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Contract suggestion - restrictions on missions


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Hey all not sure if this has been brought up before or not, I went through the common suggestion and I didn't see it. Id love to see contracts similar to what exist now, or put something into orbit or land at a place but add in restrictions that the mission be accomplished under a certain weight limit or within a certain budget or with a predefined fuel limit.

Games are all about accomplishing objectives within a given ruleset or restraints. Adding on a few extra constraints to the mission would require the rockets are built with more efficiency and solving that type of puzzle would make us all better at playing the rest of the game.

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I don't like it. I stack contracts so my "put satellite in specific orbit of laythe" contract will also be heading to orbit another body for another contract, or it might be a unmanned return probe for a "scientific data from pol surface". Whatever my secondary objectives are, they will undoubtedly add more mass to my craft.

 

If I have to do separate missions for all those because of some arbitrary limit it quickly becomes uneconomical.

 

I would say add it as a new separate type of contract, but I already decline dozens of contracts looking for ones I actually want my space program to do and I would not want more un-fun ones to shuffle past.

Edited by r4pt0r
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I'm not a big fan of trying for limits on fuel, weight, price, etc. For one thing, it seems to me that the restrictions would be hard to program in a sensible way -- either they'd be too easy to game them and work around the intent of the restriction, or else they'd be too paranoid and would alienate players by unexpectedly disqualifying a ship due to some technicality.

But my main objection is that it just feels wrong, like simply making something harder for the sake of making it harder, without a rational reason. It doesn't pass my personal willing-suspension-of-disbelief filter. If some company wants some feat accomplished, they get to tell me the WHAT. I want to determine the HOW myself. I already have an incentive to keep my cost low; adding arbitrary restrictions seems like it's infringing on my territory.

On the other hand, I do really like tater's suggestion of tight time limits. "Accomplish <task> by <tight deadline>." That makes perfect sense to me, both from the standpoint of believability (sometimes people need something in a hurry) and as a useful and interesting game challenge. Tighter deadline = higher contract reward.

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I was thinking a bit more about why it is that the idea of limits on price, fuel, mass, etc. bugs me so much.  I think it's this:  I play a career in KSP.  I start out with very little:  no money, tight limits on mass, inability to carry much fuel, etc.  I put a lot of time and effort into Making It Better so that I can launch bigger ships, have more hard-won cash to launch them with, etc.  That's a big part of what gets me jazzed in a career game and keeps me interested:  "I earned these benefits with my ingenuity and hard work, now I get to use them."  So for a contract to tell me that I can't use the things that I spent all that effort to earn would really rub me the wrong way.

Time limits, on the other hand:  that's challenge that really makes sense to me.  The central challenge of KSP is dV. When you come right down to it, the limiting factor in accomplishing most tasks is going to be "do I have enough dV."  (No, it's not necessarily the only factor-- there can be other challenges, too, like "can it stay aerodynamically stable on reentry", or "does it have enough TWR to land and take off efficiently," etc.  But "does it have enough dV is, in my experience, the main problem the large majority of the time-- and usually is the only significant problem for me.)

So, given that dV is the challenge, then adding "do it in a tight time frame" is simply adding a new high-dV challenge to the game, which works really well IMO.

Note that the time limits don't necessarily have to be on total mission duration, either.  You could have step-to-step limits, i.e. "first do step 1, then do step 2 within <time limit> after step 1."  Would open up all kinds of possibilities.  It would also give planning flexibility.  For example, "Get to Eve within <tight time limit>."  One fun challenge could be if that time limit is measured from accepting the contract, and takes current positioning into accout, so that if Eve happens to be located somewhere really inconvenient right now, but I have to finish the mission without waiting for a good window, then I have to get creative about trajectory planning.  But on the other hand, I could imagine a very different kind of contract, where the challenge is not "get there withing <tight limit> from now", but rather "get there within <tight limit> from launch."  That would allow the player to wait a long time to get a good window in order to shave time off the flight, which is a different kind of challenge but also a valid one.

So I think both types of limits could have a place.

 

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What I'd rather see, instead of putting up satellites that have specific "normal" parts requirements, have requirements to place this specific satellite bus there. Which you're given as a subassembly. That you can't edit. Maybe even use a library of new part models that aren't even in our normal parts lists, representing customer-specific hardware, but in game terms being dead payload weight.

That would add a fair bit of challenge, having to design launchers around arbitrary payloads you have no input into. And some of the payloads could be like cubesats, which are never profitable by themselves, they always have to be piggyback payloads, but at least they make it easy to actually do the piggybacking.

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3 hours ago, pincushionman said:

What I'd rather see, instead of putting up satellites that have specific "normal" parts requirements, have requirements to place this specific satellite bus there. Which you're given as a subassembly. That you can't edit. Maybe even use a library of new part models that aren't even in our normal parts lists, representing customer-specific hardware, but in game terms being dead payload weight.

That would add a fair bit of challenge, having to design launchers around arbitrary payloads you have no input into. And some of the payloads could be like cubesats, which are never profitable by themselves, they always have to be piggyback payloads, but at least they make it easy to actually do the piggybacking.

Love the feed back guys and your right the game it's self in career mode already supplies the budget restriction all on it's own and delta v requires it's own mass limits, but adding in a very specific sub-assembly payload that has to be done in a specific time is exactly what I was thinking of when I recommended the additional constraints. 

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