket's controller or the klaw, burn just long enough to dip into the atmosphere, then autowarp to atmospheric interface (when the game automatically stops autowarping). Then as your rocket is starting reentry, perform a retrograde burn until you've consumed all of your remaining fuel; this will slow you to a much safer velocity before you dip into the thicker levels of the atmosphere, and reduce the strain on your parachutes when its time to deploy them. Most importantly to someone in the early stages of their career like you, my standard rescue craft is mostly constructed of lower tier parts. I don't remember what tier the klaw itself is in.

My current standard rescue craft for Kerbin orbit costs about 34,000 kredits, with more than 25,000 of that cost in the upper stage with the klaw on it, and therefore said 25,000+ is fully recoverable. In addition I make an extra thousand or so kredits from turning in the salvaged shipwreck i brought down from orbit (FREE MONEY!). And that is not counting the contract's advance (~10,000 kredits) and the reward money for the rescue (30,000-55,000 kredits). So on average (one hell of an average I admit) I stand to lose about 9000 kredits in nonrecoverable parts and fuel, but I get around a 10,000 kredit advance, plus a 43,000 (average) reward, and a salvage payout around 1,000 kredits. So on a one-star low orbit rescue, I stand to make a profit of around 45,000 kredits. A recent rescue mission yielded a 10,000 kredit salvage bonus because the shipwreck was a space shuttle cockpit. I've also tried to decrease the money lost by trying to recover the SRB's (solid rocket boosters) by adding parachutes staged with the separators, but the chutes usually get destroyed by the aerodynamic forces or heat. When the next of these rescue contracts comes up (I've been playing in the same in-game day for about a week and a half now while working on a sea plane base for Laythe). I'm going to try not switching the parachutes deploy conditions setting to "When Risky" and leave them set to "When Safe", my instincts as a real astronautics engineer made me think that might be the problem. But if this doesn't work out it will certainly be cheaper just to write off the SRBs than to attach costly parachutes to them.

And you get a new Kerbal to torture...I mean help gain experience...out of the deal. But a word of warning, the vast majority Kerbals left stranded in Kerbin orbit by the in-game companies are pilots and engineers, with only about 1/6 being the more useful scientists. I do 3 or 4 of these rescues a week, whenever one of these contracts pops up, so I often have a lot of zero or one star pilots and engineers in my roster. I currently have about 13, and just 3 low level scientists from recent rescues, most of whom will be sent out on during a coming series of missions to the Jool system.

Another strategy for making money is to always have at least three contracts in the vicinity of a planet or moon before launching a a rocket to it. My personal record was I think 10 contracts fulfilled by a single craft (four of which I accepted after launch, two of which after the craft had been on station for years). It was a space station contract in orbit of Vall. I had a three star contract to place a space station in orbit and attach it a D-class asteroid, two three star contracts to move a D-class asteroid into orbit of Jool and Vall respectively (I fullfilled the Jool contract just by flying the asteroid into Jool's orbit on the way to Vall; I thought that was a good catch on my part), a rescue mission in orbit of Vall (the station included a tiny NERV propelled "parasite" craft to return the rescued Kerbal to Kerbin), a mission to place a "satellite" in orbit of Vall (so I just added the required science instruments to the station and eventually parked it in the required orbit), and a three star "get science" contract in orbit of Vall. This was a very large (for the pre-1.4 parts catalog) (and it was built before I discovered the trick of clustering smaller/cheaper engines using the offset tool) space station, and therefore required require a lot of of S3-14400 tanks and Mammoth engines to get it into orbit, so the final craft cost came to around 3 million kredits and another 1.5 million for the brand new at the time reusable asteroid mover; it would have cost a lot more had I discovered the joys of clustering NUKs at that time. Now that was a significant portion of my war chest, about a quarter I think. But the 6 contracts I had at Vall before the launch had a total payout in the neighborhood of 12 million kredits. I should admit that this density of contracts was created through use of the debug menu. I don't consider actively trying to get the contracts you want cheating; call it "executive decision making". Anyway while the station was in transit to Jool, two more "get science" contracts popped up; one in solar orbit and one in Jool orbit. These added another half million kredits to my war chest. And finally during two subsequent Jool launch windows I sent expansions built to contract requirements out to the station, for another 300,000 kredits combined (one of them was a lowly one star contract) . So this station eventually made me a profit of around 11 million kredits. It might have made me more, but then the asteroid shape definition bug emerged, and the station ended up encased in its asteroid about 20 in-game years after its initial launch. After the bug was fixed around 1.4.1, I deorbited the station and let it crash into Vall's surface. unfortunately couldn't get the four 5 star scientists who were in the station's labs out. All the airlocks were covered by the rock and I couldn't get the camera to focus on the labs (also engulfed by the asteroid), so transferring crew was not possible.

