What does your space career look like?

[ArmchairPhysicist]

To elaborate on the title, I'm making a call for debate and deliberation on your methodology when playing a career game? What is your goal in launching a rocket? How do you go about an objective? 

How do your rockets evolve from the pod on a booster to your Duna and beyond missions? Etc etc...

[ArmchairPhysicist]

Personally i always end up with a series of sounding rockets to squeeze every drop of science I can out of kerbin.

I normally have 4 rockets in the testing line, each built for a specific altitude. Mk1 handles the land, low flying and splashed down science. Mk2 shoots for high altitude atmospheric science. Mk 3 handles space science and sometimes makes orbit, but normally my orbital mission is different enough to deserve a new model designation. 

After my agency is proficient in orbital flight I start my "Apollo" program. These rockets are normally unmanned, I hate putting a kebal on a rocket that is untested. Munshot MK1 normally goes for 2-3 flyby or munar orbital missions. Mk2 is a probe lander to practice off planet landers. The MK3 is where I build a probe that lands, returns to orbit and comes back home. If MK3 runs smoothly I start the manned missions. 

Minimus follows my apollo missions strategy, but involves a lot of testing for the increased range.

My fatal flaw in KSP is building rockets too big. Lots of mainsails and skippers to reach orbit. My current career is aiming at smaller and cheaper rockets. 

[Spricigo]

       Well, this seems to be more a General Discussion, then a Gameplay Question to me. There is a particular issue you are facing? (notice that I don’t think its a problem to have such discussion there, rather that the format used in this sub-forum is more adequate to "how to solve this?-that is the answer-solved" than "I wondering about-I feel the same-but notice that-...")

 

      Spricigo's Space Program (SSP) is all about build and improving a constant presence in space. Contracts and science are done for advancement purposes but the goal its to have kerbals and stuff all over Kerbol system. SSP development follow the pattern: 1.select a destination and reach it. 2.make travel to the destination and back reliable.(launch vehicles, space transports, satellite network) 3.Build/improve the infrastructure for exploring the location (landers,rovers,orbital vehicles,refueling bases) 4. Iterate.

      So, I end with a lot of vessels at each planet/moon. This make easily to  realize some mission there for the cost of increase management (keeping track of fuel level, rendenvous times, transfer windows, etc...). to help with this there is a great deal of standardization and automation in SSP (e.g. Launch vehicles are designed to reach orbit following specific flight profiles with little to no player input or deviation, KAC is used to keep track of timers).

      I'm pretty satisfied with the results of SSP, and consider it a great achievement of all kerbal race.

 

 

[FancyMouse]

CONQUER EVERYTHING

 

at least it's the goal.

[Snark]

Moving to KSP Discussion.

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

Ditto what they said.

I send exactly one unmanned probe to each planet moon to survey for ore. Then I send Kerbals. A bunch of them. Once I start drilling, the system belongs to me. I have all the fuel I need, so there's nothing I can't do.

Then I send more.

[Yobobhi]

I usually push manned stuff, and disregard probes except for my very early interplanetary missions. The crew report, EVA report, materials science, and scientist skills, are just worth too much for me to not go manned. I always try to keep a probe in every scenario I have reached (Landed on Kerbin, Orbiting Kerbin, Orbiting Mun, Landed on Mun, etc.) so that if I get a "Science from" contract I can complete it easily. I also put labs everywhere and just have them sit and process during my interplanetary warps. I also develop long-range planes for observational survey contracts, which are quite good if done with a plane.

[Terwin]

Early game: Get ISRU then NERVA

Late game:

Build self-sustaining outposts on promising bodies.(USI-MKS)

Expand them into colonies.

Keep adequate transport ships on-hand to get everyone home should something make the situation untenable.

 

Current Kolonies: Mun

Current outposts: Minmus, Moho, Duna(expansions and Kolonists less than 100 days out)

(Gilly has been identified as not-sustainable, and Ike only has an automated outpost thus far)

 

I also have science probes heading for some outer planets looking for any additional colonization targets (the Jool probes have farmed Tylo and are working on Vall; Dres probes are still en-route)

 

 

[Peder]

In the start of the career I typical go as fast as possible into orbit. Reason is I can gater quite allot of science fast, and I get many bonus money for orbit/speed ect.
After that I send up 2-3 ships in orbit to gather science and unlock more science expriements.
Next I make a flyby of the mum 2-3 times to gather science.
Now I pretty fast reach the 100 science MAX in the research centre and have to focus on making money instead.

