Warning, KSP 1.11.0 new contracts' buggy durations make some interplanetary missions impossible.

[Dunbaratu]

Hopefully this gets fixed in a KSP 1.11.1 patch soon.  To any players playing career in KSP 1.11.0, I wanted to drop a warning in here.

The new contracts that were added with KSP 1.11.0 such as repairing rovers and satellites, and adding parts to satellites, have impossibly short durations for interplanetary missions.  They seem fine for around the Mun or Minmus, but not for Duna, Jool, etc.  You take the contract and get blamed for "failing" at it (sending money into the red if it's big) even though you were never even given the time it takes to make one single attempt at it.

The problem is that All the new contracts are exactly 2 years.  Hardcoded.  Period. Want to repair a satellite around the Mun?  2 years - easy.  But want to repair a satellite around Duna?  Still 2 years.  Around Jool? Still 2 years.  Whatever the game normally does to vary contract times depending on the destination body seems to be not working with these new contracts, making them impossible if you take them for a distant planet.

This is the issue in the tracker:

https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/26958#change-158334

[Incarnation of Chaos]

So send missions ahead of time and take the contracts after the vessel has arrived as a workaround in the meantime.  It should still get fixed, but just wanted to point that out.

[The Aziz]

Contract list changes by the way. So by the time he gets there, there will be no contract for that flight.

[paul_c]

48 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Contract list changes by the way. So by the time he gets there, there will be no contract for that flight.

You're missing the point, I feel. Of course there will be no contract once he arrives, but if another similar contract pops up, he is ideally positioned to respond and do it within the asked-for timeframe.

Its similar to "send science data from the surface of Mun" (and other places) contracts - you think ahead and put a thermometer/controller on the Mun, you can do these contracts in about 5 clicks.

[Rejected Spawn]

Technically it's entirely possible to reach any destination in the solar system in less than a year, I got in my head that I wanted to plant a relay in orbit around everything that can be orbited and a probe lander on everything that can be landed on, all in the first year of career mode. Eeloo sitting at an angle behind Kerbin was honestly hard and took 45000dv but was entirely possible - by leaping a 25000 ton 12 stage rocket off the launch pad and reversing the orbit around the sun and spending several real life hours burning ion engines at 4X physical timewarp and eyeballing the target because the trajectory indicator stops working at the speed required. Doing test flights like that was a bit of a chore but I landed a few tons of junk on Eeloo in around 400 days.

My insanity aside though 2 years is of course a weird time limit, just wanted to be "that guy" and point out that it's not actually impossible to handle.

[Dunbaratu]

1 hour ago, paul_c said:

You're missing the point, I feel. Of course there will be no contract once he arrives, but if another similar contract pops up, he is ideally positioned to respond and do it within the asked-for timeframe.

Its similar to "send science data from the surface of Mun" (and other places) contracts - you think ahead and put a thermometer/controller on the Mun, you can do these contracts in about 5 clicks.

It's not similar.  With the "send science data from..." contracts, the duration is clearly designed to let you do them with a fresh launch waiting for the next Hohmann transfer.  You *can* do them faster and cheaper if you already have something there, or if you spend extra deltaV on a faster but less efficient trajectory for a new launch, but those things are not *necessary* like they are with these 1.11.0 contracts.  There's clearly a major bug here.  And yes it is worth warning people of this since none of the other contracts work that way and this one is an odd exception to the rule.  The fact that the new contracts have much shorter durations than the rest do is something you're not likely to notice when first taking the contract.  And once you see that it's terminating early it's too late since you assumed it was like *every other* contract and gave you the time to do it the normal Hohmann transfer way.  (If you don't see this problem coming, your first indication that these contracts are weirdly different from the rest is *after* the duration expires and you get the red-X and go, "wait, whaaaat?")

 

 

[Dunbaratu]

1 hour ago, Rejected Spawn said:

My insanity aside though 2 years is of course a weird time limit, just wanted to be "that guy" and point out that it's not actually impossible to handle.

While technically correct, literally no other contracts in the game expect the player to look at the duration to check if it might not let you do a vanilla Hohmann transfer in time.  Thus my post here warning people.  If you don't realize ahead of time that these contracts have buggy durations, you won't be in the habit of even looking at the duration ahead of time.  It becomes "impossible" because you didn't even see that the duration is abnormal until quite a bit of time later after you've been time warping too much now to do it.  If you don't like savescumming, that really blows to have the contract surprise you by turning red halfway through your transfer to the target and say "expired", with you going, "wait... whaaat?"

[paul_c]

36 minutes ago, Steven Mading said:

It's not similar.  

