Cash shortage in deep career?

[Agate]

So I'm pretty deep into career mode: I've got a good orbital station, small 9-kerbal Mun and Minmus bases, and a couple of pet asteroids, and my unmanned Duna mission is en route; waiting for Eve to come into alignment next. Labs are spitting out science at a pretty good clip, I've got about 1000 banked up now.

But I can't spend it until I can scrape together 2.4 million Kerbucks to upgrade my research facilities to access the next science tier. Holy damn that's a lot of money. I can fill a lot of contracts pretty easily: science contracts for the Mun and Minmus consist of poking my head out of the base airlock for a second, but that's tens of thousands here and there, and I need millions.

My only high-value contract is "build a Mun base", for about a million Kerbucks. I've got that started, but it demands that my station have ungodly amounts of fuel and oxidizer in it. Rather than carting all that stuff up from Kerbin, my plan was to mine it on-site. But I can't get the mining technologies until I upgrade the research facilities. Catch-22.

I'm not sure this is a gameplay question: I think the solution is to just keep plugging away one contract at a time. But I am curious: is this a common problem?

- - - Updated - - -

On a possibly related note: my contractees are *obsessed* with Pol. Just did a forum search that found this thread about a Pol bug. I wonder if fixing that will solve my cash problem.

Edited May 17, 2015 by Agate

[Snark]

My biggest cash cow has been "build a new station in orbit around the Sun." Sometimes it wants lotsa kerbal capacity, sometimes it wants a science lab, but usually it's pretty doable with a simple thing I can slap together in a couple of minutes in the VAB. No special babysitting needed to get to the right place. Just make sure it has plenty of dV, point the correct end towards space, and floor it. Once the burn is done and it's on an escape trajectory, it's just a matter of waiting for it to leave Kerbin's SOI.

These contracts are curiously lucrative, given the minimal amount of elbow grease required-- they usually pay out in the $370K range, sometimes more.

Most hilarious fail: I was impatient and didn't want to wait for days of coasting (yes, I know about timewarp, I'm just stingy about calendar time for no rational reason) and piled on the delta vee to the craft. Launched, waited until it left SOI at a blisteringly fast clip ... hmm, that's odd, doesn't seem to be completing the contract. What gives? Took me a minute to realize that I had so vastly overkilled the velocity that I was on an escape trajectory out of the Sun, and therefore not in "orbit." Oops.

[A_name]

You can always cheat and give yourself cash by editing your save file.

What? Who said that?

[Streetwind]

On a possibly related note: my contractees are *obsessed* with Pol. Just did a forum search that found this thread about a Pol bug. I wonder if fixing that will solve my cash problem.

This is a bug that was fixed in 1.01. Have you upgraded to 1.02 yet? If yes, then the bug probably sticks around because it's already in your persistence file. It should be possible to edit the file to correct the problem (this is not cheating because you're fixing an officially acknowledged bug). Open a thread in the support forum and ask for the steps necessary to make this edit.

With that bug fixed, you should be getting a much better selection of contracts, which should let you earn money more easily.

[Agate]

My biggest cash cow has been "build a new station in orbit around the Sun."

Yeah, now that I've solved the Pol problem, I've picked up that one. It so happens that I've got a spare segment of my near-Kerbin-orbit station I'm not using... (it was intended to be the central hub, but I didn't realize that a Radial Attachment Point is nothing like a Clamp-O-Tron Docking Port until I tried to dock with one.)

[Streetwind]

Beware the "must launch new station" stipulation of the contract! Sometimes if you dock with an older vessel with a new one, it considers the combination of the two as an old vessel as well, thus making it incapable of fulfilling the contract.

[KerikBalm]

Yea... I just upgraded my R&D facility yesterday... now I'm too broke to launch a rocket with ISRU.

I've got multiple missions en route, so the funds should be coming... soon

I accepted some contracts (build a surface base on Duna), just for the advance. I thought with working ISRU, I'd be able to do these missions cheaply

On top of that, my space program has transitioned to exclusively SSTO launched payload to LKO... and I'd like to keep that up...

I have "light" and "medium" lifters... but for the ISRU, I want a "heavy" lifter.

With a SSTO lifter, and refueling via ISRU, missions should be really cheap to complete from here on out... but I still have a funding problem.

- something like this:

https://scontent-mxp.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/13723_10103556942001543_6078544185263135493_n.jpg?oh=fc6d9d1f92cfba80b592c0889f14c8fc&oe=55C2FE83

which, as you can see here.... is *not* cheap

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xtp1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/11110187_10103556943613313_4928631009340909867_n.jpg?oh=e1ceddaf233240c38bc7ad618ca3f82f&oe=55C44F3C&__gda__=1443255946_eef6133fbfebe21fc2168f67fffeab43

- Sure, its fully reusable, but its quite an investment to launch

or this

https://scontent-mxp.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/t31.0-8/s720x720/11032221_10103550674651363_2148940416804389397_o.jpg

https://scontent-mxp.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/11164685_10103550674182303_2013766903372658940_n.jpg?oh=2d49878dc6048f30a6a35b04c005f83d&oe=55D2AE68

Both require about half a million to launch, both require a runway upgrade (nearly another half a million), both are pushing the 255 part limit, and to make full use of the payload capacity, I would need to upgrade the VAB...