I start sending up sattelites arround kerbin/mum/minmus, and land 1 prope on mum and minmus..
Next i do more sattelite missions and the missions about send back data from x location ( i send back 0 science ) = mission success = fast money.. These type of missions can be finished in like 1 minute without even sending
up a new sattelite ect.. So i just use my sattelites/propes to do science for me and it cost me 0 credit.

Depending what i want to do I go to minmus and gather ALLOT of science and store it all in the science container and at some point i send a ship back with everything and get example 1000 science.
Also for an extra boost, i have a research base example in orbit of minmus and the mum and then that give extra boost to science pr. day.
Next i start to send out som sattelites to random planets and do a fly by.. I know they are mostly lost since they do not yet have a good enough antenna/dish but i make allot of money.

Regarding going further out into space.. well truth is I have the skill to go anywhere, but typical I go  to mum/minmus and duna and then I kind of loose interest for playing, and typical i start a new save game when a new
kerbal patch is released and then I restart my career game..  I did never really do allot of missions to planets far away ect.

Also i typical play with realistic mods such as with life support, that make the long jurney trips allot harder.
I have a 0 loss tollerance of my kerbals.. I will not allow anyone to die, so i send remote controled propes first and do "safe" orbits before I even dare plan to go down onto a planet.
I always have backup plans or an extra "fuel" ship just in case that i can dock with so everyone can go home again.

So I did actual not really reach the part of the game where i can drill and produce fuel ect...  ( except when i try it in sandbox )  I never play that long in an career game yet ( but i should try to keep going ;-)  )

[something]

Bought the game in January 16 and since then I played career only, with a few sandbox exceptions in order to do some stupid stuff or challenges. That is, I still am in my very first career save which is a 9MB file in 330 iterations... Initially, I wanted to get a better feeling for the single parts, so I limited myself to the choices available in the career save. Still, I am playing that one career but there's no strict approach on how to play or not to play. I do whatever is in the range of ideas I come up with. I basically learned the game while playing that game and my craft became more and more sophisticated over time. So the entire save basically is sort of a short history of my KSP abilities. Interesting to see how you built vessels a year ago...

[Freds]

I use probes to one way trips, satellites for communication network and scansat, and for very difficult missions (like Tylo or Eve returns). Almost all other things are manned missions. (Jebediah loves to plant flags on moons and planets!)

What i do most of the time is to put a research space station in orbit, collect science on planets/moons and, then, transmit the pure science back to kerbin. In order to complete the research display in the research center, i do science missions twice - one sample for the Lab, another sample to kerbin (Experiment Storage Unit is nice for that kind of thing!). 

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

Generally in the beginning, I design the usual basic rockets, and as time goes on (and I get plane parts), I start using rocket planes for my crew. That way I can land most of the spacecraft back at the KSC for refund. By now I've gotten about ½ to ⅔rds of tech tree unlocked, and I've got a large fuel depot it orbit (filled over time with leftover fuel from assorted rocket upper stages), and a nuclear vehicle good for going to Minmus and maybe Duna. 

I do most satellite contracts for the money. I also do tourists to orbit. I'm not set up for economical Mun tours yet tho.

[Wanderfound]

My standard career progression is:

1) Launchpad science to get decouplers.

2) Suborbital SRB mission straight up.

3) Upgrade facilities to gain EVA capability, followed by an orbital mission to farm EVA reports.

4) A single-biome Munlanding just to get the Exploration Contract done.

5) A biome-hopping Minmus mission. One or two of those and you've got nukes and RAPIERs unlocked; once I do that, I can SSTO to pretty much anywhere. Just send 'em off as and when the transfer windows arrive.

I don't normally bother with spaceplanes until I've got the RAPIERs, and once I've got them I don't usually bother with rockets unless I'm in a hurry.

[AlamoVampire]

My career mode in ksp has always, i mean ALWAYS looked the same: first introduced: ooh career mode, lets play! Ick this is awkward...this makes no sense.. Why should I play this? Why should i care about these kerbals? I give up, maybe next version will work. Back to sandbox! Next update? Same. Rinse and repeat. Career mode is a failure in my book. No linear logical progression. No story, no reason to invest my energy into a purely illogical grind that cant follow a basic  and logical progression that makes sense. Let alone a mode that fails utterly to draw me in and get me emotionally invested.

