Question about career mode contracts & milestones

[quazarz]

I am fairly new to playing KSP, playing career, and haven't left Kerbin's SOI yet except for 2 drones for contracts that asked for sun orbit. I would like to level up some of my crew members to level 3, and it seems like the quickest way to do that is to orbit Kerbin, land on Mun, land on Minmus, and orbit Kerbol for a total of 32.35 EXP. 

The problem is that right now I'm mostly generating money through lucrative tourist contracts using a system of orbital stations and high capacity landers around mun and minmus. It seems like tourists generally want to follow whatever milestones have been completed in the career.

So my question is this: If I take my crew outside of Kerbin SOI just for the experience points, are tourists going to start to want to orbit Kerbol on their itenerary? And a more subjective follow up: If this happens, how much more difficult would it be to go from Minmus, to Kerbol SOI, then back down to Kerbin to complete that leg of the journey each time? (how to do that efficiently?)

[paul_c]

I'm new too but it seems any sniff of exploration, and the career mode contracts will start coming in for it. For example, you have a wild night, build an enormous rocket and randomly fire it towards Jool ONCE, and then tourists start appearing asking to go to Jool AND RETURN!!! I think there's a knack of doing easier contracts and simultaneously using their suggestions to guide you towards a bit more exploration. I rather enjoy refining and making as efficient as possible, the easier contracts. For example there will always be a flow of Kerbin tundra and Kerbin Kolniya orbit satellites. They are always going to be similar; so I've made one design with a rocket underneath that I know drives nicely and does the job. Also I've gotten good at fulfilling 2, 3 or 4 contracts with a single launch - thus, improving my time management and hopefully rate of progress.

[quazarz]

right, that's what I've noticed too, I'm at a really happy place in my career where I'm comfortable with the difficulty and I want to keep practicing with the equipment that I have in place so I don't want to venture outside of that quite yet. I've actually been doing 8-10 contracts per launch - usually 16 tourists, a few rescues and debris collection, maybe a flag and/or science collection all at once. It took me a long time to set up the infrastructure but now I can launch for ~170k, do the whole tour in 60-90 real time minutes and come home with around 2mil in rewards.

[paul_c]

8-10 is good. I have a sense that its difficult to 100% "line up the ducks" and get similar contracts together, for example I have only seen max 4 "tourist trip" style contracts at any one time; and some of them want to go to Mun or Minmus (or both) so its one launch per moon (and any who just want (sub)orbital around Kerbin get a free bonus). Similarly, Mun or Minmus satellites are only ever 2-3 at most (sometimes I sit a small satellite on top of 4 tourists).

I sense its actually quicker to have a pre-designed rocket ready-to-go with minimal mods to fulfil 3-4 than building a "special" for putting together say 5+ contracts. I don't know for sure though.

Similarly, after a while combining launches for Kerbin sats I now prefer one launch per satellite.

I am not sure what is the best strategy for maximising reputation - clearly, declining or failing too many contracts is bad...but do I let the ones I don't want to do, time out, or explicitly decline them to see another (ie maximise the ones I want to do and do them?) Money and science are now no longer an issue, I've played it too many hours now!!!

[quazarz]

I've built up my network of equipment to minimise the amount of extra-effort any given contract (that I want to do) requires to add to a mission.  My system consists of: One orbital base around each of Mun and Minmus, a heavy duty mining rover on Minmus surface, some various probe-driven craft that ferry fuel around (to/from surface of Minmus and others for between stations), and two different landing craft that are docked to each of the stations - a 2-crew science lander and a 11-crew passenger lander.

I rarely take satellite missions, they are some of the most boring ones for me. Only if I have need of a satellite that it asks me to do, like a resource scanning satellite when I needed one anyways. I take all of the tourist contracts that are high prestige until I have 16 tourists total (one-star tourist contracts aren't worth the money for the crew space). Usually about half of the tourists want to land on the Mun, and half of them want to land on Minmus. Take all rescue missions for kerbals that are orbiting Mun or Minmus, with or without their debris. High value debris is good, as long as no more than 3 chunks total.

