So what ended your Career mode play through?

[ag3nt108]

Hi all,

 

Pretty new to these forums but I have been lurking for the past few months.  What a great game KSP is, Im really having a blast with it.  I wonder what ended your career play throughs and or prompted a new start for you guys?

For my part I'm on what i would call my 3rd "serious" career game, by that I mean the 3rd attempt to fashion a cutting edge space program instead of the many many plays where I was learning how to actually play the game itself.  My first career ended rather comically when a planned Minmus landing mission was catastrophically  underestimated in terms of DV required to return to Kerbin leaving my entire compliment of kerbonauts (2 pilots, engineer and 2 scientists) stranded aboard a craft out of fuel and drifting on a kerbin escape trajectory.  I had no idea at the time how to rendezvous 2 craft in orbit much less the know how to rendezvous with a craft in the middle of open space.

My second career play through came to an equally fruitless end when the director invested all of our funds (some 4 million) building an overly complicated (mega ultra has everything) space station mothership assembly for a mission for Duna.  Equipped with two miners, landers, science labs, habs, lighting, tugs, shuttles, Fuels dumps and refineries.  It was a multi part lag fest that disassembled itself under stress while initiating the burn to leave kerbin orbit.

So what game ending mistakes have you endured whilst striving for the budget to explore space?

[Xavven]

43 minutes ago, ag3nt108 said:

 My first career ended rather comically when a planned Minmus landing mission was catastrophically  underestimated in terms of DV required to return to Kerbin leaving my entire compliment of kerbonauts (2 pilots, engineer and 2 scientists) stranded aboard a craft out of fuel and drifting on a kerbin escape trajectory.  I had no idea at the time how to rendezvous 2 craft in orbit much less the know how to rendezvous with a craft in the middle of open space.

Ouch... Usually losing crew prompts a restart for me, especially any of the orange suits. Now that you know how rendezvous and dock, though, you can recover from the kind of problem  you experienced in your first career

There's a bug in 1.0.5 whereby if you change the physics warp while your parachutes are opening, it can cause them to break from "aerodynamic stress" (even though they're within safe parameters). I lost Jeb once, and then Val on another career, due to this bug. Learned my lesson -- now I keep my physics warp constant until the chute is fully open. Grrr, though!

Nowadays I mostly restart over my frustration with some of career mode's shortcomings. I get to a certain point, lose interest, and then stop playing for a couple months. When I pick the game back up, I usually restart since I didn't make it very far in my previous career anyway, and I want to better be able to critique the early game to figure out why career mode is so lackluster compared to the rest of the game. The word is they're tweaking things in 1.1, but who knows if it'll be enough. Contracts are getting a minor rebalance, but the tech tree needs some love too.

[Snark]

I'm an almost obsessively cautious person, and use lots of named quicksaves,  precisely so that career-ending-in-disaster never happens to me. 

Therefore, what ends my career is generally getting to a point that I consider myself "done", and then I go on to do something different with a new career.

When I started my first full-career playthrough, I decided that I'd be "done" when I had gotten every science result from every possible location in KSP.  (This was easier than it would be now, because it was pre-0.90 and the only celestial bodies with biomes were Earth, Mun, and Minmus.)  So I did, basically "send a crewed ship to land and return from every body in the solar system."

Since then, I've done many career play-throughs, generally something different about each one (typically a different combination of mods, to make the gameplay something interesting and new), and different self-imposed "done" condition for each.

[StrandedonEarth]

My careers usually end when a new update comes out. But I had a Career in 1.04 end when a ship bugged out, and nothing would respond to a right-click, and the app bar became unresponsive. I could quickload back and the ship would "go dead" (and everything in it's SOI, once it arrived at Dres) at the same time every time

[HebaruSan]

1 hour ago, ag3nt108 said:

So what game ending mistakes have you endured whilst striving for the budget to explore space?

Finishing the tech tree. My plan for 1.1 is a self-imposed limit of one of each type of contract per body, so no more spamming "science around Minmus" every 3 minutes. (To be fair, I don't know if that's still possible, my last career was in 0.90.)

[AlamoVampire]

In all honesty, my career ended for me when the lack of a cohesive story, a lack of contracts that made any sense and a real lack of anything in game making me feel invested, in any way, in any amount. Career mode needs to be...well...more in story, in common sense for me. Till then, the canvas that is sandbox is my story.

[Delfinus]

When my first ever attempt at landing on the Mun ended with debris and dead Kerbals scattered in a kilometers long debris field... only Jeb survived.  That caused me to start a new game, and after one or two more failed games I finally have a Space Program with no casualties, several succesful Mun landings, and a base on Minmus. 

 

Edited March 8, 2016 by DolphinDude3

[merlinux]

3 hours ago, Xavven said:

There's a bug in 1.0.5 whereby if you change the physics warp while your parachutes are opening, it can cause them to break from "aerodynamic stress" (even though they're within safe parameters). I lost Jeb once, and then Val on another career, due to this bug. Learned my lesson -- now I keep my physics warp constant until the chute is fully open. Grrr, though!

 

AFAIK this isnt a bug, more of a feature. It has always existed since I first bought the game (.20)

Now to the OP. I have never gone very far in the career mode. I always end up quitting cause I do not have the patience to unlock the tech tree. I did unlock it once when it first came out but career was science mode back then.

Im still playing sandbox. But I am looking forward to try career once again when 1.1 comes out.

[Norcalplanner]

Typically it's some combination of getting bored, finishing the tech tree, achieving whatever goals I had set for myself, the release of a new version of KSP, and/or wanting to try a different combination of mods. There's also the occasional rage quit when there's a major glitch.