The ISRU payload I designed costs about 100k.

I need at least another million to invest in the re-usable lifter, runway upgrade, and ISRU base... maybe another 2.2 million if the SPH needs upgrading..

Looks like I'll go back to expendable rockets for a bit, which sucks....

Or I can grind sat contracts and LKO rescue missions.

It costs less than 1k in fuel for me to use a SSTO for a rescue mission, or to launch a sat (though I then have to factor in the cost of the sat, as I don't bother recovering those)

[Laie]

I'm not sure this is a gameplay question: I think the solution is to just keep plugging away one contract at a time. But I am curious: is this a common problem?

- - - Updated - - -

On a possibly related note: my contractees are *obsessed* with Pol. Just did a forum search that found this thread about a Pol bug. I wonder if fixing that will solve my cash problem.

Have you even been to Duna or Eve? Pol shouldn't show up before these two. If it shows up anyway, you've got the buggy version.

More generic:

It took me some grinding to upgrade the facilities, but not much (default career settings). There's quite a few contracts that will pay 200-500k. Mostly stations and tourism. You can reject contracts without penalties, so you may reject the chaff until something good comes up. However, "Milestone" contracts can't be rejected (Fly By X, Explore Y) -- these clutter your list until you eventually accept and complete them. Having a good reputation helps, as it increases the number and value of contracts that may be on offer at any given time.

Hint: the VIPs demanding a (sub-)orbital spaceflight around Kerbin don't pay very well, but give a good boost to reputation.

[Agate]

Hacked my save to get rid of the Pol exploration, so no new Pol missions, but I do have a Pol milestone that I can't cancel. Is it safe to edit the save to remove this milestone contract, or will that mess everything up?

[ArchGaden]

I haven't had any funding trouble, but I also haven't encountered the Pol bug (probably your big problem). I've got all my facilities fully upgraded (except airplane hanger as I don't fly many planes), about 5M in funds, and my tech tree is nearly complete. I haven't felt much financial pressure yet. I do take all rescue contracts, so I don't have to hire any kerbals to man bases... that saves insane amounts of funding and the rescue contracts are lucrative as well. Other than that, I just take missions that align roughly with what I want to do anyway and the money keeps pouring in.

If you finished your tech tree or get desperate for funding, you can use an administrative policy to trade science for funding. Science labs generate insane amounts of science over time (as well as often being lucrative contracts to place). Similarly you could trade reputation, but science is probably the first to go as the tech tree finishes.

I notice most contracts expire in days... so if you want to roll up new contracts, just timewarp for a week or two. Late in career, you should be running interplanetary missions anyway, so you'll be timewarping a lot. If you need the funding, stop the timwarp every 10 days or so and check out the contracts. I've been farming that to get rescues to man my future Eve/Duna missions while my infrastructure is being placed.

One major thing that helps me is having reusable space infrastructure in place. I have mining landers, orbital refineries, clamping refuelers, and tugs scattered around kerbin, mun, and minmus right now. Soon I'll have them around Eve, Duna, and related moons as well. Have infrastructure there and ready to use allows me to send up much smaller crafts that can leverage infrastructure to get something done. I generally place the infrastructure during related contracts. For instance, my mining infrastructure on the mun and minmus were placed during ore recovery missions. My tugs came from earlier rescue and asteroid redirect missions.

[Ulzgoroth]

I notice most contracts expire in days... so if you want to roll up new contracts, just timewarp for a week or two.

You don't need to wait for them to expire. Just reject them and they'll be replaced.

[ArchGaden]

You don't need to wait for them to expire. Just reject them and they'll be replaced.

Good to know! I've never actually declined a contract because I didn't want to disappoint the contract administrator kerbal. He's always so enthusiastic with is "Awwwww wiiight!" and similar kerbalian encouragements. I probably still won't have the heart to actually press that (X).

[KatzOhki]

If you reject contracts he just says "yeah that was a crazy idea anyways..." and stuff like that.

[celem]

Funds is usually the throttle on any given run through of the career for me, I end up with sci faster than I can run the R&D building up like the OP. The way I solve this is with the policy building, usually with a minor sci->funds policy and then a heavy rep->funds one. What do I want rep for anyway? Its something I always gain at some rate and never lose, its the one the currency crying out to be converted... Go Fundraise!