Early campaign so very boring.....

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

I believe it to be quite the reverse, early carrer is fun but end game carrer is a long boring grind to get science, in fact I probably edit 2000 science in just so I can finish the tech tree.

I like early carrer because it gives me a challenge, a engineering one. No solar panels? Attach a lot of batterys. Unable to return material experiments? Use a detachable system with decouplers. It's all about your style of play.

[magnemoe]

I focus on the bottom part of the tree in the beginning, getting sensors you don't need 2.5 meter in the beginning.

pad, orbital, Mun flyby, Minmus operations, its smart to enter polar orbit, then use eva to get biomes followed by an single landing. You do multiple Minmus landings and can easy do two biomes in an landing by going suborbital to next biome. This give you rover wheels, land an rover/ lander on Mun, one location give you five biomes.

At this time you should have unlocked most, might be an idea to do an Mun mission where you dock, exchange science modules and refuel before landing again but this is frankly overkill, some probles with the new instruments should let you fill out the rest.

[KerbMav]

I believe it to be quite the reverse, early carrer is fun but end game carrer is a long boring grind to get science, in fact I probably edit 2000 science in just so I can finish the tech tree.

I like early carrer because it gives me a challenge, a engineering one. No solar panels? Attach a lot of batterys. Unable to return material experiments? Use a detachable system with decouplers. It's all about your style of play.

Being able to move the results out of the science gizmos back into the pod made the whole thing a lot easier already, no more loosing containers upon opening the parachutes or building wild contraptions to bring back several goo containers, no attaching x thermometers to return readings from everywhere instead of transmitting (especially before solar panels).

My beef with career mode is, that the tree is not built to my liking and that science gain increases so vastly.

Some things are buried deep in the tree and to get them you have to do missions that yield so much science, that the parts you wanted do not open that much more possibilities. Also I would prefer it to branch out quite early into rocketry, planes, rovers and give usable probe bodies a bit earlier - nothing that cannot be done with a modded tech tree of course.

[Pds314]

Hmm.. I seem to remember the whole 90 science tier going by in one mission. Just send something to orbit high above Kerbin and orbit low above the Mun in and highly low inclined orbit and take EVA reports over each biome. Then do the same for Minmus and if you are good with EVA, land a Kerbal on Minmus and EVA them back to Orbit after they complete their investigations. My campaign mode's first two Minmus landing were both Apollo-style using EVA jetpacks, one with Jeb, one with Bill on the same ship (which is surprising since I was playing "hardcore mode:" no quicksaves, death is permanent, no debug cheat, a Kerbal stranded without provisions for an extended stay is a Kerbal killed, basically, "revert flight" wasn't a thing for me.)

The trick is getting the high-value EVA and crew reports as well as science from outside LKO, Now, I wouldn't recommend manned interplanetary missions before you have big rockets capable of getting you there (it is also not time-efficient whatsoever to get you there, as if you are racing the clock, you will probably be launching the rescue ship / replacement mission before the other ship even gets a third the way there).

Also, beaming data back isn't worth nearly as much as bringing it back in person. This especially applies to surface samples. Picking up some Mun dust and talking about it is far less interesting than picking it up and seeing what happens when we bring it home and shoot portals at walls painted in the stuff. (oh, woops, wrong game.)

[Pds314]

Yes, I find it quite the opposite:

First mission: I tend to get enough science to make my next mission orbital.

Second mission: orbital spaceflight, but I don't have enough science for much more. I might manage to get "high over Kerbin" and data above various biomes that can help a lot, and then I might also try to do a polar landing if possible.

Third mission: finishing up the basics of LKO/HKO.

Fourth Mission: Lunar FLyby with free return, if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll try having it go to minmus via Low-munar Gravity-assist. Gut-wrenching EVA within a few tens of meters of the surface of the Mun.

Fifth Mission: Lunar and Minmus Orbit with the giant MPL, a couple of non-mission rocket- and Launch-escape system tests. Land several Kerbals on Minmus and EVA back into orbit. MPL kerbals MIGHT be screwed if something bad happens and will need to rendezvous with another smaller ship to return to Kerbin because science module is too heavy and awkward to land. Unfortunately, a lack of docking ports means it cannot be re-used, and is either left up as target-practice or deorbited for safety. Alternatively, may be sent to Duna or Eve systems after escaping Minmus and used to gather immense quantities of science from interplanetary space and other planets. After this, it will hypothetically go back to Kerbin (I haven't gotten a campaign to the point where it is more than half way to Duna, let alone all of the way back.)