Imho

[NSEP]

I never really get beyond the Mun or Minmus.

[Alpha 360]

I cheated to get me to a point about two hours into a new career mode game, now I'm running it pretty well without cheats. Usually I land on the Mun or Minmus several times, though in this save I got USI installed and I plan to use it on a planet, other than Kerbin. That would be totally worth it. 

[MaxwellsDemon]

The very first campaign I played, I opted for a 'science' campaign, to introduce/familiarize myself with KSP in easier chunks-- I was overwhelmed at first by all the possibilities in the VAB and reasoned that by limiting it by tech level, I could progress and learn through all the parts in a fairly logical stepwise progression.   It worked for me.

The next campaign (I tend to restart campaigns with every new KSP version, so there have been a string of them), I went with the full-up Career mode, contracts and all.  I was most concerned with "what can I do with what I know now?" and such.  It tended to be haphazard.

By my third campaign, I had developed a sequence patterned (perhaps inevitably) after the historical US space program.

This time around, I'm doing things a bit differently.  I decided that my goal was to land a Kerbal on Duna (which I have never managed to do before), and I put things together like a project plan, with subprojects and dependencies all organized around that specific goal.  I identified four primary effort-pathways that would need to be followed to attain my goal:

1.   Establish a communications network to support each successive phase of the program.  This encompassed planned upgrades of the Tracking Station and a planned network of increasingly-capable commsats, culminating in a network with interplanetary support range.
2.   Establish a refuelling station at Minmus.  This encompassed the probe and Kerbal exploration of Minmus, the identification of sites with good Ore levels, and the development of mining/refining systems.
3.   Develop a long-term space habitat.  This included early space stations in LKO, and is intended to result in both an orbital refuelling station in Minmus orbit teamed with the mining surface base, and also the design of an interplanetary-capable habitat to serve as the basis for a Duna spacecraft, as well as the development of heavy-lift capabilities.
4.   Preliminary reconnaissance of Duna, starting with flyby probes, to identify prospective landing sites.

Each of these pathways has subsidiary goals and steps, and they interlink to some extent.  So far, so good; I am presently nearing completion of project 1 (comm network), have identified a mining location on Minmus and landed Kerbals there and am designing a surface base, am operating a basic Kerbin orbit space station somewhat akin to Skylab or the early Salyuts, and am waiting for a good transfer window to send a couple of probes to Duna.   I'm not absolutely limiting myself to the lined-out pathway; for instance, I have used the Duna probe design for Moho and Eve probes, and have already sent the Moho probes on their way, and I have done a set of landings on Mun as well as Minmus.   But I find the project-management-oriented approach is keeping me on track.

[GarrisonChisholm]

This is exactly the type of thing I enjoy chatting about, so I'll chime in. 

My goal is exploration, so I will never attempt anything so grandiose as colonizing anything.  I have yet to have a Kerbal more than dip its toes into interplanetary space, and am testing a Duna landing mission unmanned, though given what I've learned already I am pretty sure it will be back to the drawing board before I have even completed aerobraking.  I generally try to let the contracts steer me, and suppose that various govt agencies and private enterprise are collaborating on the tasks.

I love the game "as-is", despite the fact that I am still playing the version that doesn't allow planes to taxi straight.

I also simply ignore contracts that are foolish.  I generally let the "search for life" be my guide, or rather in KSP the search for a "benign life environment".  Ultimately I imagine a manned mission to Laythe may be considered, but I am going so slow and cautiously that that is decades away from consideration.

[JoeNapalm]

While I see the point of Career mode, every time I start a new one (most recently this weekend) I rapidly realize that the reason I play this game is not compatible with it.

 

-Jn-

[MaxwellsDemon]

That's one of the great things about KSP-- it doesn't limit you to one "correct" style of play.  I fall very naturally into spreadsheets and project-planning, for instance, so that feels comfortable to me.  But I know others would rather fly a plane (or a spaceplane) and would just as soon leave the project planning abstracted.   KSP allows both approaches (and more)...

[NISSKEPCSIM]

Unmanned before manned, with the Historical Progression Tech Tree. I do LKO satellite's first, then manned LKO spaceflights, setting up first a reliable multi-crew spacecraft, then make a space station for refuelling and to squeeze every last drop of science out of kerbin. Then I send unmanned probes to the Mun and Minmus, and then do unmanned tests of manned Munar landing and return spacecraft. Then the manned Munar launches come, and then some unmanned interplanetary probes.

