Arsonide

World Firsts work like a bread crumb trail. After the initial four, at any given time you might qualify for more than one, but there is always one available at a time, to keep you focused. Because of this, they are not conducive to being auto-accepted, because even if they were, you might miss some if you have one accepted while you "skip" another. They are based off of your achievements, but they are not an achievement system. They are still contracts.

I might be able to diagnose the issue, but first, would you mind expanding some of the acronyms there, and describing how you are playing the game when this occurs?

I imagine that this allows you to actually accept and decline contracts without having to bounce to the space center and back.

You didn't break the progression, that's just how it works. World First never offers you things that you've done before, or it wouldn't be a World First. If something is on the board, and you do it, they'll pull it off the board, and pick a new objective either immediately or in the next few days. So progression isn't broken, but you did miss out on a bit of cash.

Kind of, as this thread shows, the community doesn't really perceive this as an exploit, so it was "soft fixed". Station and outpost contracts prevent this sort of contract "stacking" by never targeting the same planets. This essentially forces the player to launch a new facility for every contract, without explicitly telling that to the player. Unless the player can get a base from the surface of Duna to the surface of Ike, in which case, more power to him. With satellite contracts, there are people that enjoyed stacking them, but there were also some people stacking upwards of eight per launch to abuse the "new vessel" objective. The solution was somewhere in the middle: no more than two satellite contracts can target the same planet. This requires the player to launch a new vessel for every two satellite contracts, essentially, even though it's a very subtle change. It allows players to multitask, but ensures that a minimal amount of mission planning will be required, to avoid getting too exploitative.

This will continue to happen until all of your mods that do things with science have updated to 1.0.1 - you have quite a few loaded, so I can't be sure which one is doing it. I believe Orbital Science was having this issue, and I see you have some of DMagic's mods installed, so I'd look into updating your addons.

Contract science was rebalanced to supplement experimentation rather than replace it. You'll need to work some experiments into your missions. There are more experiments lower on the tech tree to help you out with this, and the revamped lab and extra scientist abilities help as well.

If you hit Alt-F12, and go to Contracts, Active, you can hit the "Com" button to forcibly complete the contract. I don't think it would count as cheating at this point.

If you are trying to use the small gear bay, there is an issue with it's collider preventing this objective from triggering. Any other wheel will work.

Here is a more detailed explanation: the contract system picks randomly from the list of contracts it has available to it, including Explore contracts. The list of contracts available to the contract system have prerequisites before they can be added to this list, and those prerequisites can include progress milestones, technology research, or facility upgrades. As the player progresses through career, this list gets bigger, and therefore the chance of any particular contract type appearing gets smaller. Explores will not appear once you have visited a planet, and given that your average player spends quite a bit of time in the Kerbin system, they have a decent chance of visiting Minmus before its Explore contract pops up, especially if they have unlocked rescue contracts, tourism, base and station contracts, etc. So to summarize, the chance for this to appear is equal to any other particular contract, unless you've visited Minmus, in which case the chance is zero, but by the time you visit Minmus, you've unlocked enough types of contracts to make this chance much lower, resulting in players perceiving that this chance is any lower than it is for other planets, when it is not. The reason this isn't a perceived issue for the Mun, is because the player will not unlock as many contract types before that has a chance to appear. It similarly isn't an issue for Duna, because the player will pause for a long time before going interplanetary, giving Duna a greater chance to appear in time even given the lower chance to appear.

When I said they were more lucrative I meant in terms of just raw rewards, not chaining etc. I saw similar results with the Mun and Minmus contracts. This is on the "moderate" settings for career mode. On average, they are 25% of the Explores, it varies with objective. It is there, it's just random. There's no guarantee that it will appear.

The Explore contracts are still present, but there are more contracts for the pool to choose from now, with world firsts, tourism, and grand tours. That means they have a slightly lower chance to appear now. It has always been random. The Explore contracts can also skip planets. The partial World First contracts pay the same amounts (they have 25% of the objectives, and 25% of the rewards). They never skip planets. They can also theoretically be chained by one vessel more than four times, so indeed they are more lucrative. There are also hundreds of them, they require less time invested, and they are easily layered on other missions, so missing them is less of a problem.

Just to clarify, that tourist is paying 160,000 funds to dive into the sun, not 15,000. The fare of the whole tour is weighted 75% towards the recovery of the tourist, the other 25% gets split evenly amongst the destinations. So the player gets partial credit as he goes through the tour, but is heavily encouraged to...you know...keep the tourist alive. Also, suborbit of the sun just means that you need to have a suborbital trajectory, not necessarily that you have to physically dive in. Think of these tourists more like thrill seekers.

It should be looking for both. Kilroyiv, can you PM me your Contracts.cfg so I can take a look at it? It might have been modified somehow.

In GameData\Squad\Contracts\Contracts.cfg there are many options that let you do these sorts of things. Look for things labeled "MaximumAvailable" "MaximumActive" and "MaximumExistent". Setting these to lower or higher numbers will drastically affect what sorts of contracts you get, and there are many other options as well.

