What are some good strategies to most quickly get through the "grindy" part of career mode?

[FancyMouse]

I mean, what's the point of unlocking all the high-tech stuff at the end of the tree if you're not ever going to use it?

You're totally correct, but I'm looking at the stuff that I bought but never used in my home and I'm starting to feel a little bit bad:(

[MerlinsMaster]

Without knowing your skill level this is really hard to answer, but essentially what you need to do is satisfy as many contracts as possible with every launch, yet also concentrate on getting as much science as possible in that same launch. You should - in a single flight - test a part, reach a destination, and/or bring something along to satisfy as many contracts as you an, as well as take every single bit of science you can along the way.

This means bringing a goo pod AND a Science Jr along, as well as a thermometer and any other science doodads you have. You should take readings EVERYWHERE and your scientist (yes, bring one) should be doing more EVAs than Mark Watney to take the science and reset the goo and jr. The moment you can, you should send him to both Mun and Minmus to land and hopefully land several times on Minmus, in different biomes. He should plant flags to complete contracts anywhere he lands, and every time you complete a contract mid-mission you should hop back to mission control to find another one.

It's a pain, sure, but that one mission will be far less of a pain than 20 individual mission, and be far more profitable. And the grind will pretty much be over. I personally tend to do 4 launches in the early career: One suborbital, one orbital, one to Mun, and one to Minmus. Then I'm ready to go anywhere.

I do "try" to do that, but it's not a technique I've learned to master yet.

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The one good thing science-wise in 1.x is that now a 0-level rookie scientist can reset the Goo and Material experiments by himself, in the field. Used to be, only the Mobile Processing Lab could do that. Shamelessly exploiting this is the key to getting through the grind.

Do what you need to do in the very early going to unlock the following stuff:

* Goo, Materials, and whatever other science instruments are within easy reach. NOTE: using the DMagic Orbital Science mod really helps here as it provides many new instruments (so your ship can get more science per biome) and also lucrative contracts (in both cash and science) to use them.

* The OKTO probe core, which can do SAS. Once you have this, you no longer need pilots at all.

* Enough 1.25m, maybe a few 2.5m rocket parts to build a lander with about 3000m/s dV, enough TWR to land on Minmus with full tanks (this doesn't require much), and a rocket capable of getting this lander to Minmus. This needs the OKTO core as well.

Once you have this, put your 0-level scientist in it and send him to Minmus. Just before you touch the ground, run all the experiments that will work in "space just above". Land. EVA, collect all the data and put it in the pod, resetting the Goo and Materials. Then run all the experiments on the ground, plus get EVA reports and a surface sample. Store all this in the pod, reset the Goo and Materials again. Then hop to the next biome and repeat the process. You should be able to hit 3, maybe 4 biomes this way and still have enough fuel to get home no problem. You'll come home with a couple thousand science points. Spend them, upgrade the ship (especially with more instruments) and then go get the remaining Minmus biomes. Again, you'll get a few thousand science. By now you'll have all the 2.5m rocket parts, maybe even some of the 3.75m. Use these to repeat the whole process on Mun, which takes a bigger lander due to its higher gravity.

Doing things this way, you can pretty much clear out the tech tree in 4-5 relatively simple, not-all-that-repetitive missions.

I am continually amazed at your ability to tear this game apart and find out how it really ticks! Well done. I am definitely going to give this a try.

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Check out my tutorial.

Lots of good ideas here.

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*edit*

Do yourself a favor and check out the "Caveman Challenge" thread. Watch how they do it.

Getting started needn't be grindy.

Best,

-Slashy

Pretty interesting idea.

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A lot of it comes down to knowing where to find science. You'll discover that with default settings (Normal difficulty), it's actually quite quick and easy to get through the early game.

Also, focus on the world-first record contracts. They throw absurd amounts of free money after you for basically doing what you would be doing anyway (accelerating to orbital speeds etc). You can make half a million funds in a few simple launches with only one or two tech nodes unlocked.

