Some Ideas on Contracts

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

I have a few Ideas on the contracts that might be interesting for you guys:

Survey Contracts: Instead of sending Kerbals to an imaginary location for the surveys, why not send them to Biomes directly?
This would eliminate the notion that these contracts serve no porpuse and are completely made up.
You could have them triggered with or worked into the explore-body-contract as a Sub-Goal.

Explore Body Contracts: These seem to pop up randomly and I have no Idea what triggers them
IMO they should be triggered like this:
Mun & Minmus - after you reached orbit
Duna & Eve - after you reached either Mun or Minmus
Moho, Dres, Jool, Eeloo - after you reached either Duna or Eve.

Tourism Contracts should now also have you to bring Astronauts/Tourisms to a Spacestation or Base for X Number of Days and then return them home.

Part Test Contracts should have you to actually test a part in prototype conditions. For Example:
Run a SRB on the ground (or let it even fly why not) BUT you have to recover it for inspection.
Wheels have to run x Number of Meters on the ground without breaking. Also to be recovered to complete.
Please get rid of the very specific conditions, like "Range of Speed" and "Range of altitude" as it can be very frustrating if you find yourself unable to reach 300m/s with a small Jet engine.
Instead parts should be tested in their natural Habitat (Wheels on the ground, Engines and Fueltanks on the Pad or in Flight, Wings and other Jet-parts on the runway)
It is a Test-Contract after all, not a "Use a prototype as a reliable Part"-Contract.
Also consider please provide us with Fueltanks for Engine-Contracts. I ran a couple of times into the a Contract where I had to test a jet-engine but I had no air-intake unlocked.
The same goes for the Ion-Drive, but it doesnt give you a Xenon-Tank temporarily for the contract so, you cant test the Drive properly.

Satellite Contracts should be less exploity.
After completion, the Satellite should be locked out of your control like handing over the controls to the company that gave you the contract.
Right now you can complete X number of contracts with the same craft and deorbit and recover it afterwards. Which makes no sense to me, really.

I hope these Ideas falls on fertile soil

[Pthigrivi]

Dude I like these a lot, especially the survey biome suggestion. Things may have changed recently (I haven't accepted any in 1.0.5) but I remember them proving pretty frustrating in practice. I can imagine for new players these would be really difficult, and opening it up to biomes would make them a lot more flexible. For that though it would really be handy to have a biome mapping system. 

We've discussed exploration in a couple of other threads, and I do like the idea that they would be unlocked in a logical fashion. I'd be happy with your solution, but there are edge cases where a player might want to send a probe to Jool or Moho before mounting a big crewed Duna mission. I suppose this would depend on the definition of "reached".

Edited January 2, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Workable Goblin]

I'm not sure I would call those "edge cases". It's a lot easier to just send a little probe with a couple of science instruments over to Jool or, especially, Moho when you don't care about getting it back or necessarily getting into orbit than to launch big crewed missions.

[Pthigrivi]

^True, which is why I thought opening up fly-by and orbit advances before land and flag advances might be useful. Things really aren't that much different now, with World Firsts awarding whether you've accepted the Explore contract or not, the trouble is World Firsts are basically invisible to the player until they get there, which means its difficult to know what you're going for or plan on what the reward will be. For clarity they really ought to be folded together so you could more easily see what you're doing in Mission Control. Either way, I agree with Malfunction that unlike other contracts these really should unlock in a logical, understandable way rather than rolling the dice on rep as we do now. 

[Workable Goblin]

Yes, I agree. I've been playing Career lately, after a while doing Sandbox, and the opacity of World Firsts and Explore contracts is rather frustrating.

Actually, the systems I have seen you propose remind me a bit of RP-0's system but with a better UI, have you played RP-0 at all?

[tater]

Caveat: I see the "science" contracts (surveys, etc) as more appropriately coming from your own staff, not a 3d party. 

As such, I would prefer to see the survey contracts be arranged in a way that makes sense for a real program seeking out landing sites. 

Visual (we need a camera part for probes to do this) above a certain altitude, then below a certain altitude in the same region.

Temp/pressure/gravity Same thing, higher to lower.

Surface collection, temp, gravity, seismic, etc at sites within. With he proposed contextual contracts in 1.1, perhaps this is doable. Right now a visual has just a few places to take data. About about the above alt X versions have a WIDE area (so your orbit need only be roughly close, and it's not twitchy about clicking the crew report at the right instant), then have it have many such readings as part of the "contract." It will then pick a subset of these for "below alt X." Then, of this subset, it picks 1-2 landing sites as separate missions. Note that the first pass "above X" could be set so the system generates one set of survey locations per "biome" (should be geome or something, "biome" requires life).

[r_rolo1]

Oh, let me comment on this:

17 hours ago, MalfunctionM1Ke said:

Survey Contracts: Instead of sending Kerbals to an imaginary location for the surveys, why not send them to Biomes directly?
This would eliminate the notion that these contracts serve no porpuse and are completely made up.
You could have them triggered with or worked into the explore-body-contract as a Sub-Goal.

