Contracts?

[Muskiet]

Would a contract system be possible?

When/if a monetary system limits the building of rockets it would be great to have contract offers from companies and the government to put payloads like communication satellites, spy satellites etc into orbit.

As an extension, contracts could also be awarded to replace/repair/remove those satellites.

Even more of a challenge would be government grants to put a Kerbal on the Mun or perform certain scientific experiments.

I see this as a great storyline option where you can't just build the biggest rockets regardless of cost and have something to work towards.

[Supernovy]

I'm almost certain that something similar is planned. I speculate that a way to make money (along with an economy system) will be the next focus for the development of career mode. I'd also hazard a guess that this would include completing contracts for money.

Time will tell whether this is actually what will happen.

[Muskiet]

I just haven't seen anything suggesting that this will be the case in the "What's already planned" posts. I might have missed it of course. Implementing such a system would open up the possibilities of adding a payload category where we would be charged of placing it in the correct orbit and orientation after which it would be out of our control. Maybe we could be fined if afterwards we happen to run into one of those payloads and break it? Just an idea.

[Kegereneku]

The devs said something about creating a "mission system" and since they'll be focusing on career-mode it should come along.

The question of money is hard to solve. Unlike what some would like it's hard to make money out of the void, it's not a gold rush. Nowadays most if not all of the money made for launch-service come from satellites-contract or government-funded scientific mission (+ a few military spy-sat).

And the problem is that KSP will certainly not limit itself to launching "dumb communication sat" over and over, even less the full constellation of 24 satellites for Geolocalisation.

So we have to make "Science" pay for itself, up to the furthest planet.

And there's only a few criteria I can be sure of.

- The most important is that player want to launch things for themselves, without needing to apply for a mission or do things linearly.

- Money mustn't be too easy to win or it make the system worthless.

- Yet you must stay able to "get back" from a low period even if most of the interesting things left to do are hard to achieve.

- An lastly many players don't like grinding much (do repetitive task to replenish money).

Lately the developers pushed back a "resources system" because finally it wasn't actually fun to play.

[Eric S]

I just haven't seen anything suggesting that this will be the case in the "What's already planned" posts.

Harvester specifically mentioned contracts as one of the parts that will flesh out career mode in the "closing ceremony" of the recent KerbalKon.