Making money in Career mode

[Yuriznikov]

Hi Everyone!

I have recently started playing a career mode as i wanted more of a challenge and to set goals for the long run. But have been struggling with money problems lately.

My science center requires me to make 3 million, but i can see no other way of making this much atm other than grinding the same mission over and over.

I want to play it legit, so no money cheats or file editing to make stuff cheaper. I turned on the Perks to turn reputation into money to get a little bit extra. But wonder how to proceed.

Anyone has good solid tips on how to make this much, can i complete the same mission over and over from the same satelite for example?

Science is no problem, but money is keeping me from proceeding much further than i currently am

Thanks in advance!

-Yuri

[el_coyoto]

First of all, welcome to the forums Yuriznikov!

I usually kinda "cheat" the system, and do as you suggest : leaving a sat (equipped with a reusable science instrument, like a thermometer) in orbit of as many bodies as possible, then accept those "gather science from around ..." contracts and reap the rewards.

You don't need to send a new probe to complete these contracts, which lets earn some easy money.

The same works for these "plant a flag on ..." contracts : you can leave a poor lonely Kerbal on each body on flag planting duty.

You can also look for contract asking you to test parts on Kerbin (you can do it on the launchpad) or splashed down (stick a SRB under to part to be tested and head west to the sea), but these won't really help you reach 3 millions.

In late career, I make A LOT of money with the contracts asking you to put a science station in orbit or land a base somewhere. By building small and tight, I can usually earn ~100 000 funds from these.

You can also "piggyback" contracts : if you have a contract asking you to drop a base on the Mun and plant a flag, accept both of them and complete them in one mission. You will pay for one launch, but will receive two rewards.

Also, I found that turning reputation into money didn't work so well, but I may be mistaken (tried in my career when I had unlocked the tech tree and wasn't impressed with the result).

Good luck getting those sweet, sweet funds!

Edited April 17, 2015 by el_coyoto

[Streetwind]

Hi Yuriznikov, the space center buildings can indeed be very expensive. The game as you see it right now is just a short time before its full release, but still a beta. Not everything is tuned properly yet.

One of the things that are not tuned properly are the administration strategies. The largest part of them is completely worthless, while a select few are game-breaking overpowered. There is not even a proper conversion ratio between the currencies - each strategy just randomly makes up some numbers. They're probably all just placeholders. Because of that, even though I know you want to play stock, I suggest adding one simple mod: Sane Strategies. It's just a simple set of config files that makes the administration strategies make sense. Each currency converts into one of the others at fixed rates that are shared across all strategies equally.

While that's unlikely to fix your money problem, it'll at least ensure you're getting a fair deal no matter which strategy you like running with. Then it might even be worth to convert science into funds, too - after all, you're trying to upgrade the science facility, and until you do, accumulating more science is not going to get you anywhere. And there is a lot of science in this game. You can in fact complete the entire tech tree without going to any of the other planets, even if you never gain any science from contracts. There is absolutely no chance you can run out of science, so convert away!

To earn more money from contracts, el_coyoto has the basic tips down: try accepting contracts that go to the same places and complete them together. Try to improve your rocket construction, so that you can achieve the same missions with cheaper, smaller rockets. In my last playthrough, I made most of my cash with satellite launch missions using rockets that cost less than 3000 funds on the pad. And that's with satellites that actually had capabilities (I was using a mod that involves setting up commsats). For stock, you can probably get away with less still.

Except for one thing:

The same works for these "plant a flag on ..." contracts : you can leave a poor lonely Kerbal on each body on flag planting duty.

This doesn't work. The game will not generate any new flag planting contracts for bodies with Kerbals on them, or in vessels landed on them. (Or that might be patched in with the next version... I forget. But it's definitely a thing that's happening or has already happened. Just don't get into the habit of distributing Kerbals everywhere.)

Edited April 17, 2015 by Streetwind

[el_coyoto]

This doesn't work. The game will not generate any new flag planting contracts for bodies with Kerbals on them, or in vessels landed on them. (Or that might be patched in with the next version... I forget. But it's definitely a thing that's happening or has already happened. Just don't get into the habit of distributing Kerbals everywhere.)

