Mission Control

[Vl3d]

"Mission Control is also open for business - meet Dr. Keri Kerman who will send you on increasingly-challenging quests from learning about basic rocketry to attempting to build and maneuver an entirely new kind of vehicle."

Spoiler

What types of missions do you think Mission Control will have? What missions would you want there to be?

I can think of a few:

- world first missions (fly-by / orbit / land / return)

- visit discoverables

- plant flags in hard to reach places

- make kerbals pass out (was always a fun one)

- lore missions (the actual narrative campaign)

- build / expand space station / colony

- perform scouting (telescopes or planetary scanning)

- things to do with airplanes (scouting, research, transport)

- low orbit missions (capsules or space planes)

- rover missions (science, transport)

The most important thing is, in my opinion, to only define a greater mission objective and let the players decide the actual subgoals, profile, implementation  details. I would like to come to the conclusion that I need a certain type of vehicle by myself, out of mission necessity, instead of being explicitly required.

Edited November 10, 2023 by Vl3d

[Periple]

I expect  that there will be missions with science objectives pushing you to explore ever further, unlocked by unlocking various nodes in the tech tree. 

I hope there will be a possibility to design my own missions, or at the very least that there will be a menu of missions to choose from, so that I can set my own objectives rather than be led through the game on a predetermined path.

[Superfluous J]

I hope you can pick a mission you accepted in the VAB and it'll tell you if you have the DV/TWR in each stage to do it.

[kdaviper]

4 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

I hope you can pick a mission you accepted in the VAB and it'll tell you if you have the DV/TWR in each stage to do it.

Or maybe... Maybe at least a native DV map 

[Vl3d]

34 minutes ago, kdaviper said:

Or maybe... Maybe at least a native DV map 

When you realize how low expectations have fallen.

[Periple]

21 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

When you realize how low expectations have fallen.

Unrealistic expectations set you up for disappointments!

[regex]

9 hours ago, Vl3d said:

What types of missions do you think Mission Control will have? What missions would you want there to be?

vOv It's something I'm probably never going to use other than checking out when it arrives.

[Scarecrow71]

11 hours ago, Periple said:

I hope there will be a possibility to design my own missions, or at the very least that there will be a menu of missions to choose from, so that I can set my own objectives rather than be led through the game on a predetermined path.

I'd like to see a mission contain options that you can piece together.  Like:

Head Towards the Mun
At the Kerbal Space Agency, we've been hearing rumors that people believe the Mun is simply a bright light hung way up high on a ceiling somewhere, and we'd like to prove them wrong.  Or right, whichever the case may be.  So what we'd like you to do is head towards the Mun, and do one, all, or some of the following:

• Do a simple fly-by, just to check that it really exists
• Get really close to it on the fly-by.  Like, almost touching it, but not quite.
• Go in a circle around it.  Otherwise known as orbiting it.
• Why stop with just one ship going there?  Deploy a satellite if you feel so inclined.
• Land.  No better way to prove that it's real than to actually set foot on it.  Get some good photos!
• Land and Return.  Whether you drop a probe or Jeb onto the surface and bring it/him back are entirely up to you.
• Drive a rover around on the surface a bit.  See if you can plot out good places to build roads at later on.

Or something like that; I'm just spitballing on all the activities you could do on/around the Mun (and that's without taking science readings).  It would be interesting to see if they did this, and then would this mission go away if you didn't do everything on it the first time?  Like, could I accept the mission and run through it several times to do all the stuff on it?  Maybe do the first 3, then do the landing, then the land and return, then the satellite.  Or whatever order you want to do them in.  Again, just ideas!

[Cosmic Sailor]

On 11/8/2023 at 10:54 PM, Scarecrow71 said:

Deploy a satellite if you feel so inclined.

New contract: Get a 43.6 degree orbit around Gilly!

[TwoCalories]

But where even is the Mission Control building at the KSC? None of the current buildings seem to fit the bill.

[RileyHef]

On 11/8/2023 at 2:54 PM, Scarecrow71 said:

I'd like to see a mission contain options that you can piece together.  Like:

Head Towards the Mun
At the Kerbal Space Agency, we've been hearing rumors that people believe the Mun is simply a bright light hung way up high on a ceiling somewhere, and we'd like to prove them wrong.  Or right, whichever the case may be.  So what we'd like you to do is head towards the Mun, and do one, all, or some of the following:

• Do a simple fly-by, just to check that it really exists
• Get really close to it on the fly-by.  Like, almost touching it, but not quite.
• Go in a circle around it.  Otherwise known as orbiting it.
• Why stop with just one ship going there?  Deploy a satellite if you feel so inclined.
• Land.  No better way to prove that it's real than to actually set foot on it.  Get some good photos!
• Land and Return.  Whether you drop a probe or Jeb onto the surface and bring it/him back are entirely up to you.
• Drive a rover around on the surface a bit.  See if you can plot out good places to build roads at later on.

Or something like that;

Sounds like something similar to the weekly social media challenges they've been posting? Personally I haven't tried any because there is no incentive, but I wonder if that structure were to work if the science rewards were high enough to take risks and go for more challenging tasks. It would be nice if these were static missions that could be done freely out of order and if there was variety given to each celestial body (other than those unique discoverable being teased). Maybe someday we can be tasked to launch a helicopter on Duna? We can only dream....

 

[mcwaffles2003]

Missions I would like:

General progression - get to space, land on the mun, land on another planet, get to interstellar space, repeat, etc

Launch a premade payload from a company to a destination orbit - X company wants their probe/satellite in this orbit to perform their mission (reward based on payload mass, orbit difficulty and return (y/n) )

Also have the payloads be dev made payloads or community voted payloads, which shoehorns into...

Challenge missions - Missions that are updated over patches as seasonal challenges. I can see this getting whacky with time and would make for great content

Colony establishing and resource gathering missions - Create a mining outpost for resource X somewhere to start gathering this material which will soon be helpful to your next endevours

Trade route setup missions - Establish a route from A to B carrying X tons of cargo

Send a probe out to a region of interest to find resources, a new planet, new solar system

 

 

Finally, if I were to have my way with science being revamped like kerbalism and a flight UI got filled out as more data was recorded then I would say:
Send probe like mission above for gathering more data on the attributes of other celestial bodies like atmosphere pressure/temperature profile, magnetometer/Geiger measurements looking for X bodies magnetosphere/radiation belts, SCANsat esque mapping of altimetry/resources, impact probe for high definition mapping for possible collection sites, etc..

Edited November 26, 2023 by mcwaffles2003