Usually before I disembark the tourists I'll run the science landers around Mun and Minmus to gather the rescued Kerbonauts onto the station. Then I launch a rocket with a Mk3 command pod and Mk3 passenger bay (1 pilot, 3 empty seats, and 16 tourists). The rocket also has a cargo bay for each chunk of debris that is on the itenerary. Each cargo bay has a claw, and a cheap disposable drone that goes to fetch the garbage and bring it back. The upper stage of the rocket has enough fuel to rendezvous with the Mun base, then transfer from Mun to Minmus, rendezvous with Minmus base, and then land back on Kerbin. At the Mun base, I transfer all of the passengers that want to land into the passenger lander, take them down, then bring them back to the carrier. Send one of the drones to pick up any garbage (or garbage+rescue) missions. Transfer rescues onto the homebound rocket. Then I transfer to Minmus and repeat.

So, this way, I can do a large number of tourist, debris, rescue missions without having to do a bunch of declines to get them all to line up. 

[Cavscout74]

In my experience, you get a few tourists that want to do solar trips, but most still want Mun/Minmus.  I usually either combine the handful of solar orbit tourists with crew training flights or screen the contracts carefully & avoid those.  When you go to any other planet, that's what really opens up the flood gates of tourists going further away.

[Fraktal]

When tourists want to land on a world, do they want X distance within a specific point, or will any landing anywhere on the right world do the trick?

[paul_c]

Anywhere on it - which is handy. For Minmus, I either combined them with rescue missions or hoovering up a bit more science; or a nice easy equatorial landing on one of the ice lakes.

[Spricigo]

57 minutes ago, paul_c said:

clearly, declining or failing too many contracts is bad.

By default is a token penalty for declining a contract. So, there is some effect but given that the game will be less likely to offer another contract of the same type you declined (actively, not just let expire), you probably don't see much of a difference. Of course, the penalty can be zeroed out or (go figures why) increased in the difficult settings.

 

Personally, I really don't enjoy sorting which tourist goes to where  very much. Flyby/orbit around Mun/Minmus I'd consider, lading it's not gonna happen.

[bewing]

It's exactly as you said, tourists follow where you've already been.

They are handy for two things: getting some extra money in the early game, and for having an excuse to return to places where you've already been -- to pick up a rescue victim, for example.

However, tourist contracts are much less lucrative than just about any other contract type over the long term. Especially since you don't get any advance payments on the contracts.  And taking tourists into solar orbit and back again takes a very long time -- so you sit around forever waiting to get the bulk of the contract payment. It is, of course, significantly worse after you visit Eve or Duna and then tourists want to start going there.

Note that to get 3 stars, it's easier to plant a flag on Minmus, enter solar orbit, do one quick orbit of the Mun, and then return to Kerbin (or have a science lab in Mun orbit, and level your Kerbals up there!).

[quazarz]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

However, tourist contracts are much less lucrative than just about any other contract type over the long term.

I assume you have a great deal more experience in the game than I do, but I am finding the opposite to be true, none of the other contract types are nearly as lucrative but with the caveat that I have built up an infrastructure specifically to handle large volumes of tourists. I described the system in another post above. Right now in my active contracts I have three 3-star tourist missions queued up for a total of 14 tourists, about half want to land on mun and half on minmus, I will take ALL of them at once in a single relatively cheap rocket and do the full tour using my established infrastructure. I added up all of the rewards and in total it is 2 million JUST for the three tourist quests, and I will be also completing four rescues (two with debris) and a flag planting. There are no other quests that I see that offer anywhere near that amount, except ones that can only be completed by themselves with a single launch, like placing outposts, or the grindy ones like asteroid detection.

[Spricigo]

2 hours ago, quazarz said:

I assume you have a great deal more experience in the game than I do, but I am finding the opposite to be true, none of the other contract types are nearly as lucrative but with the caveat that I have built up an infrastructure specifically to handle large volumes of tourists.

