Stock tourism troubles

[DaMachinator]

I'm doing my first career save after quite a bit of science mode and a little bit of sandbox, and I am having a lot of trouble turning a profit on tourism contracts due to the 30 part count limit. (If I could upgrade the VAB, I have designs that will work, but...) Any suggestions?

[Streetwind]

Depends on what kind of tourist contract you need to do. Suborbital hops and orbit trips? Perfectly possible. Carrying 4 tourists to orbit the Mun and then land on Minmus and return? Not gonna happen in 30 parts.

[bewing]

Well, I don't quite know why you are having problems. I am playing on super-hard mode right now (50% funds and 50% science) and I love the tourist contracts because they are so profitable. Here is my "Virgin Galactic" suborbital tourist bus -- trivial to fly and land on the runway at KSC for a 100% refund on the upper stage.

[Snark]

Yah, it's a good idea to be really judicious about what contracts you accept until you can raise the 30-part limit.  Orbit's perfectly doable, and reasonably profitable in early game.  Fly by the Mun, also doable.

In my own career games, I've found that boosting the launchpad is a handy early upgrade-- it's a lot cheaper than upgrading the VAB.   And it lets me use whacking great SRBs, which in turn lets me loft more rocket while keeping the part count low.

I use suborbital/orbital tourist contracts a lot in the very early game as a handy reputation builder to unlock more useful contracts.  Once I get far enough along that I can get to Mun/Minmus without awkward ship-design gymnastics to deal with low tech and/or part limits, though, I tend to taper off and avoid tourist contracts-- the payoff is terrible, in terms of reward per hour of my time.  They tend to be extremely time-consuming contracts that don't actually pay a huge amount of money, so they quickly turn into a really tedious grind for me then; I switch to other contract types.

[bewing]

I use the longer distance tourist contracts as a way to shuttle science/rescuees/personnel back and forth between a destination and KSC and get paid doing it. I agree with Snark that upgrading the pad is essential. Three or four kickbacks per launch makes up for a whole lot of other parts in the early game to get stuff up into the sky.

[DaMachinator]

Managed to pull off a Mun flyby, which got me enough funds (World First awards) to upgrade the VAB, so my troubles are over Lots of great suggestions, though - thanks