How to hire more Kerbals?

[Pax Kerbana]

...at a reasonable cost? First hire is 131k roots. No. I refuse to rely on kidnapping Kerbals from other rival space agencies. If they can get up there without my help, they don't need it to get back.

This minor point has killed career for me, it's just not fun. If I could somehow change a setting to get the cost of new hires to a reasonable level, I would resume my career save. Spent time last night but couldn't find any setting or entry in the persistent file that would help. I really don't want to resort to hacking the program root fund.

Sandbox is getting immensely boring so please help a brother out!

Edited May 22, 2015 by Pax Kerbana

[SmashingKirby148]

...at a reasonable cost? First hire is 131k roots. No. I refuse to rely on kidnapping Kerbals from other rival space agencies. If they can get up there without my help, they don't need it to get back.

This minor point has killed career for me, it's just not fun. If I could somehow change a setting to get the cost of new hires to a reasonable level, I would resume my career save. Spent time last night but couldn't find any setting or entry in the persistent file that would help. I really don't want to resort to hacking the program root fund.

Sandbox is getting immensely boring so please help a brother out!

If Sandbox is boring and career is giving you difficulties try Science mode. A mode that I always play and EVERYONE seems to forget about. It has the same science gathering missions, but no funds or contacts. That's my only solution.

[Murph]

Don't hire them, rescue them. I've got 30 on staff now, with another 3 freezing their little green butts off somewhere, waiting on a rescue taxi, and I think I've only ever hired 2, maybe 3, (because rescues were not giving me enough scientists).

But, you don't seem to like that, and don't like the current cost model. Ok, easy solution, decide on a cost model that is acceptable, then (while the game is not running) search for "Funding" in your persistent.sfs, and you can receive whatever discount/rebate/refund/grant/bonus you consider appropriate, to adjust the cost model to something you find acceptable.

[ArchGaden]

As far as the legitimate stock game goes, you have two options. Pay the gold price and buy expensive hires. Pay the iron price and do rescue missions. As you don't want to do either of those, you'll have to cheat or make/use a plugin.

You could modify your save file to reimburse yourself for a portion of the funds spent hiring. The save files are plain text, so it should be pretty simple to modify your funds. I'm not sure if hiring prices are moddable or not, but they likely are. It sounds like that is what you want to do though, in which case, you're better off asking around on the plugin development forum.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forums/30-Plugin-Development-Help-and-Support

[Pax Kerbana]

Thanks guys.

I'm all about the contracts, science just doesn't "do it" for me. It's not that career is difficult, it's that the cost of Kerbals makes ZERO sense. I have no possible idea why they made them so expensive without a slider to adjust. Why even bother to have applicants? Squad clearly wants the player to perform rescue contracts... and once you do one, they're like tomato bugs.

If you need a pilot, you should be able to hire one, not be forced to rescue 5 Kerbals in the hopes you get a pilot.

The "funding option," looks like I will need to resort to that. I guess I'll just figure out how many I want to buy and make a group purchase... then hack myself some roots!

Was really hoping there was a stock way of doing this but I guess they left it out... hopefully they revise the pricing scheme or at a bare minimum make a slider for it.

[ArchGaden]

I'm actually surprised I haven't seen a plugin for this yet. I do like rescue missions... they're even one of my favorite mission types, but I don't like having my staffing depend on them. I've got about 30 kerbanauts now and about half of them are deployed to space stations on and around Kerbin and its moons. I'm looking to setup interplanetary stations now, but don't have enough to staff as many stations as I'd like. New hires are well over 800,000 now. Once I got into the interplanetary game, the rescue missions really slowed down. I'll either end up recycling crew from older stations and leaving behind mountains of unprocessed science... or engaging in some illegitimate reduced cost hiring myself. I might poke around in the xmls and see if there are moddable values somewhere.

[archnem]

Yah this issue annoys me greatly, considering I can launch an entire Mun/Minmus mission for less than the cost of hiring a single kerbal.

This mod might be what you're looking for tho

As far as a stock way to do things.... hit alt-f12 for the debug menu, but continue to hold down for 5-6 seconds. Viola! Cheat yourself some funds to cover the ridiculous hiring costs.

Edited May 21, 2015 by archnem