Maybe because you didn't  took similar preparations to make a different kind of contract lucrative. So you need to taken in account this infrastructure as part of the opportunity cost.  In other words, the time you setting up and maintaining this infrastructure is time you are not doing the best thing you could possibly be doing to advance your career (or more to the point: enjoying the game) whatever it is*. 

Also, is very convenient in the early Tourism contract when everyone  just want to go to orbit because no other destination is unlocked. Not so much when each tourist want to go to a different planet.

*Of course "best thing to do" is not necessarily the same for every player.

[Zhetaan]

10 hours ago, quazarz said:

I assume you have a great deal more experience in the game than I do, but I am finding the opposite to be true, none of the other contract types are nearly as lucrative but with the caveat that I have built up an infrastructure specifically to handle large volumes of tourists.

A second, also important caveat in addition to what @Spricigo mentioned is that, as @bewing said, tourist contracts are best for quick money in the early game.  Although it is possible to complete the tech tree without leaving the Kerbin system, from a contract and exploration point of view, that is still the early game.  I generally don't consider it mid-game until I'm either conducting Duna/Eve missions or exploring asteroids, but of course I admit that there is no official word defining that--what is important to you is that I think you're still seeing good returns from your tourist contracts because the game has not yet decided to offer you the later contracts where the balance shifts.

I don't know how you feel about mods, but if tourism infrastructure is something that you're dedicated to developing, then you should at least seriously consider Contract Configurator and its Tourism Plus contract pack.  Even though you may not want to go that route, you should still at least look at the page for the Tourism Plus pack--that space hotel picture still impresses me nearly six years after it was posted; you may like it, too.

16 hours ago, paul_c said:

I am not sure what is the best strategy for maximising reputation - clearly, declining or failing too many contracts is bad...but do I let the ones I don't want to do, time out, or explicitly decline them to see another (ie maximise the ones I want to do and do them?) Money and science are now no longer an issue, I've played it too many hours now!!!

If you find yourself letting contract offers run out rather than declining them, then you should disable the reputation penalty (which you can do in the difficulty settings, I believe).  Mission Control only offers a limited number of  contracts; it doesn't make sense to sit there warping to get out of contract offers that you don't want in order to avoid losing one point of reputation.

Spoiler

Assuming that I recall correctly the history of this system, the idea behind making it cost reputation to decline was to give players pause before treating Mission Control as a kind of 'contracts slot machine' where they would decline offers repeatedly in order to re-roll until they got contracts that they wanted.  The additional intent, if I'm not completely wrong, was to give a kind of incentive to take less-than-ideal contracts and try something that you might not normally try to do, but the actual effect for some (most?) players was only to slow the slot machine.  Since contracts are the only thing in the stock game that have any sort of deadline, and simply refusing to accept the offer has no cost, that's what people did:  reputation points are, for a lot of players, a point of pride, and many would rather effectively refuse to play than lose reputation.  That one-point penalty may as well have been a thousand points.  I don't recall when the setting for removing the decline penalty appeared, but it appeared fairly quickly.

I think that the decline penalty makes more sense when there is a sense of urgency behind the contract system--one needs to secure Funds for an annual space program budget, for example--because then there is an actual trade-off between declining a contract in hopes of a better one and trying a contract that is less than ideal.  There were, at one point, mods for that, but I don't know what they were called.

[paul_c]

Aaaah makes sense now. To clarify:

* Letting an unselected contract "time out" and disappear from the board - no penalty
* Declining that unselected contract, so a better one may appear - 1 point penalty
* Failing the contract, either by eg killing the tourist or running out of time doing it - penalty as detailed on contract

I'm not 100% sure where declining a selected contract fits in there - do you get the -1 or the possibly higher penalty as detailed?

