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Satellite contract question


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I am about to send a large ship to Gilly and was going to launch a trio of satellites to dock with that ship and bring to Gilly and Eve to fulfill some satellite contracts. However, I've never attempted to fulfill a satellite contract with satellites I've docked with another ship for transport to their destination, so I wanted to know if docking those satellites with the mothership and then undocking in Eve orbit and flying them to their designated orbits will still fulfill the contract requirements. I assume it will, but I'd be pretty bummed if it didn't and I had to send them separately, especially as I'm playing a career mode with a set minimum launch schedule and it'll be many hours (prolly 20+ of game time) before that ship even arrives at Eve for me to find this out on my own.

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It depends, on a lot of things.

First off, if you build all 4 ships (the actual ship and the 3 satellites) AFTER the contracts are accepted, you should be totally fine. The problem with satellites losing their "newness" is when they dock to older ships already launched, and gain that older ship's time stamp.

Secondly, even if the mothership is already built you may be fine. I've actually docked satellites to refuel a lot of times and in the contrary to what many people say, I've never had a satellite contract not fulfill because of it.

Thirdly, what sucks is the only way to know is to do it. You can test it before you eject to Eve by detaching the satellite from the mothership temporarily and seeing if it still satisfies the "build a new satellite..." clause of the contract, in the contract window in flight that will have a check if the satellite is still valid. However there's never a guarantee that it'll still be good once you get to Eve. And there's no way to test it before launch and docking.

Fourthly, if the game and you disagree that all your work was worthy of the contract payment, by all means go into Alt-F12 debug mode and complete the contract. It's not cheating if it fixes a bug.

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I accepted the contracts a while ago as a way to basically make the large cost of the ship pay for itself on arrival to Eve. Good to know that I should be OK - I'll test what you suggested (ie docking and undocking a satellite) before setting off for Eve as well, just to be safe. Thanks~

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I've managed - at least once - to get the "build a new satellite" tick mark back on a vessel by switching to another vessel (outside physics range) and back.

I believe that if the satellite as such is newly launched after the contract was accepted, then it should fulfill  that criteria. I.e. if there are no parts docked to the current vessel that were already launched before the contract was accepted, then the "build a new satellite" tick mark should be there. Independent of what has happened with the current vessel in the meantime. And sometimes you can kick the game back into behaving after being buggy, but I won't guarantee that this works every time.

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15 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

It's not cheating if it fixes a bug.

Given that use of the cheats menu is now a standard part of the advice toolkit, is it perhaps to the point that we need to revisit the requirement that a satellite be new in the first place?

I know that contextual contracts give contracts to move already-launched satellites, but those contracts are for specific already-launched satellites:  the contracts pick a satellite and say, 'move this one'.  The fact that they invariably pick satellites that I've placed with tender care into their orbits and have no intent to move for any price is merely twisting the blade for me--but that's a separate issue.

Instead, what I mean is to ask whether it is possible to have a contract that will accept any satellite that meets the other requirements, regardless of its launch time.  In other words, let's say that a contract requires that a satellite with an antenna and 600 units of monopropellant be placed in X orbit, and I happen to have one from an earlier contract that required 1,000 units, so it qualifies.  One Hohmann transfer later, I've completed the contract.

Does anyone know whether such a thing is possible without overhauling the game?  @bewing, perhaps?  If it is, then I'll write it up as a feature request for the bug tracker.

If not, then I think I'll do that anyway.

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1 hour ago, Zhetaan said:

Does anyone know whether such a thing is possible without overhauling the game?  @bewing, perhaps?  If it is, then I'll write it up as a feature request for the bug tracker.

If not, then I think I'll do that anyway.

It's easily doable. Pretty trivial actually. It might even be doable by just editing contracts.cfg.

The reason I know it's doable is that's exactly how sentinel contracts already work.

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