 

 

Its vaguely similar; in that with the "send science from", its MUCH more efficient to already have the kit there and do it with 5 clicks. You aren't going to send them to the far flung corner of the solar system with 1 repair kit are you? And if another contract comes up, send another rocket??

[Dunbaratu]

13 minutes ago, paul_c said:

Its vaguely similar; in that with the "send science from", its MUCH more efficient to already have the kit there and do it with 5 clicks. You aren't going to send them to the far flung corner of the solar system with 1 repair kit are you? And if another contract comes up, send another rocket??

The difference is that when taking multiple contracts to accomplish in one mission I'm going to launch but haven't yet, as I usually do, one of them can be "send science from" along with the others.  That is not true for these new ones.  Which is exactly the situation here.  I was going to Duna to do 3 things in one mission: Retrieve Duna Stone, Plant a Flag, and Add a solar panel to a satellite.  The two normal contracts did not expire on the way there.  The new satellite repair contract did (with a very large negative "fail" value that overwhelmed any gain from the other two and killed the career sending funds several hundred thousand into the red.).   Had the three contracts been Retrieve Duna Stone, Plant a Flag, and Send Science From Duna, all 3 would have still been do-able when I got there.

Edited January 3, 2021 by Steven Mading

[paul_c]

You're right in that respect, and thank you for pointing it out.

[Dunbaratu]

12 minutes ago, paul_c said:

You're right in that respect, and thank you for pointing it out.

What makes this bug in the new contracts dangerous to players (and worth pointing it out here) is that it has a very large negative penalty for expiration, and none of the other contracts do this thing with a duration being too short for using the next Hohmann transfer window.  People won't be in the habit of expecting to have to read the duration to see if an excpetional weird transfer is needed because literally none of the other contracts before now required doing that.  It's the complacency of knowing up until now the durations have always "just worked" and never been a problem that causes the danger here.

Usually I don't look at the duration until after I failed my first attempt, and then I start worrying that I might not have the time for a *second* attempt with a normal transfer.  I never expect there to not be enough time for the *first* attempt with a normal transfer, as is happening here.

It's also the fact that this contract does not vary at all - it's 2 years, fixed, no matter what - it's not even applying any minor variation with any RNG - that makes me assume this was not intended and there's something very wrong.  The system that varies the duration of contracts by various circumstances doesn't seem to be activating for these at all.  They're all getting the base hardcoded duration without variation.

Edited January 3, 2021 by Steven Mading

[The Aziz]

I personally design my missions around contract requirements (if I play career, which I haven't in a long time). I'm not carrying stuff "just in case". I won't take any repair kits with me in case something breaks on a random vessel already out there (and if I do, it's to repair the ship I'm currently flying, I'm not planning to do a rendezvous or pinpoint landing unless explicitly specified OR I want to do it on my own), the same way as I don't bring science experiments if I plan to only set up let's say a mining facility on Ike.

In any case, the game should not expect me to have something already in place, if it didn't previously required me to do so. So hardcoded 2 year limit is clearly a problem to be fixed.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 1/3/2021 at 4:30 AM, paul_c said:

You're missing the point, I feel. Of course there will be no contract once he arrives, but if another similar contract pops up, he is ideally positioned to respond and do it within the asked-for timeframe.

Its similar to "send science data from the surface of Mun" (and other places) contracts - you think ahead and put a thermometer/controller on the Mun, you can do these contracts in about 5 clicks.

And you can always decline all contracts in mission control and force it to reload another stack until you roll the desired contract.

On 1/3/2021 at 2:03 PM, The Aziz said:

I personally design my missions around contract requirements (if I play career, which I haven't in a long time). I'm not carrying stuff "just in case". I won't take any repair kits with me in case something breaks on a random vessel already out there (and if I do, it's to repair the ship I'm currently flying, I'm not planning to do a rendezvous or pinpoint landing unless explicitly specified OR I want to do it on my own), the same way as I don't bring science experiments if I plan to only set up let's say a mining facility on Ike.

In any case, the game should not expect me to have something already in place, if it didn't previously required me to do so. So hardcoded 2 year limit is clearly a problem to be fixed.

I agree, but KSP has so many longstanding bugs that still haven't been fixed that I wanted to suggest an interm solution. That's it, they should absolutely fix the duration. 

And the only "extra" thing you might need is a bit more fuel than normal to pull it down from the high parking orbit you left it in while playing dice with mission control. (Especially duna, Ike is a vacuum).

You can still make your ships fit for purpose, and nothing else. I don't see how launching earlier really changes that tbh.