Anyway....I've now achieved my aim, of getting 90% reputation. Yay! A while ago I turned the corner both with science (now about 25000 and pretty much all the tech tree unlocked) and money (about 45 million)

[Wobbly Av8r]

18 hours ago, quazarz said:

So my question is this: If I take my crew outside of Kerbin SOI just for the experience points, are tourists going to start to want to orbit Kerbol on their itenerary? And a more subjective follow up: If this happens, how much more difficult would it be to go from Minmus, to Kerbol SOI, then back down to Kerbin to complete that leg of the journey each time? (how to do that efficiently?)

Going to Minmus efficiently is about 930 m/s dV. To get to the Kerbin SOI is only another 30 m/s dV - it seems more daunting than it really is, and the only thing you need to do is recognize that the *moment* you "pop out" of Kerbin's SOI, you are in Kerbol orbit. If you were to approximately reverse course by a few dV, you'd suddenly be BACK in Kerbin's SOI and, presumably on your way home.

[quazarz]

11 hours ago, Spricigo said:

Maybe because you didn't  took similar preparations to make a different kind of contract lucrative. So you need to taken in account this infrastructure as part of the opportunity cost.  In other words, the time you setting up and maintaining this infrastructure is time you are not doing the best thing you could possibly be doing to advance your career (or more to the point: enjoying the game) whatever it is*. 

I was hoping that you would clarify what other preparations that one would take to make other contracts lucrative. I definitely understand what you are saying, but when I look at what is available to me, it appears that tourist contracts are the best return on investment over the longest period of time, and yes it did take a lot of time and effort setting up the infrastructure, but I'm a 6-year Factorio veteran and logistics is just what I do naturally, so getting that sorted out was a pretty enjoyable experience. Most of the equipment I installed was also fulfilling a contract, the mun and minmus orbital stations were both fully financed by other corporations. 

Ignoring the obvious fact that interplanetary contracts are always going to be more valuable than those within the Kerbin system, which contract types would you take to generate the highest return on investment? If it's just a matter of rushing to interplanetary scale for higher profit then that I can understand, but I've only been playing for 3 weeks now so I am still making myself at home in the Kerbin system and still practicing orbital mechanics and ship handling. 

[Spricigo]

10 hours ago, quazarz said:

I was hoping that you would clarify what other preparations that one would take to make other contracts lucrative.

That misses my point entirely. I was trying to make the opportunity cost more evident, not more important. I after considering that you still consider tourism contract the best option available more power to you. (Still, YMMV)

In any case, it's not other preparations but rather coming up with efficient way to do other contract in the very same manner you com up with efficient ways to do tourism contracts. I really don't want to enter in the specifics of each kind of contract because there is so much depending on preferences and personal inclination (including less evident factors like williness to use mods (and which mods))

...except maybe as a kind of joke:

10 hours ago, quazarz said:

which contract types would you take to generate the highest return on investment?

Gather Science/Test Part at the lauch site.

The payout is enraging low but several orders of magnitude over the cost.  

 

[Superfluous J]

12 hours ago, quazarz said:

which contract types would you take to generate the highest return on investment?

I'd take (and I do take) only those that I was going to do anyway.

I won't take tourists to Mun and back. That's too much of a pain. I will let them ride along to LKO though if that's all they want.

I take satellite contracts for every world out there. They're lucrative and I was going to put relays up anyway so why not toss a Mystery Goo on there as well and make a quick buck off my investment? That's an infinite reward, because I was going to do a satellite anyway for $0 return. Well I guess not technically. But considering the cost to me is basically the cost of the mystery goo container and a tiny bit of fuel, it may as well be.

But in short, I'm extremely picky on contracts. I'll let the exploration contracts guide me if I've not got something planned myself, but if I want to start drilling ore on Minmus the only contracts I'll take are for Minmus, and then only for stuff that either I'll do anyway or will be ridiculously easy to do. Plant a flag? Sure thing. Deliver 2000kg of ore to low Sun Orbit? No thank you. No matter the payoff.