I usually take my time with early career mode, since I quite enjoy it. But if I wanted to hurry up, I would do it the following way:

1.) Accept the contract to generate a crew report from the launchpad. Put a pod with two goo canisters on the launchpad. Generate a crew report and activate both goo canisters. Go on EVA. Generate an EVA report while hanging on the ladder ("Flying above Kerbin's shores"), put report into the pod, drop down to the launchpad, get another EVA report, get back into the pod, recover

2.) Unlock Basic Rocketry. Unlock Engineering 101. Accept the contract to launch a vessel.

3.) Build rocket with a pod, a parachute, three goo canisters, a decoupler, a Hammer solid booster (throttle to 2/3rds thrust), and a quartett of basic fins. Launch. Get goo from flying low. Transmit crew report from flying low. Get crew report and goo from flying high. Land somewhere. Go EVA. Get EVA report on the ladder. Take all data from pod, store all data in pod (resets the crew report). Get EVA report from the ground. Get back in pod. Get goo and crew report while landed. Recover. (I forget if a single Hammer is enough to get above 18 km. If it isn't, take a Flea for a second stage.)

4.) Unlock Survivability.

5.) Repeat the mission in 3.), except this time you remove the 3 goo canisters and pack 4 (yes, 4) Science Bays instead. Make liberal use of radial parachutes to ensure you land without wrecking your materials bays. Don't be afraid to build so you land sideways, since your tall stack of science bays will tip over anyway. Get material science from launchpad, flying low, flying high, and wherever you land.

6.) Unlock General Rocketry. Accept mission to escape the atmosphere. Accept mission to get into orbit. If you happen to have 45 science left, also unlock Basic Science.

7.) Build rocket with a pod, a parachute, two materials bays, and a service bay containing two goo canisters. If you managed to unlock thermometers, take a bevvy of them to the pod (not into the service bay, you don't have action groups yet). I recommend 6. Then a decoupler, and below that, a two-stage liquid fuel rocket capable of getting you into orbit. Yes, it's possible with 18 tons and 30 parts... easily.

8.) Depending on how much dV you managed to pack, get yourself into a polar orbit (more costly but preferrable) or an equatorial orbit (less costly). Get goo, crew report and material science from low orbit. If you brought thermometers, remember to get data for launchpad, flying low, flying high and low orbit. Do EVA reports from all biomes you pass over - if your orbit is polar, you can get all biomes on Kerbin in one flight.

9.) Lift your apoapsis above 250,000m. Get crew report, EVA report, goo and material science (and thermometer data) for high in space over Kerbin. At apoapsis, burn to drop your periapsis to 0 km, touching the surface exactly. Counterintuitively, this reentry is gentler than a 35km periapsis from 70x70 km; the service bay will easily take the heat and also has a great impact tolerance for landing on. Try aiming at KSC. The earlier you start practicing, the more funds you will recover from each mission. But wherever you land, remember to check if there's science left to do.

10.) You have now completed the starter World-First record contracts and should be a rich Kerbal. Upgrade buildings in this order, as funds allow: Mission Control, Tracking Station, Launchpad, VAB. You may not have enough funds for all of them, but you can now have up to 7 contracts at once, which lets you farm money efficiently. Also unlock Basic Science (if you haven't already), Advanced Rocketry, Stability and Flight Control. You are now able to go to Mun and Minmus, as well as get science from solar orbit. This took you just four flights, and zero dumb rolling around KSC for dumb science.

You can get by with even less flights easily, but that starts to get to unwieldly for my tastes, and saves little actual time (in fact you'll probably end up spending more time due to having to build large, wobbly vessels than you save by not flying a quick suborbital hop).

This looks like a pretty good tutorial. Will try it out and see how it works.

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To help with science grind, i reccomend installing [X]science mod. This lets you know what science is available in your current biome, and makes the "collect data everywhere" part much more efficient.

For funds, if you get tired of repeating the same contracs over and over (in particular the "take tourists to kerbin orbit" and "launch a satellite to kerbin orbit" ones) download mechjeb and let it automate it. I'm a big believer that you should try to do stuff first without mechjeb's help, but once youve repeated something 20 times and could do it in your sleep mechjeb helps reduce the grindyness of doing it again.

