SkyRender

Quite; the only option is some form of nominal fee. Even if the fee were set to basically what it would cost to cancel the strategy and re-implement it at the new level, that would still be an improvement over the current system, as it would require fewer steps.

I believe you mean this mod. Quite useful indeed.

Wow, what have you got your payouts set to? I've never seen a contract offer anything even remotely that high in returns! I'd be half-tempted to accept it, spend all of the advance money upgrading facilities, then cancel the mission. Sure, your reputation would tank and you'd have no money left, but if you planned for that, you could get a huge leg-up on some of the more absurd building upgrade prices.

Actually, it seems to be a bug with reputation-to-anything contracts. It scales in such a way that, at 50% you "approximately" get no Reputation at all, while at 100% you lose however much reputation the mission should have given you instead. If you set it to 10%, you get 80% of the mission's normal reputation; 45%, you end up getting 10% of the mission's normal reputation, etc. It seems to be deducting the reputation twice, in short.

Yep, Stayputnik and OKTO2 are both what you could call "depreciated" cores now. Though for an auto-rover of some heft, the OKTO2 generally works just fine. For any sort of mission that requires control, stick to OKTO, HEKS, and the larger cores.

Sorry, Nemoricus, but no. Your concept violates the golden rule of game design: you do not take control away from the player. Whenever you have a dilemma of game design wherein players favor grind over variety, the answer is not to force variety, it is to incentivize variety. Taking the option away by making the player suffer an inferior system is never a good idea, especially not if said system hinges upon a random number generator (which the contract system currently does). A better solution to this entire problem of contract spam is to give players more incentive to actually run missions that don't involve contract spam. Which forces us to ask the essential question: why are players spamming those contracts? The answer is simple: they're easy, they pay well, and they're basically impossible to fail. The takeaway from this is that the alternatives are too difficult, don't pay nearly well enough, and/or are very easy to fail. My go-to example at this point of bad contracts are the aerial/visual surveys. Their payout is atrociously bad for what they ask you to do, their precision requirements are excessive, their engineering requirements are excessive, and ultimately they take far too long to complete. Adjustments are badly in need for this variety of contract, for as it stands, they just take up space on the mission control contract list to tempt players who haven't tried them yet and don't yet realize that they're horrible.

Thank you, that is exactly what I was looking for! No wonder I missed it, it's in the general forum for add-on development...

Well I was kind of hoping for advice on what programs to use for this endeavour as well. There isn't really any "getting started" topic here that flat-out tells you what software you need to code and compile a mod for KSP, at least that I could find. A couple of high-level ones like the "help a fellow modder out" and "debugging" topics, but that's definitely more advanced than someone who's completely unaware of where to start is going to be helped by.

If you mean declining them, then hell no. Not how the contract system stands as it is. Right now your contract list can get completely polluted with tedious, near-impossible, and/or completely worthless contracts. I've lost count of how many "visual survey" and similar contracts I've had to decline now just to get something actually worth doing to spawn, not to mention the "test [part] flying over Kerbin" contracts that often demand stupid-fast airspeeds at given altitudes and pay out far worse than more profitable base/station/satellite missions.

Scott Manley isn't actually that impressive a KSP player; he's just very well known. The last time I even felt remotely "intimidated" by him was early in his Reusable Space Program series. Then he started using MechJeb and regularly demonstrating (and admitting) that he wasn't a very good pilot, which was when I realized that I'd surpassed him in terms of skill. He's gotten better since then, admittedly, but he's still behind the grade for a lot of us long-timers. So you can imagine why I get a bit tired of people using him as a benchmark for player skill and ranking him as an unattainable "maximum level". He's good, yes, but he's not the best ever.

It is a lot harder to circularize around Moho with an ion drive, since it has such low TWR. It was 10 times harder a few versions ago, though! You still tend to need to start your burn before you actually enter Moho's SoI, and be prepared to have to keep burning even after you've left it. It won't be as efficient as advertised, but it will still work out; just follow the maneuver node's instructions and start your burn when you're T-minus half the time the burn is going to take. Also, if you're going to send an ion probe to Moho, make it as light as you can possibly manage. Stick to the massless Z100 batteries for power, for example. It really does work better to get the LV-N engine so you're only burning for 10 to 15 minutes upon reaching Moho instead of for 25+, but if all you have to work with is ion, that's the way to do it.

