Mission History

[Bobe]

I believe it has been suggested to add statistics such as number of missions and total flight hours to individual Kerbals, but I would like some consolidated record of all missions flown.

I just completed a successful landing on Minmus with a safe return to Kerbin, but I have nothing to show for it. I have the memories, but how do I brag to friends besides some lousy screenshots?

I would like to see some sort of list of all ended missions that can be filtered by outcome (success, failure, unknown, etc.) and sorted by things like total flight time, fuel burned, distance travelled and so on. Each record would hold data about where the mission went, what planets if any it landed on, what the Kerbals did (EVAs, died, picnic). Possibly also you would be able to view the entire path the mission took in the map view.

Of course I have no idea what something like this would require and if the data stored would be too large (surely each mission record should be no more than a couple dozen kilobytes, if that), but I personally think it would be interesting to have, especially as a way of keeping track of your progression throughout the game and being able to look back at how awful you were that you couldn't even break Kerbin orbit.

If anything, something to think about far down the road perhaps. There are obviously far more important things to address at this stage in development.

[404james]

I agree with this, as a low priority thing. perhaps a "Mission Archives" building that would track the logs for each mission, and an "Air and Space Museum" that would have exhibits of all the craft you recover.

Edit: this just occurred to me: if there's ever an option to reuse the parts recovered from a craft, perhaps there could be an option, on recovery, to either reclaim the parts, which would add them back into your stock, or to sell it to the museum, which would give you a lump sum of cash, based on what sort of things the craft did. (a ship that went to the moon would be worth more than a suborbital craft.)

Edited December 9, 2013 by 404james

[Kasuha]

Flight hours could sure be logged, but these can run into astronomical numbers and I don't think they have much of sense. I have a crew of Kerbals on my orbital station for some 20+ years already. Because when you use time warp, time flies by not only on the active ship but everywhere.

And how exactly would you define a mission? A time between departure from Kerbin and return there? That doesn't necessarily have to be one mission. Sometimes when I return from mission with enough fuel left, I don't land and instead park at my orbital station, refuel and send the crew to another mission. There are many people who do this regularly.

[Panzerbeard]

Well, .23 is adding the Science Archives:

* The Science Archives

Collecting scientific data isn’t just about advancing the tech tree. The Science Archives will be a new section on the R&D Facility, which lets you review all the data you’ve accumulated to date. This is your library to view all the knowledge you’ve gathered for Kerbalkind. Also, this overview should help plan future missions.

Maybe some of that information will be included on there; personally I hope they do add some sort of mission logging in the future, maybe customizable to some degree so you can specifically define when a mission begins and ends, to account for using stations, as Kasuha says. We'll have to wait and see

[Bobe]

Flight hours could sure be logged, but these can run into astronomical numbers and I don't think they have much of sense. I have a crew of Kerbals on my orbital station for some 20+ years already. Because when you use time warp, time flies by not only on the active ship but everywhere.

And how exactly would you define a mission? A time between departure from Kerbin and return there? That doesn't necessarily have to be one mission. Sometimes when I return from mission with enough fuel left, I don't land and instead park at my orbital station, refuel and send the crew to another mission. There are many people who do this regularly.

Yeah flight time cumulates quite a lot, but still might be interesting to keep track of.

I would probably define a mission as one that either was recovered, aborted or failed (exploded), but like you say that is narrow range of scenarios. Perhaps you should have the ability to plan and start missions after launch and then designate when a mission has been completed yourself.

This is perhaps a little messy, and it would mean that you could hypothetically just "complete" hundreds of tiny missions, but why would you? It would just spam your mission history. The only reason to do this I can imagine is to exploit an achievement system, but we can cross that bridge when we get to it.

[Luis]

I suspect that the problem with this feature is that the people who would care about it, would also be extremely fussy about the details of the formatting and what information was included. I keep my own record of successful missions, for example, but these discount various test launches. I also want to be in charge of when a given flight counts as a new mission, with a different number, and when it is just a refuelling mission for a ship being assembled in orbit. I'm quite happy to keep track of this myself, but if the game was treating every single launch as a new mission and displaying them in a separate list, it would offend my OCD sensibilities.

If you add enough customisation to the flight log to satisfy the obsessive lunatics like me, then really all you end up with is an in-game word processor or spreadsheet. I'm not sure that's a great use of development time.

[Kasuha]

Well, thinking about if it could be implemented in some not-too-much obtrusive way, there are some options.

The game is at present rather clueless about what happens when the ship docks, undocks, or parts separate, so there could be options to handle "mission formalities" with it.

Launches:

Every time you launch, a window appears where you confirm the crew (I really wish it was there anyway) and you can decide the mission status of that flight. The game would assign the flight a generic name (e.g. Flight1234) and you could change that name.

Docking:

Every time you dock, you decide what is the outcome of the docking and whether it is end of the mission for either of the two ships. Docking usually takes time so you can spend a few seconds on formalities.

Undocking and separation:

Would have two modes, formal and informal.

When informal (default), the game would handle it the same way it does now and both ships (except for special cases) would stay being on the same mission. Special case would be when you undock a ship which you previously docked and now are undocking to continue the mission.

When formal, you can decide what the names of resulting ships are and whether it is a start of a mission for either of them. Presumably one part would keep the original name and mission status and the other part might start a new mission, or they would stay part of the same mission.

Landing:

Would give you option to declare the ship's mission ended. To lift off after that, you would need to assign the ship a new mission, it would stay uncontrollable until then.

And there would be an option to shut it off in settings.

[Capt Snuggler]

I agree there are a few issues to figure out but this could be a really cool feature. have you ever noticed the mission stickers stuck all over the inside of the ISS and launch tower.

thinking in terms of a User interface. it could be cool to have a panel that slowly gets covered in Mission stickers that you can click on to look up mission data/record.