covi2955

I love this idea, of satellites as a job. I think it would be cool if you got a monthly payment for "upkeep" on some of them. Say something happens to the satellite or it needs an upgrade and you'll have so many days to fix/upgrade it before you loose the monthly funding because you're not doing your job.

That's a brilliant idea! I think I'll delve into the files to do that. I've just been wanting to have some sort of space-mining setup that actually brought in revenue. I suppose with the values that I'll have to give kethane to make it practical I'll just have to ignore the fact that there's some of kerbin.

Oh goodness no! How is it possible to research to our modern tech levels without landing a person on Mars... er Duna!?! My only problem with the biomes system right now is that I have yet to find a good way (either in vanilla or via mods) to visually distinguish where the biomes start and end, so I find too much time wasted on online maps in the wiki to figure out where to send a mission to. As such I've ended up mostly ignoring them. If I need more research to get to where I'm going I'll drop a Mun lander in some unexplored crater on the Mun, hoping its a new biome. And as it's mostly a sandbox game I see no reason why if someone wanted to spend all their time on Kerbin to start with, collecting research, they shouldn't be able to. Heck, because of the placing of the flight wings and control surfaces I find it easier to shoot for the Mun than try to land in Antarctica. I would only be truly upset about biomes if they started to include them heavily in the missions.

I love the new career mode. Having to balance my personal goals with not just the restrictions on research but also having to fund my exploits has made this game immensely more entertaining and challenging to me. However, I've been playing with the kethane mod and started thinking that there should be other ways to get cash besides just the missions (which are mainly testing out parts in various locations). The two thoughts that came to mind were Grants and Sales. The Idea for Grants was that a company (probably one of the ones that gives you missions) would provide a large amount of funds every X days, but that they require certain features to be maintained, such as a constant base on the Mun, a certain number of flights reaching Duna, or taking a certain number of passengers to Minimus. Something like that so that you receive funds but have a quota of something that you have to fill each month. The idea on sales was that vanilla KSP could include the option of selling things like surface samples from other places as opposed to researching them. This would provide incentive to keep going back to the Mun after you've gotten all the research from it to help fund future missions by "selling moon rocks." With this UI available, modders would be able to go in and add in things like selling kethane. I'd have loads of fun orchestrating a kethane mine on the Mun and transport back so I could sell it to pay for my journeys to other places. I would think that like research, value would go down as you get more of the same thing, but its value would last longer in my mind. Anyway, what thoughts do you guys have about this?