[Willbl3pic]

My most recent career... I made a mun flyby thing with excessive dV. Then I accidentally staged during the trans-munar injection, so I wasn't able to turn the engine off. It pushed Jeb, Val and Bob out into solar orbit. I tried to get them to get out and go back to kerbin with jetpacks, but not enough fuel

[MaxxQ]

I've never started one...  

[Francois424]

I started my career in 0.23 (as soon as that mode was released I believe) and ran the same game all the way to 0.25).

During the experience, I gained a lot of skills, and started adding some mods (KER - Boy made planning/building easy!, KOSMOS, KommitNucleonics, RemoteTech2. EVE/Volumetric clouds, and finally FireSpitter for the electric prop). I took pride of continuing my career thu the patches.  Then it happened...  I was like what the hell ?  Nothing could fix it...  Why was I constantly crashing ?   I had reached the memory limit of the 32-bits Unity.  And there was NOTHING to be done to fix it.

Took me a very, very long time before I did another Career, but then 1.0 happened with the new aero and a couple quick patches...  Didn't want to restart again and haven't ran a career since then.
Looking forwards to 1.1, it's going to be my first career in a very long time.

Edited March 8, 2016 by Francois424

[RizzoTheRat]

Can't remember which version career mode came in on, but I've basically only played career since then, and started a new career each time a new version is released.  I make date/time named saves (when I remember) fairly regularly so not had any major kraken or self inflicted disasters that I couldn't recover from.

[KerbMav]

Only once it was a save breaking bug - mod induced most likely, I use them a lot.

Sometimes I lost interest or another game/TV series got in the way.

Usually it was/is a new version that makes me restart a career game.

[Superfluous J]

My most recent career ended (well, was put on hiatus. I'm now waiting for 1.1 before I continue it) when Fallout came out. Before that, it's generally been a combination of game-killing bugs, new versions coming out, boredom, and actually completing the goals I'd set for myself in that career.

[Nightshift83]

*Holy *** I have two keyboards in front of me, playing on my laptop right now while writing this text now on a desktop-pc - I just hit space because I got confused with the keyboards - luckily it was just the fairing stage !!!.. (First attempt ever to go to Moho with satelite - transfer window is like right now)

Anyway I played carreer mode ever since it became avaiable and have not gone back since. First career ended because I got frustrated with the rocket equation wich I had no idea of back than. After succesfully taking it to Mun and Minmus I just started building bigger and bigger wich lead me nowhere. I didn'nt play KSP for a long time then until I met an old friend who was playing KSP as well. He started to get me interested in playing it again and we kinda played one carreer together a little bit, showing each other our concepts and stuff, he explained to me how to dock too wich made it much easier then.

My first craft assembled in space (3 launches or so) was the end of the next career since I was unable to control it wich was mainly due to my system specs.

Sometime later we played dark multiplayer mod wich was great but didn't work out too well, probably again because of my system.

Then I remembered how to fine tune physics-delta in config.cfg.. and now I'm playing KSP in slow-mo but that's ok. Waiting for my first Duna mission to come back home now (wich was awesome btw) and using any transfer windows along the way to send out some probes until then (as seen in the beginning of this post)..

What I really like about career is that you're forced to play and build economically, so I really don't have any problems with the contracts since you can usually do multiple with one mission. Will see what else I can achieve until the patch comes out.

 

 

[Guest]

Boredom ended it for me.

[Curveball Anders]

Normally it's the availability of an update that triggers me to start a new one.

[Bloody_looser]

My recent career ended when I got overhyped for 1.1. Previous ones ended in a similar way.

[FungusForge]

One time I spent my last smidgen of funds on a contract rocket. The rocket took off okay, got to the assigned orbit, (wasn't backwards or anything), but I had the wrong scanner. This was a hard save with no quickloads, reverts, and it started with negetive reputation so that was the end of it. My last hope, sitting high above Kerbin, glaring down upon my space program in disbelief of our incompetence.

[Mr. Speed]

I start a new career save every new version. I usually have some sort of focus for my early career. This time it is space shuttles.

[YTNewneo]

Sometimes i start a new career with a new update if the changes are significant. And otherwise my goals depend on the mods i play with. when i play with interstellar and some colonization mods i see "THE END" when i colonized Duna and at least Laythe and established some sort of trade route system between my colonies. 

If i play unmodded which i don't do very often i just finish the tech tree and some missions that seem to be a challange and then see it as done. 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

A massive ship with one docking port junior right smack dab in the middle.

This was before I knew about joint strength and the inherent instability of single docking port connections. Wobble city!

The real clincher was that I basically entombed Jeb inside the ship (I covered the only hatch with another part.) since the ship was intended to stay in space forever where it would be refueled again and again, never landing on a planet. Once I realized what a useless limp noodle it turned out to be, and that no rescue mission could hope to free Jeb from his eternal prison I gave up on that career save.

 

[Musil]

Mostly updates. My last one ended when I sent all my best kerbals on a mission to Gilly and they ended up not having enough Dv to get captured at Eve due to partly misscalculation and partly a bug. I had invested too much in that mission, so I was too frustrated when it failed. 

But since now I am doing a comic about my current career, I guess I am forced to stick with it even if something fails. That's part of the reason why I started doing a comic-mission-report, to get more involved. 

[Draco T stand-up guy]

9 hours ago, Xavven said:

Contracts are getting a minor rebalance…

I hope so. I presently have a heap of contracts on offer that I can't actually do because I don't have the tech yet.