Whoops, my bad, thanks for correcting me.

To be honest, I don't really like leaving stranded Kerbals everywhere, so I never really used that trick and thus shouldn't have talked about something I never tested.

I only use flag planting contracts as a mean to fund my science missions.

Edited April 17, 2015 by el_coyoto

[Kerbart]

In late career, I make A LOT of money with the contracts asking you to put a science station in orbit or land a base somewhere. By building small and tight, I can usually earn ~100 000 funds from these.

You can also "piggyback" contracts : if you have a contract asking you to drop a base on the Mun and plant a flag, accept both of them and complete them in one mission. You will pay for one launch, but will receive two rewards.

Some consider it cheating, but it's more using loopholes that may or may not be against the spirit of career mode: fulfulling multiple missions with the same vessel. This is not the same as the "piggyback" contracts that El Coyoto mentioned, but a bit more devious:

• Combining a surface base contract with a space station contract. Make sure your contraption meets both requirements. Then for instance, your contractual Mun base can first fulfill a "put a space station in Kerbin orbit" contract, before you send it of to Mun
  
• Combining multiple "put a satellite in a specific orbit" contract. Again, check at the launch pad that you fulfill all requirements (some contracts require a goo container or materials bay), determine a wise order (increasing semi-major axis and/or inclination for instance, watch out for retrograde orbit contracts)

Also, and you may already know this, read your contracts carefully: space station and surface base contracts only require space for x Kerbals. You don't have to put them actually on board. Just as in real life, your mission profile gets a whole lot cheaper when you can plan one-way missions.

[ghpstage]

If you don't mind using time acceleration quite a bit and haven't already done them, the 'explore' contracts have huge payouts, and the overwhelming majority of them can be completed using a one way probe mission costing less than 10k. When doing them you can also frequently pick up 'science data from around' contracts from the bodies as a (big) bonus as they often appear once you have entered the SOI.

Is this for the second R&D upgrade on the normal setting?

Edited April 17, 2015 by ghpstage

[MarvinKitFox]

Some consider it cheating, but it's more using loopholes that may or may not be against the spirit of career mode: fulfulling multiple missions with the same vessel.

This is cheating only if you feel that fedex "cheats" by driving around a van full of packages, rather that doing a dedicated round trip for each package, each customer.

If you dedicate a separate launch for every contract, you will have a really hard time to make ends meet, at least on the higher difficulty settings.

For me, a typical launch contract itinerary looks like:

Build a rocket with manned capsule(empty), probe core, and 9000m/s in its tank.

Launch, testing docking clamps

fire a sepratron at 11500m, the boffins want to know how it behaves in transonic regime.

orbit at 82km, test that illuminator

raise orbit to 102km, rendezvous with Gus Kerman, invite him onboard. He must be getting thirsty.

have gus fly it to the Mun. Remember to get that high-space-around-mun science data beamed back

Land on mun. Plant a flag.

have Gus walk/fly to a couple more biomes. We rescued him, he needs to earn his pay!

return to Kerbin. Remember to enter a polar orbit, so we can get that "over 18500m" observation of the south pole anomaly.

Try to land near ksp for a good refund. But this is not so important. If you can land on a mission-ground observation spot, so much better.

Total expenditure: about 105 000

Total income, from 6 fulfilled and 4 partial-fulfilled mission: about 1 035 000

Plus one free astronut.

P.S.

This is basically what I did last night.

Might have mixed up a secondary or two with another flight, the mission end cash is about right. Hard difficulty, career, 0.90

Edited April 17, 2015 by MarvinKitFox

[Mister Dilsby]

My biggest single moneymaker was a rover with an ion engine that could hop around Minmus fulfilling survey contracts. The survey contracts you get on Minmus are quite lucrative, and not hard to do at all if you already have assets in position. I would just make suborbital hops on ion from target point to target point, getting close enough to drive on the ground. When the xenon was almost empty I would return to the orbiting service ship for more. It was a bit of farming, yes, but an ion hopper/rover is pretty fun to fly.