Edited December 18, 2020 by Superfluous J

[paul_c]

The approach would be quite simple - maximise the science/money/reputation per unit time taken. For example, with an expendable rocket launch you'd need to look at the pay vs the rocket cost to work out the net profit you'd make. And the time to "design" it - if its a new design, then that might be 30-60 mins in the VAB. If you did it before (and it performed well, and you saved it) then a small tweak then a launch is 5 minutes. Similarly, tourist flights - if you have a good design for a returning, pax carrying rocket, then a lot of time can be saved because the criteria aren't going to vary massively for different contracts. And of course, if you can combine 2+ contracts into one launch, then time and money can be saved there.

The "test at launch site" or "test splashed down" are good because you can recover pretty much 100% of the hardware for money (so long as it doesn't blow up....)

[Zhetaan]

21 hours ago, quazarz said:

Ignoring the obvious fact that interplanetary contracts are always going to be more valuable than those within the Kerbin system, which contract types would you take to generate the highest return on investment?

I'll offer some possibilities:

If you want to staff your space program with more than a few Kerbals, then rescue contracts are a good way to go because they give you people and pay you for it, instead of the increasing-costs model for hiring in the Astronaut Complex.  If you don't like the Kerbals that you rescue, then you can fire them and rescue others.  There is also a refuelling mod called Kethane that uses a finite-resource model for refuelling, and you can stretch your supply with unwanted Kerbals and the KE-WAITNONOSTOP-01 Kerbal Unreconstitutionator ... though I suppose that's not polite to talk about.

Part recovery and Kerbal recovery contracts can be made to work with some infrastructure by making use of vessels equipped with independently-controllable grabbing units and reentry gear.  Launch the carrier--essentially a rack of decouple-able grabbing unit probes--once, and you have something standing by in orbit to recover however many pieces and Kerbals as you brought Klaws.  I've personally seen these with the capacity for twelve, and that is definitely not the limit.

Asteroid capture contracts result in refuelling depots, which extend the service life of whatever existing infrastructure you have--including the vessel that initially performed the capture.  Should you perfect your SSTOs and reusable transfer craft (I know that that's probably some ways off since you're a new player), your space program can stop costing Funds entirely, except for those occasions that you need new rockets.

[quazarz]

I appreciate the advice, but I think my system is better than anything else that others have mentioned here, and I think that the people who are commenting about tourist contracts being weak have not actually run the numbers. I have been doing rescue contracts since the beginning so my team is up to almost 50 kerbonauts. I'll explain using data from my most recent launch which completed a total of 10 contracts before landing back on Kerbin. Here is a table of the contracts that I took and the TOTAL rewards (including advances and sub-conditions). I don't want to repeat myself from just earlier in the thread so a description of the infrastructure that I use is in my third post here.

#	Type	(*)	Dest.	Funds	Rep
1	VIP	*		58,499	19
2	Tourist (2)	*		87,749	17
3	Rescue+Scrap	**	Minmus	305,045	25
4	Rescue+Scrap	**	Minmus	305,045	25
5	Rescue	**	Minmus	221,310	16
6	Rescue	**	Minmus	247,910	15
7	Tourist (5)	***		789,755	20
8	Tourist (6)	***		851,180	23
9	Tourist (3)	***		412,427	23
10	Rescue+Scrap	***	Mun	319,305	28

Total rewards: 3,598,225

The two one-star tourist quests are obviously the weakest for fund rewards, but I had the spare seats so it cost me zero extra effort to include them and I did benefit from the reputation gain (finally put me over 750). But as you can see, the huge majority of funding is coming from the three 3-star tourist contracts. Those 3 contracts make up 57% of the funds from the entire set.

The passenger ship that I designed costs approximately $170,000 to launch, and includes seating for 20 with Mk3 crew and passenger cabins, and has a modular cargo bay containing a klaw and a disposable tiny fetcher drone that I can duplicate for however many chunks of scrap that I am picking up (I have taken 3 at most). This recent launch, I sent Jeb as pilot, 2 engineers which went to live on each of my Mun and Minmus sky bases, and all 17 tourists. The three rescues that included debris had to ride home in the cargo bay. This is the third time I have done a mass-contract completion with the same rocket design, and fourth time it has launched, one of the launches was a training tour for 20 of my idle kerbonauts to reach level 3 (which is what this original thread was supposed to be asking for advice on. I didn't want to ruin this system pre-maturely. But the result is that the tourist contracts have only gotten better with the added destination for minimal extra effort.).