My last tip is a cost saving measure I discovered a few years ago: Kerbals don't have to be inside of a cockpit or crew compartment during transit. They can stay in their space suits indefinitely, and only need to be protected from the heat and wind of reentry. So, rather than using a more realistic spacecraft to move them, particularly to return them to Kerbin after being rescued or completing their missions, simply seat them in External Command Seats mounted inside of cargo containers or service bays, and add a heat shield and parachutes to it. Lets say you have 16 Kerbals you need to return to Kerbin, and for the sake of this argument they're all coming from the same craft (Two real-time years ago I had a return craft visit every moon of Jool to pickup Kerbals). Now to move them the normal way, you'd need either a MK-3 passenger cabin or some combination of other crew compartments. Lets say you opted to use the MK3, at a cost of 30,000 kredits. You would need to use a lot of fuel to move it, use the largest sized heat shields (900 kredits), or the inflatable heat shield (2400 kredits), a lot of other MK3 and larger diameter rocket parts, and a lot of parachutes. Your rocket is going to be jolly expensive. But if you use my "sardine can" approach, you can get 16 external command seats (16*200 kredits = 3,200 kredits) into a 2.5 meter service bay (500 kredits), use a RC-L01 probe core for guidance (3,400 kredits: The probe core is an absolute necessity; otherwise you'd have a Kerbal sitting at some weird angle inside the bay trying to control the ship, making maneuvering impossible), a 2.5 meter battery (4,500 kredits) and either a bunch of solar panels or a NUK for power (I prefer the NUK, they're expensive but you get the money back from recovering it) (23,300 kredits FULLY RECOVERABLE), a 2.5 meter heat shield (600 kredits), four of the radially mounted parachutes placed around the circumference of the crew portion (4*400 kredits = 1,600 kredits), and some fuel tanks an engines that probably won't be recovered but you will need far fewer than if you built the rocket around the MK3 passenger cabin. By treating Kerbals like fish fillets in olive oil, your entire return craft can cost less than the cost of the MK3 passenger cabin; especially if you use solar panels instead of a NUK. The trick is building the "crew container": You start with the 2.5 meter service bay, then set the editor to place 8 radially positioned command seats on both the top and bottom inside surfaces of the service bay. Rotate the seats so the Kerbal's backs will be against the surface their seat is attached to and crown of heads facing out, and use the offset tool to place the seats completely inside the container. For best results, you'll want the advanced tweakables rigid connection and autostruct to the root part (the service bay) engaged. There are four downsides to this strategy: (1) You have to spacewalk the Kerbals in one at a time, (2) it increases your rocket's part count which can slow performance (especially since the Kerbals count as a part when not inside something), (3) If you have one of the Kerbals leave their seat they'll be shot out like a bat out of hell and you'll have the devils own time getting them back there, and (4) you have to be really careful of the G-load during reentry, because if it goes too high the kerbals can be ejected from the contain.

In summation: Moving asteroids and ferrying tourists are good reliable income sources that either don't require much upfront investment or can reuse the same craft. Low level rescue missions can turn comparably small by frequent profits, and a constant stream of new green guinea pigs to play with *insert evil laugh*. You can save money by treating Kerbals like sardines in a can. And recoup the cost of expensive missions by fulfilling multiple contracts with one craft.