Macguffinite economy

[Temstar]

Currently career mode has two ways of making money - Strategy and contract grinding. Strategy converts Science or Rep into fund, but the return is rather low so it's fairly pointless. People have a beef with contract grinding as the contracts are rather arbitrary method of getting your space program to do stuff for fund. Logically there's little reason why a company would pay you to put up a space station for YOURSELF then pay you for it.

One method to inject some life into career mode is to introduce a macguffinite economy. A "macguffinite" in this case refers to some valuable substance that can only be obtained in space away from Kerbin which provides a motivation and income source for the space program.

In many ways ore is already a macguffinite. It's an incredibly useful resource that can be converted into LFO and monoprop, which can then be further converted to electricity and delta-V. Unfortunately the only people who really need electricity and delta-V is you yourself, and understandably returning full ore tanks back to Kerbin for recovery produces very little profit.

Instead of ore, we could have another resource that may or may not have direct application in the space program but is in high demand on Kerbin and can only be obtained in large quantities in space. It can be anything: blutonium, helium-3, magnetic monopole, room temperature superconductor, anti-hydrogen, tiberium from Magic Boulder, even a cure for male pattern boldness. Whatever it is its price on recovery makes it worthwhile to harvest it and return it to Kerbin.

Assuming the macguffinite resides in regolith just like Ore does, the current ISRU equipment could then be made to do dual purpose and be used for macguffinite mining. Survey scanner for example would have a toggle to switch between Ore and Macguffinite overylay, and ISRU converter would also be able to convert raw macguffinite ore into refined macguffinite. All that's needed is a new set of tanks to store the macguffinite. Although I would suggest we could also make use of a set of low tech extraction and refining equipment that is rather inefficient and must be manned by engineers and scientists to do work. I believe the current stock resource system is already setup with this in mind and it's trivial to add another resource.

We don't have to be restricted to one macguffinite either, it could be something interesting like there are two macguffinite, one tends to accumulate on worlds closer to Kerbol (eg, helium-3), while the other tend to accumulate on worlds away from Kerbol (eg, monopoles) with Kerbin SOI having a bit of both but not particularly rich in either.

A player driven economy like this would make career players really "own" their space programs instead of feeling like a grind.

Edited February 17, 2016 by Temstar

[KerikBalm]

"Logically there's little reason why a company would pay you to put up a space station for YOURSELF then pay you for it. "

Pretend its a government, or they get to use it for research,

"Strategy converts Science or Rep into fund, but the return is rather low so it's fairly pointless."

At 100 funds per science, and a lab filled with 500 data over time makes 2,500 data, and one trip to duna gets me enough data to refill the lab many many times, and a trip to a new body easily yields thousands of new science poitns from all the various scans... with tthat strategy I can budget missions with costs in of hundreds of thousands of funds without worring about contracts.

Of course, if possible i can also take a couple tourists along too.

Once you develop the tech you need to have cheap acces to LKO, its easy to make missions profitable just by taking a lab along. With ISRU, i can move that lab from one body to another, many many times, having it produce millions of funds over the course of time

[Sir_Robert]

Personally I use Science Funding mod for just that.

Effectively, in my game the government sponsors my program based on direct results. I can take along contracts to make a little on the side, but my basic income is purely science funding

 

[mikegarrison]

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Pretend its a government, or they get to use it for research

Yeah. Kongress is paying the bills. Or maybe it's Kollywood, and they want the video.

... Not that it's a bad idea to have some rare and valuable space resource. Actually, it's a very good idea.

Edited February 17, 2016 by mikegarrison

[Captain Sierra]

12 hours ago, Temstar said:

-snip-

Outside of new tanks*, all of this can be done via modulemanager work. Granted my modulemanager-fu is rusty. As an interim solution until we get confirmation or denial of this from the powers that be, this could very quickly be hacked into a mod.

*A fuel switch patch for stock ore tanks can even solve this problem, allowing it to be tweakable in-VAB. Ideally this would pair with a texture switch but if the goal is get a mod working with zero artistic work, it can be done.

[Snark]

Actually, there are plenty of mods out there which provide macguffinite equivalents.

In RoverDude's MKS/UKS, you can mine uranium.  That stuff is incredibly valuable.  Takes forever to mine enough to make a load... but it's amusingly dense.  A 2.5m canister of the stuff that's only slightly longer than the 16-ton LFO fuel tank has a mass of over a hundred tons.  Try aerobraking that!  Anyway, you can make tons of cash mining/refining the stuff and sending back to Kerbin.

Or there's Karborundum, from the Karbonite Plus mod, also super valuable (worth tons of cash if you return it, or very valuable fuel for K+'s sci-fi engines).

Metal from Extraplanetary Launchpads is also fairly pricey-- not as much as the abovementioned ones, but a cargo container of the stuff that's reasonably compact and only 4 tons empty (more like 100 tons full) is worth something like a quarter-million funds, IIRC.

I'm sure there are others out there, those are just the ones that occur to me off the top of my head.

[DerekL1963]

On 2/17/2016 at 7:10 PM, Temstar said:

We don't have to be restricted to one macguffinite either, it could be something interesting like there are two macguffinite, one tends to accumulate on worlds closer to Kerbol (eg, helium-3), while the other tend to accumulate on worlds away from Kerbol (eg, monopoles) with Kerbin SOI having a bit of both but not particularly rich in either.

A player driven economy like this would make career players really "own" their space programs instead of feeling like a grind.

Grinding for macguffinite isn't that different from grinding for contracts...  you're still doing stuff you don't necessarily want to do to pay for the stuff you do want to do.