[Tex_NL]

I can only agree with the 'combine contracts' philosophy. Many contracts are very easy to combine into a single mission. The first contract pays for the mission, the others are pure profit.

The only thing I want to add is you should learn to build and fly SSTO spaceplanes. A well designed spaceplane can carry a small satellite to orbit at the cost of maybe a few thousand funds worth of fuel. If you land back on the runway you'll get a 100% refund on the plane.

SSTO Spaceplanes are also an excellent solution for rescue missions.

[micr0wave]

i might add that the shuttle option is also pretty good for station contracts, can do 3 in a row when you collected the contracts for each celestial in kerbin soi. As a bonus you can put tiny landers and satelites into the cargohold and earn millions with a single trip

[Kelderek]

Don't convert your reputation to funds or science. That is part of your problem. You need the reputation to get the better contracts. Eventually you can get station contracts that pay upwards of 4 million funds (though most are in the 1-2 million range). I know it seems like you will lose out on funds by not converting reputation to funds, but in the long run you get a lot more funds by having high-rep contracts, not to mention a lot more efficient use of your time.

Combine contracts for the same trip (i.e. put a satellite in orbit around Duna and also land a surface outpost on Duna that holds 7 kerbals - this could be combined for one voyage).

Edited April 17, 2015 by Kelderek

[Kerbart]

This is cheating only if you feel that fedex "cheats" by driving around a van full of packages, rather that doing a dedicated round trip for each package, each customer.

I think we're talking about two different things here. There's testing 25 parts in a single mission. That's absolutely fine. And then there's delivering a satellite in a certain orbit, and then moving that satellite to a different orbit to cash in on that contract. Same thing with recycling the same craft to cash in on a mission to orbit a station around Kerbin, then around Mun, and then land it as surface base on Mun.

To use the Fedex analogy: they'd deliver a laptop to the front door of your house. Then they pick it up, (after succesfully delivering it and getting paid for it) and deliver the same laptop at my house. Would you be happy with that? Would you consider that cheating by Fedex? I would.

You'd have to assume that someone wants a space station of surface base and do things with it; not that they're paying you to see if you're able to put it there and then don't care that you pick it up. The missions where you have to put something in orbit should have a mechanism in place (removing the craft from the game, specially marked parts, whatever) to prevent this from happening and it doesn't. Until then I will be happy to abuse that mechanism, as I see it a a challenge to maximize contract income, but I do find it, in a way, cheating.

[TheXRuler]

I second Tex_NL. A well designed Spaceplane can get you ~60 tons to orbit for ~20k fuel costs. A really well designed Spaceplane can get 300+ tons to orbit for maybe 30k. Rockets with expendable stages are ridiculously wastefull, also, don't convert rep to funds, if anything convert science to funds (not recommended).

Or think about getting something like the stage recovery mod, which allows you to recover spent stages, as long as you attach enough chutes and landing legs.

[Yuriznikov]

Lotta useful responses, thanks guys! Didn't expect 2 pages of info and tips haha.

Ive been playing kerbal for well some time now (250hrs) but Career mode is something i hadn't really gone far into.

I removed all the perks for rep to science and rep to funds (both were 50% dedicated so i didn't get any rep at all) So that might help with getting some better contracts. As i expected i will launch some sats to spam data contracts lol.

A spaceplane was something i was thinking about too, the more i can re-use the better and more efficient everything will get.

[Norcalplanner]

Also make sure to upgrade the mission control building so you can accept more contracts at once. And don't be afraid to say no to the ones that don't interest you or aren't lucrative. Daisy-chaining contracts together in a cost-efficient manner becomes part of the fun/challenge.

And although some people think it's a bit cheaty, consider installing Stage Recovery and/or Kerbal Construction Time. Both allow you to retrieve a portion of the cost of staged parts, so long as there are enough parachutes on them to slow them down below a certain threshold.

Edited April 19, 2015 by Norcalplanner