contracts on hard difficulty are completely illogical!!

[tater]

I want to control how many lousy contracts I am presented with. Current system does nothing of the kind.

If I were to ask you in plain english what the overall strategy of your space program was, would any of the "strategies" in the Admin facility be your answer? I cannot imagine any would. Is anyone's purpose "Outsourced R&D?"

I want a way to denote the overall mission of my facility, and have the contracts/missions generated with that in mind, if for no other reason than to eliminate the clutter. Contract filtering would do the same thing without codifying my current goals, obviously.

If I don't see myself in the space tourism business, I don't want to see those contracts, ever. I'd like to be able to look at satellite launch contracts, but not have to constantly dump them hoping for something decent. Part of the problem is that so many of the contracts are just dumb. Why would I need to test an engine on a suborbital flight? I could see testing it at various altitudes, but why would a part care if the end result was a bare orbit or not? How about a suborbital flight above Minmus? That is different from orbital flight over Minmus in what way? LOL.

Of course with no time mechanics, there is no compelling reason to accept any contract you find uninteresting---with a time mechanic, you might need to take the odd, boring sat launch to keep the lights on at KSC.

Edited May 12, 2015 by tater

[herbal space program]

I've been Getting all sorts of Kerbal rescue and tourist missions from practically the beginning of the game, even though I still don't have any parts with crew capacity >1 after 7 quite productive missions. Putting all of those as well as the RCS port in the 90 science tech tier just seems wrong. I know you can do it by stacking two Mk1 pods, but that's just silly! There are all sorts of examples like this, where stuff that you really should be getting pretty early is not available until mid-game.

...Like why does it take until tier 5 to get a flippin' LADDER, for Kraken's sake? That's just plain stupid!

Edited May 13, 2015 by herbal space program

[KSK]

You are worried the game won't recognize a base ?

Me I'm more worried the game would consider any spacecraft that land as a self-sufficient base.

However you got me to realize I considered the thing in a mission-centric way, aka "the game recognize there is a base because they asked you to put one". Which is not ideal since player will do whatever they want as long as they can.

The flag would make a good milestone... but you still have the same absurdity of tourist asking -like seriously- to go on a planet minutes after the WORLD FIRST ! ... cheap tour bus it is.

Mankind put a flag on the Moon but the only place we can even space tourist seat is LEO.

We can try to consider the problem from another angle :

The tourist only selling point should be the prestige, you should be encouraged to squeeze them in the cheapest spacecraft possible in the hope of breaking even.

I wasn't really worried, I just didn't want to enforce anything on other players and require them to put a base on other planet before sending tourists there. It makes sense to you and me and its certainly the way I'd prefer to play, but other players might not want to. Using the 'flag' contract seemed like a good compromise to prevent the tourist contracts from popping up as soon as you've sent a probe somewhere, whilst letting players deal with those tourists as they see fit.

I still think we have a different opinion of tourists but let's leave that there.

For what it's worth, I like tater's ideas for strategies and the National/Commercial/Tourism sliders. Building on that a little, I think it would be fun to have a computer-controlled rival space agency to play against and to let the contracts you see at least partially reflect the agenda of that rival. For example, if the NPC agency is running a predominantly Tourist strategy, they might put out contracts to have their tourist infrastructure built for them, to resupply that infrastructure, or conceivably to rescue their poor tourists from a mission gone wrong.

That would be quite an extension to the game though so it's probably more wishful thinking than anything else at this stage.

Edit: Just thought of another reason why I personally wouldn't want to see a base as a prerequisite for tourist contracts - the cruise ship model! Build a large vessel in LKO fitted out with plenty of cabin space (at a minimum, one Hitchhiker per two kerbals), cupola modules etc. Give it a small lander for trips to the surface, maybe a second ISRU equipped lander for refueling. This is a luxury vessel - essentially a flying space station all by itself, so no need for infrastructure at the destination planet. It's also not going to be cheap and almost certainly won't be paid for by a single tourism contract. That's OK though - with ISRU it's effectively got unlimited fuel, so the cost can be amortised over several trips.

You know - I think I'm gonna build me one of these!

Edited May 13, 2015 by KSK

[tater]

I agree a Space Race would be a neat career option, but that, too, requires a meaningful sense of time passage.

[Cdr_Zeta]

Hello,

Totally agree...I have contracts to go to Minmus and not even Mun yet...and try to solve the suborbit problem at a range of 10k-16k...ya...I had an idea to to try 2 ships on the same ship and split one off...let one hover at 15km the other to keep going to 70km...each ship has the test part...ya...

I really had to add contracts and change alot of things to make them work in my Science intensive Tech Tree; I am not a happy camper now I have to add contracts for resources, outer planets MOD which I dont mind...not much correlation.

Cmdr Zeta