Yeah, I have [x]science. It's very helpful. Another really awesome one to have is Science Alert. It tells you whenever there's a new experiment to run.

I agree about MechJeb. If NASA does it that way, there's no reason for us not to.

[ghpstage]

Still true in 1.0.4.

Yup, you have to have the ability to EVA in space for this to work. That should always be one of the 1st building upgrades you get.

Yeah, fired up KSP again for the first time since 1.04 came out and managed exactly the same Mun landing and return on the fourth launch as before, on hard with a 0 cash start. Don't even need to grind lots of biomes on the first launch either, just a scientist with goo's and a chute strapped to a flea, launched into the water to get the 30 points needed to get goo and a science jr into orbit on the second launch.

To those struggling with the grinding, how long in terms of time and number of launches are you taking to achieve the key milestones of getting into orbit, getting to and orbiting the Mun, and landing on it or Minmus? and what are you finding yourself grinding at to achieve them?

Or is it only later things, like upgrading the VAB that people are struggling with? Make sure to check for new worlds first contracts while once you tick off existing ones, theres a bunch of less obvious ones that appear at times worth surprising amounts, such as the 30k funds offered (on hard) for just returning from your first orbit!

Edited August 1, 2015 by ghpstage

[GeneralVeers]

The brick wall I ran into in Career mode turned out to be the VAB and the launch pad.

I overengineer a lot. I think big. I build ships that test five parts in a single launch (my third one being an assymetrical mess quite appropriately named "DerpStar 1"). The part count limit in the VAB and the weight limit at the launch pad really slowed me down.

[GoSlash27]

The brick wall I ran into in Career mode turned out to be the VAB and the launch pad.

I overengineer a lot. I think big. I build ships that test five parts in a single launch (my third one being an assymetrical mess quite appropriately named "DerpStar 1"). The part count limit in the VAB and the weight limit at the launch pad really slowed me down.

There's that

KSP really rewards the ability to operate efficiently, especially in the early going. If you can accomplish the job using lower mass, fewer/ less advanced parts, and lower cost then starting out isn't "grindy" at all. You end up collecting science and unlocking parts faster than you can use them.

It's only when you tend to overengineer that you'll get bogged down. The standard "moar boosters" mentality leaves you stranded when mass and part count limits preclude their use.

I take the opposite approach: I figure out the bare minimum required to accomplish the goal and then build that with whatever safety factor I have left. If it's not quite good enough, then I look for ways to remove bloat instead of adding thrust or fuel.

Best,

-Slashy

[capi3101]

So I put my normal career game on hiatus over the weekend to test out Streetwind's and Geschosskopf's strategies, or rather to see how hard it would be to bridge the two together. Got through Streetwind's strategy, though I did have to add a couple of steps to it, as follows:

6.) Unlock General Rocketry. Accept mission to escape the atmosphere. Accept mission to get into orbit. If you happen to have 45 science left, also unlock Basic Science.

6A.) Upgrade the Astronaut Complex. You'll need the ability to EVA soon.

6B.) Go to the SPH. Attach a Girder Segment to the back end of a pod, attach four Materials Bays to it, then attach four Goo containers to them. If you unlocked Basic Science, attach four thermometers as well. Tip the whole assembly so that the pos is facing upward. Launch, run the experiments and gather a crew report. Recover.

6C.) If you haven't already, grab Basic Science. If you have the science, unlock Advanced Rocketry as well.

7.) Build rocket with a pod, a parachute, two materials bays, and a service bay containing two goo canisters. If you managed to unlock thermometers, take a bevvy of them to the pod (not into the service bay, you don't have action groups yet). I recommend 6. Then a decoupler, and below that, a two-stage liquid fuel rocket capable of getting you into orbit. Yes, it's possible with 18 tons and 30 parts... easily.

I run with FAR, and I needed the Advanced Rocketry parts (the FL-T400 and Terrier in particular) to build a ship capable of performing the mission described in steps 7-9. I was able to grab Basic Science at the end of step 5.