Nightingale, I just flew a little basic jet engine on a continental flight to take some temperature surveys. It paid well, and really showed off the new aero system. It was quite relaxing, but some of the sites were on the surface. I couldn't figure out where to land, so I quick saved and installed your mod. I'd been meaning to for a while, but I don't get too much time to sit down and play through a full career game. I have to say, it was icing on the proverbial cake. It turned a pleasant experience into a perfect one. I popped some drogue chutes over the landing site, and made a perfect landing - something that wouldn't have been possible for me last version. I did two surface surveys, after two in the air, and made some good money. o7 Great work sir.

Absolutely, but does that make for engaging gameplay? Also, time acceleration implies vessel stability. It freezes the rotation and trajectory of the vessel, so it's an unnecessary layer of complexity for something relatively simple.

Howdy, there are a lot of great ideas here! I wanted to address a few of them, as several of them have actually been addressed already. This was a known progression issue in 1.0, it was fixed in the hotfix. This is what the World First contracts are. There are hundreds of them. They have one objective, and the same rewards as Explores: 25% of the objectives, 25% of the rewards. They are always offered by World First. They will never offer you something you have done before, and they will never ask you to do something you aren't ready for. If they ask you to go to another planet, it will be after you've exhausted the basic possibilities of the ones you've been to. Most of them are. They keep track of all sorts of things ranging from your researched technology, to your program's achievements, to your facility upgrades. Very few of them can skip progressional steps, like the Explore contracts, but usually if they do skip a planet, it will be in an exceptional difficulty contract - the harder ones with three stars. This means it pays much more to compensate. Surveys were added to address this a bit, but because there are only four planets with atmospheres, they were made more generic, so they aren't specifically designed for any particular kind of vessel. Distance records were also added for plane oriented players. Forcing the player to stare at his vessel for hours is not necessarily a fun gameplay mechanic. These objectives are not there to hold the player up, but to prevent state issues, like crashing into the surface of a planet counting as a "landing" because you touched the surface for one frame. They could probably be reduced to one second, actually, but ten seconds ensures that the player isn't tipping over, or something similar.

"Two different vessels" is pretty clear. If the vessels were part of the same launch, it won't work.

Base contracts do not require crew, they require crew capacity.

Could you try to reproduce this again, and if possible, provide a save file just before recovering the kerbals, and a full log after recovering the kerbals? This would help me diagnose what is happening.

That fix addresses the fixed wheels, whereas he is using a small gear bay. The small gear bay has some collider issues that prevent it from working with this objective at the present time. Pretty much any other wheel will work. I do see one fixed wheel on the front though, so that should be triggering it. Have you updated?

Tourism contracts do not have waypointed destinations. You might be seeing surveys in the tracking station. Tourism contracts just ask you to go to a vague area on a body, like "in orbit of the Mun".

Contract science is more rare than it was to encourage earning science through experimentation, so the ratio of funds to science is high: 10,000 to 1, approximately. This can help out quite a bit in late game contracts since funds scale by the contract planet in large factors. A mission to Eeloo could net funds in the millions. This has shifted Outsourced R&D to be more effective later in the game when funds are more abundant, and not as necessary. In the early game, it is indeed not worth losing the funds over. The thing you want to keep an eye on is the commitment level. Consider this, at 5% commitment, you are losing 5% of your funds, and every 10,000 of them converts into one science. This means you would need 200,000 funds in a mission to see one science. (5% of 200,000 = 10,000) So later in the game, when funds are scaling to much greater amounts, and at higher commitment levels, Outsourced R&D can be a great source of bonus science. It isn't meant to be a primary source of science, but an auxiliary "bonus" source. Imagine a late game ARM contract that awards 2.5 million funds - at 50% commitment, you'd net an extra 125 science out of this contract. If you went whole hog and took a loss on the contract at 100% commitment, you'd get an extra 250, on top of the contract science, and any earned through experimentation. So no, Outsourced R&D is not the early game powerhouse that it once was, it is, however, very useful later in the game, when you are trying to clear up those expensive technology nodes at the end of the tech tree.

The Explore contracts target planets that you have not reached somewhat randomly. They can skip planets. They have always been this way. If you want a more linear progression, do the little bite sized World First contracts. They have the same rewards (1/4 the rewards, but 1/4 the amount of objectives) as Explore contracts, and you can chain them together with a single vessel, so theoretically, you could drag them out longer than the four objectives an Explore would net you. They also follow a strict progression based on your personal progression, and never skip planets unless you did yourself. (Obviously the Pol bug is an exception here, one that's been fixed.) They never ask you to do something that you have already done, they always ask you to do things that are very close in difficulty to things you have already done - things they perceive you to be ready for, and they are pretty decent reward wise. Another benefit of them, is that there are literally hundreds of them: 14 per body, 17 bodies, so including the early game ones, it's a bit over 238, and they support modded planets. So if you progress without having one, and "skip" it by unlocking progress, it's less of an issue than with the Explore contracts.