The current contract system is badly in need of an option to specify what kind of contracts you do not wish to take (meaning they'll never be generated when you've told the game not to spawn them), and I figured that would be a good mod to start work on. The only problem is this: I don't know where to start! I could code it easily enough, but I don't know what tools I'll need, what resources from KSP I'll need to access/modify, etc. If someone could point me in the right direction on where to get started with this, I would appreciate it greatly. Thank you!

The contract system definitely needs a bit of refinement, yes. I shouldn't have to spend 5 to 15 minutes declining contracts I don't care about just to get one I'm looking for to spawn. It would be nice if we had some way to specify what kinds of contracts we wish to take, so we could exclude ones we will never do. You can be sure I would be un-ticking every single "aerial/visual survey" mission if that feature were implemented.

I've had more spontaneous glitches, bugs, and complete program failures than I can even count from KSP since I started playing it back in 2011. I don't have that much of a problem with it since it is early access, but it does mean that saving regularly is of utmost importance. Indeed, random crashes are why I enable quicksaving for my custom Hard mode (though I basically never quickload unless something does go pear-shaped with the game's code, so it balances out).

The main reason why people tend to abuse the spammable contracts is that, quite frankly, a lot of the other options are not viable or even remotely as rewarding. Do an aerial survey that will take at least an hour of real time and reward you less than something you can do in less than a minute with science spam? No thank you. Do a mission to Duna that requires you to wait for a planetary alignment 200 days from now? I'll spam the Mun and Minmus science contracts, thanks. I think a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of the annoyance with the early contracts could be resolved just by putting Duna and Eve's starting points in their orbits closer to a Kerbin alignment. As it stands, Duna doesn't align until half a Kerbin year after the game starts, and Eve takes until some time in the second Kerbin year. That's a long wait, even with time acceleration to skip ahead.

For a less experienced player, no. For an expert, however, it's a fun challenge (especially on Hard Career mode).

So I decided to set up a 50% reputation-to-funds strategy, seeing as my space program was ripe with reputation and could get by on less. After running a few missions, I noticed that my reputation... was not going up. It seemed to be more or less frozen in place, in fact, despite the fact that I was still getting appreciable amounts of it from contracts. Curious, I checked the quicksave file before and after running a contract with a decently high reputation payout. Before the contract was completed, my rep was 490.8923. After, it was 490.1023. Even though I was supposedly gaining reputation from the contract according to the game, it was actually stealing my reputation away! Something's definitely buggy here, so consider this fair warning: use reputation-to-anything strategies at your own risk!

Moho isn't that hard to reach as your first interplanetary target, actually. You can get an encounter with it for as little as 2500dV. Circularizing is another matter, of course, but if you unlock either ion or nuclear tech, you can totally manage that. My first interplanetary vessel on my latest Career mode file is indeed a Moho science rover, powered by the majesty of a nuclear transfer stage that has (well, had) over 10,000dv in it. Launched it out there on day 10 of year 1, well ahead of the curve.

Well how about that. Only took me a little over 3 years, too. Seriously, though, good times.

We could use an early-tech 2-Kerbal capsule. Seeing as the Mk1 capsule is based off of the US Mercury capsule, why not base the 2-Kerbal early capsule off of Gemini? It's a very practical design, to be sure. Would make early rescue contracts much easier to do too.

Before SQUAD goes nerfing the spammable contracts, they really should do something to remove the need to spam them in the first place. Just sayin'.

Been working through 0.90 Career mode today, modified Hard mode (dropped building prices to Normal levels because I don't want to grind forever just to be able to go interplanetary). I just finished up my traditional Mun exploitation mission, and have a Minmus variant to that mission on the way to the little blue marble in Kerbin's sky. Also have a craft going off to Moho for much science fun, though I'm sure I won't get the "Explore Moho" contract before it arrives...

If you account for repeat science for various experiments that get extra data from further tests, the number climbs up to around 180,000. There's plenty of science to be had, and it's always been intended that you can get more science than is needed to unlock the tech tree. That's what the science-to-reputation and science-to-funds strategies are there for.

Practically speaking, it would take a LONG time to find all of the potential spots for that, and figure out which biomes are excluded from that exploit. Though depending on what extended research found on the subject, it could easily bump Eve up a rank. I just limited this to the science you can perform "normally", ie. not exploiting the splashdown/landed situation save with the two types of science it's easiest to do that with (EVA Report and Surface Sample).

It would, actually. I actually forgot to crunch the numbers for Jool (oops!), but they should be roughly between Kerbin and Gilly thanks to the atmospheric region data. The real trick, of course, would be actually acquiring all of that science from the Jool system in one mission. Hmm, I smell challenge material!