Suggestion for more Contract info.

[strider3]

I would humbly ask for more info before accepting a contract? This especially applies to orbital rescues...does the person I'm attempting to rendezvous/rescue have a docking port? What size is it? Perhaps a tutorial on orbital rescue (not so much the rendezvous part)...how to rescue a Kerbal when you don't "own" the craft and cannot control the craft (or the Kerbal inside, I'm guessing, in that situation), or there is no docking port? How do you get a Kerbal you are rescuing to EVA over to you if you cannot "switch to" their craft and have them EVA? These are the types of problems I'm running into. Granted, this might be more my lack of "how to" knowledge but I still think some more info on the craft you are attempting to rescue a Kerbal from, and it's equipment, would be helpful?

Vic the Newbal

[Mjp1050]

If you can't switch to a ship to EVA the Kerbal, make sure you are within 2.3 kilometers of the craft. That's the maximum range at which ships are loaded. Then you'll be able to switch vessels. 

[The Aziz]

Yeah, that's basically it. it doesn't matter if your stranded Kerbal has docking ports or whatever. Make a rendezvous, switch at closest approach (matching relative velocities before of course) go on EVA, fly to your rescue vessel, realize you forgot parachutes/one free seat, give up or try again.

[Wjolcz]

I wish that rescue contracts weren't a thing. There's so much we could do in Kerbin's SOI on our own but instead we are forced to cycle through a bunch of contracts we don't want to complete.

[The Aziz]

3 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

I wish that rescue contracts weren't a thing. There's so much we could do in Kerbin's SOI on our own but instead we are forced to cycle through a bunch of contracts we don't want to complete.

No we're not. For a long time I just warp (if nothing happens to my vessels already in space) to find if something interesting apperas in mission control building. And there it goes, simple exploring contracts,  station expansions etc.

[Wjolcz]

Just now, The Aziz said:

No we're not. For a long time I just warp (if nothing happens to my vessels already in space) to find if something interesting apperas in mission control building. And there it goes, simple exploring contracts,  station expansions etc.

The system where we could influence the kind of contracts we want to do would be better though. The current career is just bad.

[kBob]

12 hours ago, Veeltch said:

The system where we could influence the kind of contracts we want to do would be better though. The current career is just bad.

Well don't we have that now with the weighting system?

Anyway a quick look in contracts.cfg shows me this line:

AllowKerbalRescue = True // Whether to allow kerbal only rescues at all

which seems to imply that if you set it to False then you won't get any kerbal rescue contracts, have you tried this?

Edited June 27, 2016 by kBob

[Wjolcz]

9 hours ago, kBob said:

Well don't we have that now with the weighting system?

Anyway a quick look in contracts.cfg shows me this line:

AllowKerbalRescue = True // Whether to allow kerbal only rescues at all

which seems to imply that if you set it to False then you won't get any kerbal rescue contracts, have you tried this?

I hope some day I will be able to play this game without modifying its files.

[Superfluous J]

8 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

I hope some day I will be able to play this game without modifying its files.

And I hope more options will be available wherever they may be placed. They cannot please everybody, and can't please anybody completely.

[kBob]

58 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

I hope some day I will be able to play this game without modifying its files.

They could have used proprietary or not easily accessible configuration files, but they realized not everyone wants to play the same way and went to the trouble of providing documented configuration files.

[kBob]

Just curious did you try editing the file to see if that really did kill that type of contract?  I'm in a new career so I don't want to play with those right now, but I have thought about editing the persistent file to change the weights as my career advances since, for example, I may not want as many measure/report at xxx altitude contracts as I did earlier (I'm not sure yet how responsive the weight system is).  Looks like (when using default configuration) you can mark the weights as low as 10 (which will presumably make them rare but does not eliminate them like in the contracts.cfg  (which also has a lot more specific choices as to what specifically to turn off it looks like).

[Daveroski]

I quite like the rescue contracts. That's how I get my crew of free engineers for bases and scientists for station labs. Even extra pilots are useful.

I would however like to see more variety in the rescues. I Don't accept the 'and his craft' rescues because I am simply not a fan of The Claw.

I would like to see a station that I can dock to and have to return to Kerbin all of the kerbals on board. 20-40 or more just so I would have a free large crew base to choose from for my colonisation programs.

As I often have 8 to 10 kerbals working at each colony and 3 to 5 kerbals at each space-station it can work out rather expensive and often you need more engineers but there are none to be had even in the astronaut complex. When you include travel time and crew rotations it becomes a logistical problem.

Perhaps even a station which you don't own but is in fact another fixture like the KSP buildings from which various missions could begin or end could be interesting. Bringing home sick kerbals taking supplies and science experiments which can only be done there as the kerbal interested in the science works there.

It would open up a lot of possibilities and encourage the learning of docking and intercepts in the vanilla game.