As I aim to make my carrer realistic, there won't be any manned mission outside of Kerbin's SOI until a few months (in game) later. I let the interplanetary probes arrive, and then start orbital contraction of motherships for many different mission - planetary flybys, the planetary landings.

And, since my current career is an alternate history style series, my spacecraft will have two majorly different designs - American and Russian ones!

Edited May 15, 2017 by NISSKEPCSIM

[Zeiss Ikon]

I haven't played career mode yet (I got into KSP at 1.2.2, just about six months ago).  I've been playing a Science game, however, built around the idea that space exploration is more about individual heroism than about saving money by sending machines everywhere.  I have a couple simple "rules" I abide by -- first, no crewed missions with solid boosters, starting as soon as I had a Swivel engine (had to let Jeb fly on a solid a couple times to get the science to unlock that -- but he was a volunteer!).  Second, no automatic pilots.  Every mission, everywhere, has a crew, with a pilot (and, now that I have larger pods, sometimes engineers and scientists).  It makes the rockets bigger (takes a pretty big booster to launch a two-stage lander with enough dV to get the crew home to Gilly or Ike), but there's no worry about communication limitations -- Tracking can always tell where a ship is, even if Ground Control can't talk to the crew, and the ship always has full crew control, even if it's in a comms shadow or out of range.  All science is brought back to KSC (unless the experiment burns up on reentry, which happened a couple times during the early Mun/Minmus phase).  My final self-imposed rule is no nukes.  Personally, I don't have a problem with launching nuclear hardware into space, but the Kerbin of my current space game doesn't like the idea of an accident contaminating their tiny planet.  If we can't get there with chemical rockets, we'll consider ion propulsion -- or we won't go.

Perhaps in the future I'll do something similar with a life support mod (which will make for even larger ships on interplanetary missions), more crew space than a 3-Kerbal command pod, and so forth.  For now, though, by the time I've done an Ike landing, and possibly a Duna surface mission, I'll be close to filling out all of the stock tech tree (except parts I'm not using anyway).  That's looking like another ten Kerbin years yet (I'm currently in Year 7, after a one year asteroid retrieval, and a five year Gilly mission -- bad return window, probably would have saved time to wait in Eve orbit for a better one, since that would have taken a maximum of two years or so for the round trip).

FWIW, there hasn't yet been a Kerbal killed or abandoned/stranded, though Duna landing and return will be the real test of that.

[Freshmeat]

Probes before crew to any location. Ample living space for kerbals in space for more than a week, to the tune of 1t hab module for each in addition to work compartment.

[Ohm is Futile]

I usually play career, leave the settings with a "normal" difficulty level until I can get enough science to shoot for the Mun or Minmus, at which point I turn up the difficulty. Note that I play mostly stock and will keep doing so until I feel that I've "conquered" the stock game.

So, once I am Mun or Minmus capable, I usually do a mission to each, with maybe a repeat for Minmus so I have enough science to go interplanetary. As far as science goes, I usually aim for Nukes/engines along with science/electricity/probe/antennae branches before anything else. Then I set up a relay network around Kerbin and an interplanetary relay.

The I usually plan out big missions to other planets, with or without space stations and such.

I tend to stay away from ISRU and space planes. First, ISRU takes up valuable science points from me and second they are slow and heavy, which bothers me. Spaceplanes, well, they're efficient but slow and require more fine-tuning and fiddling to make them work well, so I stick to rockets.

 

On 5/12/2017 at 11:34 AM, Peder said:

Regarding going further out into space.. well truth is I have the skill to go anywhere, but typical I go  to mum/minmus and duna and then I kind of loose interest for playing, and typical i start a new save game when a new
kerbal patch is released and then I restart my career game..  I did never really do allot of missions to planets far away ect.

Yeah, I tend to have that problem too. So I started a let's play series to motivate myself. Not the best for motivation though, because the let's play gets the least views out of all my videos. Still, I'm set on having a manned mission visit every celestial body before either moving to a modded career or shelving the game until I find myself other goals in it.

[Kerbal01]

I dont do a career career, but I do follow a few realism rules.

1. No shutting down coasting then restarting first stages

2. Abort action must be configured on all manned craft

3. All flights from KSC must drop all their suborbital stages in the ocean. To this end, I restrict myself to flying within the lines of the below map, and even then there is some land over flight.