[Zhetaan]

11 minutes ago, quazarz said:

run the numbers

I can certainly appreciate running the numbers, though I think that the fact that you are also using this infrastructure to run rescue and part recovery contracts does confound the data somewhat.  Regardless, I can also appreciate that what you are doing is working--I have reservations about saying whether any particular approach works 'best' but that's a separate discussion--so, put succinctly:  good job!

I do have a question for you:  are you running any strategies, as well, or are these the raw, unadulterated numbers?

[quazarz]

32 minutes ago, Zhetaan said:

 

I do have a question for you:  are you running any strategies, as well, or are these the raw, unadulterated numbers?

No strategies, those are raw numbers. 

Another point that I failed to make in the above post is that "density" is a critical part of how I view mission efficiency. Level 3 mission control says that it allows "unlimited" contracts open, but not really since it only offers a certain number at a time. So three missions that are worth $500k each are worth much more than ten missions that are worth $150k each, assuming you can do them all at once. And suppose that they were all 10 rescue+scrap missions. That would require at minimum 10 different rendezvous, and a rocket design that can fit 10 different items in cargo (volume wise, my 20 seat passenger rocket is only slightly larger than a 4-item cargo bay would be). And the reward would be significantly lower, extrapolating from the figures above. If the only thing I did was the five tourist quests and no rescues, that is: transfer to Mun, dock with the spaceport, landing, re-dock, transfer to minmus, dock with the spaceport, land, re-dock, and back home. The only extra effort is periodic fuel delivery, one payload of fuel from Minmus to Mun supplies 5 surface landings for the 10-passenger lander, and a fuel delivery to the Minmus station pays for about 12 landings. So, realistically, the most "extra effort" comes from adding in the scrap recovery and rescue missions, but I find them valuable anyways for the extra kerbals and utilizing my cargo space more effectively. I don't have to decline many contracts to get everything to line up, almost all 10 of those were the first contracts offered after I got back from the previous journey. I just have to know the limits of the passenger rocket, and the parameters of each launch are sufficiently flexible that there is a wide variety of contracts that I can add to any itenerary.

Edited December 18, 2020 by quazarz

[paul_c]

I've not run the numbers so I'll trust you on that one. I go off of a "hunch"; and I'd say you strategy is definitely in the right direction. 

I do the same (but on a smaller scale) - I do 4x tourists at a time and might expand to 8. I've done 4x satellite launches at a time; and satellites on top of tourist trips. The most I did at once was 6, but the design wasn't a 100% success and a muddled docking connector failed to detach....I had to make it home with a weirdly imbalanced rocket which needed the throttle applying in 2-3 second bursts followed by a few seconds to restabilise! So nowadays I'm cautious about doing too much. Also, my contracts never seem to be generated that neatly so its rare to have 4 or more of a similar enough kind to combine.

I imagine I'll carry on like that for another couple of weeks (or months), then maybe go back and restart a career mode with "Ironman" restrictions like, no quicksaves, no reverts, never killing a Kerbal, having to flight test everything before being "himan-rated" etc

[Spricigo]

[snip]

Ok, it is a pointless comparison but let's take an example from my current career archives 

#	Type	(*)	Destination	Funds	rep	Sci
1	Station	**	Solar Orbit	524,975	20	21
2	Station	*	Solar Orbit	366,030	16	0
3	Station	*	Solar Orbit	373,420	17	0
4	Station	*	Solar Orbit	373,420	17	0
T				1,630,785	70	21

Station cost: 8,120, Launch Vehicle cost 4,200

And since a singe station will complete all four contracts RoI=1,630,785/12320=13,000% 

On top of that all the advantages of not be doing tourism contract.

Edited December 30, 2020 by Vanamonde