I did have something like 150 science points after unlocking Stability and Flight Control (leaving Aviation and General Construction available on the 45-point tier); if I wanted to transition to Geschosskopf's strategy from there, what would y'all recommend unlocking next? I ultimately did General Construction (for struts) and then Fuel Systems (for fuel ducts/bigger gas tanks) - though I wonder if either Electrics (for the OKTO probe and solar panels) or Space Exploration (for the barometer) would've been a better choice.

Quick question for Geschosskopf: do you still recommend the use of your science bomb lander design from 0.23?

[Geschosskopf]

Quick question for Geschosskopf: do you still recommend the use of your science bomb lander design from 0.23?

No, because Science works differently now. That lander was designed around the premise that you needed a Mobile Processing Lab to reset Goo and Materials, which is no longer the case. So now you just need 1 of each and any rookie scientist to reset them in the field. The only advantage the MPL has now is that it can store duplicates (such as multiple Goo reports from the same biome) whereas pods can't. So you can only save one copy anyway, so no sense in having more.

Because scientists can't use SAS, you need a probe core that can. The 1st such is the OKTO, so unlocking that needs to be a high priority.

I really recommend Universal Storage and DMagic Orbital Science. When you have both, you can stick the Goo and Materials in the US section (along with a bunch of other instruments) to make the lander less bulky and easier to design.

Check out this post, which shows how I made a Minmus biome-hopper. The lander is the important part. I did it kinda Apollo-style in this post because I had a docking contract but having a separate CSM isn't necessary. Anyway, I put all the stock instruments around the hatch, and the Goo, Materials, and a number of DMagic instruments in the US ring at the bottom, all for easy access by the EVA scientist.

Edited August 3, 2015 by Geschosskopf

[capi3101]

Alright, I'll check that out, thanks.

[capi3101]

Okay...so I got Bob to Minmus yesterday for the first time (I don't get to play KSP in much more than 45-90 minute spurts, and I was filling the 18 day gap with doing contracts for money - with the exception of the SPH, Admin Building and Tracking Station I was able to get everything fully leveled up at KSC, those three buildings are at a solid Level 2). Stock science parts only - I had goo containers, materials bays, thermometers and barometers locked. Built a probe-controlled capsule like Geschosskopf suggested with these instruments and shot the whole thing off to Minmus. Plan was to hit three or four biomes, tops - I wound up with a good enough position and enough delta-V to hit seven of Minmus's nine biomes (missed the Flats and the Poles - could've hit the Poles but the numbers said I wouldn't make it back to Kerbin again if I did). Wound up netting just shy of 4000 science from the single trip.

Now, I have a question: I have unlocked the other three stock science instruments at this point (gravioli detector, seismometer and atmospheric technobabble-thingy). If I'm reading the wiki's science page correctly, the base/maximum science values of those three instruments are equal (and in fact slightly higher than) the combined values of the four instruments I brought. It seems to me that a second trip to Minmus with those three instruments with visits to those two biomes is in order, yet the old wisdom was that once you hit a biome it's generally not worth it to hit it again. Does the old wisdom still apply, or should I begin plans for a return trip? Does it still take four visits to a biome with a specific instrument (or one visit with four of the same instrument) to clean it out entirely?

It's pretty nice to be only about 25 days into a career save and already have nuclear engines and mining capabilities. I'll just throw that out there - these strategies work, no question.

[Streetwind]

The atmospheric technobabble-thingy doesn't work on or around Minmus IIRC.

The gravioli detector on the other hand does, and it has a pretty big payout. Especially since it, in contrast to all other experiments, is biome-specific even in space high over <body>. So you can get 27 different gravioli scanner reports for Minmus alone - 9 landed, 9 in space low, and 9 in space high. That's a lot of science. The 9 seismometer reports for landing are just a side dish at that point.

Bonus: launch the craft into a polar Kerbin orbit, and grab low and high space gravioli scans for all the Kerbin biomes before you leave for Minmus. You can transfer out of a polar orbit just fine, you just need to pay a little more attention to the precise time at which to leave in order to get a Minmus encounter. It may even make the transfer a little easier in some ways, because Minmus' inclination ceases to matter entirely.

Edited August 19, 2015 by Streetwind