[Temstar]

6 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

Grinding for macguffinite isn't that different from grinding for contracts...  you're still doing stuff you don't necessarily want to do to pay for the stuff you do want to do.

But that's what career is about isn't it? How can you treasure the fruit of your labour if you didn't have to labour for it? At least with macguffinite the player is doing it on his/her own terms.

Edited February 18, 2016 by Temstar

[loch.ness]

40 minutes ago, Temstar said:

But that's what career is about isn't it? How can you treasure the fruit of your labour if you didn't have to labour for it? At least with macguffinite the player is doing it on his/her own terms.

I like the idea of having valuable resources to go get and bring back as one possible way to pay for future missions - but I disagree with this for a couple of reasons:

A) How can you trasure the fruit of your labour if you didn't have to labour for it?

- You still had to design, build, and fly the mission... that's alot of labor in itself especially for some of the more exotic locations.  Going for realism, asteroid belt (or Dresteroids) would be there "ideal" location for a mining operation.  Getting to that level of tech requires a lot of funds already.  By the time you are planning large infrastructure out at Dres you likely have most of (if not the entire) tech tree unlocked - at that point science for money works very well too.

B) "The player is doing it on his/her own terms."

- Last I played career you can decline contracts you don't like.  I saw a mod I have to try soon called Strategia (or something) which gives special contract/bonuses according to the directives the player sets.  The player states that they plan to go to Mun - they get a set of contacts for setting that strategy and it causes more mun contracts to spawn.  The player states that they plan to focus on probes - they get a set of contracts for probes and causes more probe contracts to spawn...  This would be awesome for improving contracts but even without it the player still gets to choose what they do.

Contract for space station - player choose to accept or not.

Contract for Minums exploration - player almost certainly chooses because, why not... they were going there eventually anyway.

Contract for returning 42 tourists from the surface of Eve?  Gene, Mort, and Walt laugh the company out of the KSC and go back to snagging a Class C asteroid and moving it into Mun orbit.

[sal_vager]

A mechanic that forces the player to mine a resource would not be a good thing I think, ISRU is optional and should stay that way, not everyone enjoys doing it.

You might say we're forced into the contract system, we can however choose which contracts to do, ignore the ones we don't like, etc, we can also convert funds, reputation and science into each other via the strategies.

There's also some funds to be earned from the world firsts.

Basing the games economy on a resource requires obtaining that resource early and continuously through the game.

We already have this in the science point system, you gather science to spend on the tech tree, but you have three ways to get it, contracts, strategies and experiments, four if you count the lab, so there's variety which you would not have with an ISRU based economy.

Gathering a resources works in other games as a means to an end, such as sending your peons to gather wood, or your harvesters to gather (insert macguffin here) so you can build your army and tankrush the other players, but the resource collection is not the focus.

In KSP flying spacecraft is the focus, contracts, science etc just enables that in career mode, and the games resources are built around that, mining is an optional enabler of further ship flying.

A resource based economy would change that into flying ships to enable mining.

[DerekL1963]

4 hours ago, Temstar said:

But that's what career is about isn't it? How can you treasure the fruit of your labour if you didn't have to labour for it? At least with macguffinite the player is doing it on his/her own terms.

Grinding is never on the player's own terms almost by definition.   If you're doing stuff you don't want to do in order to gain the ability to do the stuff you do want to do, it really doesn't matter if the thing you don't want to do is rescuing tourists for the umpteenth time or hauling back your ten thousandth ton of mcguffinite.   If you want oranges, it doesn't matter whether you're offered a choice between Grannysmiths or Jonagolds.
 

2 hours ago, sal_vager said:

You might say we're forced into the contract system, we can however choose which contracts to do, ignore the ones we don't like, etc,

Yes, and no...  We're now penalized (as of 1.0.5) for treating the contract system as a slot machine.   Even if we weren't we can only accept the contracts offered, which quite often (at least for me) include a significant number of ones I don't want to do which is why players treat the contract system as a slot machine in the first place.

With mods, you can make things better, but there's still a lot of cruft and grind.
 

2 hours ago, sal_vager said:

A resource based economy would change that into flying ships to enable mining.

AKA the "MMORPG grind trap", something KSP should steer well clear of.

[Buster Charlie]

I like this idea a loy, nobody  would be "forcing" you  to do it, it seemed like a supplement to the existing  funding methods. 

 

Also I'd like to see more colonization stuff like @RoverDude is working on made stock.

 

Then part of your income could be Elon musk style space taxi. Instead of contracts asking you to build useless crap, or space tourists  asking for pointless missions, imagine a contact that says 15 new colonists want to move into your station on Duna, provide the living space and infrastructure for a 5 year contract with optional renewal. 

 

So you only get requests on colonies you already established,  you get paid for the trip and a deposit on the return trip, you get paid for a set habitation time, maybe in monthly or quarterly installments with a down payment for initial supplies.

And if all goes smoothly, you may get indefinite habitation. 

 

This actually ties in with the op, because what do the colonist do to pay you?

 

Maybe some of them are independently  wealthy, maybe some are writers, or others research scientist,  maybe they film movies. Maybe they're miners and they mine mcguffinite themselves, maybe they manufacture products, who knows.

 

Point is, they'll need supply runs. I'd suggest allow the player to fly cargo supply and resource  return missions them self for maximum profit, if they find it fun, but also allow for an in the background automated delivery system,  the player won't make as much, but they won't have  to baby sit.

[Nich]

I think you just need to adjust your funding sliders all I do is rescue kerbals and build stations and I have like 5 mil the bank. My last station cost me 200k and completed 3 contracts for a total of 1.2 mil

Edited February 27, 2016 by Nich