Well, this would assume that you have access to the Biomes in game in a non-cheaty or awkward way  Besides that, I can agree with this ... after we get some redrawing of the "Biomes" ( "Geographical zones" was too long?  ) to resemble more actual terrain zoning of areas of interest ( or not interest )

17 hours ago, MalfunctionM1Ke said:

Explore Body Contracts: These seem to pop up randomly and I have no Idea what triggers them
IMO they should be triggered like this:
Mun & Minmus - after you reached orbit
Duna & Eve - after you reached either Mun or Minmus
Moho, Dres, Jool, Eeloo - after you reached either Duna or Eve.

I can't agree with this, since this doesn't fit with the planetary system we have in hands. Say, if you can land something on the Mun and bring it back ( and if you have ablator shields ), you can do a explore Laythe contract ( the dV for a Mun and back mission is enough to send something to the Jool system and you can do the rest by aerobraking ). OTOH a explore Ike contract might be harder than a explore Dres one ( say, if you can't aerobrake in Duna ).

Other objection is that it disregards the possibility of tranfer windows not beating right with your calendar and force you to disregard good oportunities just because you haven't done a step in the ladder. Say, in current stock career, you'll have a window to Moho and another to Jool before you have one to either Duna or Eve. So, if I had advanced enough in technology to be able to do a Moho or a Jool ( or any of the Jool moons ) mission ( something that isn't even that hard ), I would have to twindle my thumbs when those windows came by , just because some arbitrary rule said I can't gain anything from going to Moho before going to Duna ...

That said, the current 1.0.5 is OK by me. I would not change it in this aspect

17 hours ago, MalfunctionM1Ke said:

Tourism Contracts should now also have you to bring Astronauts/Tourisms to a Spacestation or Base for X Number of Days and then return them home.

Agreed. You could also keep the current touch and go contracts ( think RL Virgin project ), but more permanent stays would also be nice.

17 hours ago, MalfunctionM1Ke said:

Part Test Contracts should have you to actually test a part in prototype conditions. For Example:
Run a SRB on the ground (or let it even fly why not) BUT you have to recover it for inspection.
Wheels have to run x Number of Meters on the ground without breaking. Also to be recovered to complete.
Please get rid of the very specific conditions, like "Range of Speed" and "Range of altitude" as it can be very frustrating if you find yourself unable to reach 300m/s with a small Jet engine.
Instead parts should be tested in their natural Habitat (Wheels on the ground, Engines and Fueltanks on the Pad or in Flight, Wings and other Jet-parts on the runway)
It is a Test-Contract after all, not a "Use a prototype as a reliable Part"-Contract.
Also consider please provide us with Fueltanks for Engine-Contracts. I ran a couple of times into the a Contract where I had to test a jet-engine but I had no air-intake unlocked.
The same goes for the Ion-Drive, but it doesnt give you a Xenon-Tank temporarily for the contract so, you cant test the Drive properly.

Well, first of all, I think the current part contracts by themselves are reasonable, including the Range stuff. First of all, I do see the current contracts as ignition sequence tests aka dry runs. Those are done IRL so no issue with that ... and OFC something that works at surface level might not work at mach 3 and 15 Km high, so I'm Ok with that too.

What I don't like is that this part contracts are the only ones we have  If we had some more types, like the ones you suggest, it would be better ...

17 hours ago, MalfunctionM1Ke said:

Satellite Contracts should be less exploity.
After completion, the Satellite should be locked out of your control like handing over the controls to the company that gave you the contract.
Right now you can complete X number of contracts with the same craft and deorbit and recover it afterwards. Which makes no sense to me, really.

Well, I can see your point, but also note that the company is not asking you to put a sat they made into space ( what happens IRL and the idea that seems to be behind your sugestion ), but that you build and put in a certain orbit one sat that belongs to your program. As you retain ownership of the sat and you're not bound to keep it there for any time bigger than 10 seconds ( other thing that could be done is to enforce stabilty for more time ... say, a year or two ) you're in your right to do two contracts with the same sat ...

So , in other words: IMHO you could either ( or both ) put predelivered by the contract company sats to orbit ( and then lose ownership ) and/or keep the current contracts, but enfoce stabilty for more time. Both would adress your point without major fuss

Edited January 3, 2016 by r_rolo1

[tater]

I hate most of the pats tests, and many are note remotely reasonable. Testing in a suborbital trajectory over an airless world matters vs testing anywhere else above the atmosphere how, exactly? There are many that are pretty absurd.

[r_rolo1]

Just now, tater said:

I hate most of the pats tests, and many are note remotely reasonable. Testing in a suborbital trajectory over an airless world matters vs testing anywhere else above the atmosphere how, exactly? There are many that are pretty absurd.

Well, being in orbit in theory assumes you are up there longer, so  in theory it is akin of a longer exposure to vacuum. Again, in theory 

[tater]

I could satisfy a suborbital flight to any body via a trajectory that hits it, the only difference might be if it cares about first being in the SoI. So you could plot a collision with Eeloo in X years, and you'd be inbound for years

[Pthigrivi]

15 hours ago, Workable Goblin said:

Actually, the systems I have seen you propose remind me a bit of RP-0's system but with a better UI, have you played RP-0 at all?

I haven't, but it sounds interesting. I play around with mods from time to time but generally play stock. Maybe I'll check it out before 1.1 drops.