Sixth mission: I can dock! Apollo-style Mun-landing with a 3-man lander. This often get borked in some way, maybe I run out of fuel when trying to get my lander back into orbit due to a design oversight and I have to EVA-to-Orbit the rest of the way balancing 3 Kerbals, maybe Bill decides to go investigate a nearby crater, and a loud "thud" is heard through the ground and Bill is never seen again. Maybe I accidentally deorbit the Command module into the Mun with 6 Kerbals in total now trying to escape on a three-Kerbal lander by holding onto the ladders. Who knows. I get a lot of science, things go boom. Kerbals might be stranded on the moon, in orbit, in interplanetary space, who knows what could happen. As GLaDOS once famously said: "and the science gets done and we make a neat gun for the people who are still alive!"

Seventh mission: I start working with SSTO spaceplanes about here if possible (e.g. I have Turbojets). Otherwise I try to make a better way to get things to LKO and build a spacestation.

Eighth mission: IDK, Laythe would work nicealy if I can get a jet there for an apollo-style mission.

Ninth and above: IDK, stuff. At this point the tech tree is, while not fully unlocked, quite comfortable to work with. I can basically make anything.

Notice that at no point do I do hundreds of suborbital or LKO flights to unlock one tier.

[Pds314]

Oh, another hint: If you plan on returning. Screw transmitting. You can get 700 points or so just for biomes on an orbital Mun mission. that is almost sure to return to Kerbin. My first lunar orbit mission literally didn't have a transmitter.

[Pds314]

Nah, solar panels are not needed for a simple manned Minmus mission with minimal maneuvers, even 200 points of charge is gratuitous. All you need it for is landing and rotating a tiny ship in suborbital maneuvers.. Even the electricity in the command pod might be enough.

[KerbMav]

Another thing that changes with the use of Remote Tech - as well as slowing down everything until the bigger dishes are available.

[Aragosnat]

Also the LV-T30 generates electricity when used. So no worries about electricty while you still have fuel. Just making it back alive might be a problem. Or the very least. Have a nice one way trip out of Kerbin's SOI.

[Sabreur]

Okay, I'll be brutally honest here - I cheated.

I've done the early campaign "honestly" a couple of times (no mods, no cheats), but I just got tired of doing the first basic missions. I've put rockets into orbit so many times that there's no real challenge to doing it anymore, and biome-hopping around Kerbin bores me to tears. So, for my most recent career, I edited my config files to give me some extra science at the start. Nothing much - just enough to get me some landing legs and science modules for my first Minmus and Mun landings. I found that made the start of career mode significantly less tedious!

It's up to you - different people have different ideas about what constitutes "acceptable" behavior in KSP. If you're okay with modding the config files and have tried the legitimate path at least once, I highly recommend letting yourself cheat for a change.

[KerbMav]

.

Perfectly acceptable player behaviour.

If it werent for my OCD in certains kinds of games, I would have started "advanced" and not "pre warp" in Master of Orion 2 ...

[OneEyedShark]

I'M A CHEAT!!

Me too.. the start is so very boring so i usally skip the very start of the start and then it's much more fun

so much so, very and start in that tekst

[Superfluous J]

Can't cheat in a single player game. I enjoyed figuring out how to get science with low tech nodes, but if that's not your thing go for it!

[Kerba Fett]

A few questions about some of the suggestions. Rocket Farmers idea about swinging around the Mun and back to Kerbin sounds interesting, but when I tried to set up the maneuver it doesn't look like its going to work without a burn at the Mun.

If I set it up for a 10 to 15km PE then the projected course doesn't return to Kerbin. If I tweak it till I do return to Kerbin then my PE is in the 40 to 70 km range. I've tried tweaking prograde/retrograde, radial +-, and node position on my orbit path and still can't get a close approach and free return.

I normally put the node for a Mun transfer where the Mun is just coming over the horizon then fine tune it as needed.

Also, the idea of using the jet pack to get to the surface of minmus from orbit sounds interesting, but how do you rendezvous with your ship when you go back into orbit? With the navball and maneuver nodes it would be easy, but you don't have those on EVA.

[Superfluous J]

A few questions about some of the suggestions. Rocket Farmers idea about swinging around the Mun and back to Kerbin sounds interesting, but when I tried to set up the maneuver it doesn't look like its going to work without a burn at the Mun.

If I set it up for a 10 to 15km PE then the projected course doesn't return to Kerbin. If I tweak it till I do return to Kerbin then my PE is in the 40 to 70 km range. I've tried tweaking prograde/retrograde, radial +-, and node position on my orbit path and still can't get a close approach and free return.

I normally put the node for a Mun transfer where the Mun is just coming over the horizon then fine tune it as needed.

I do the trajectory - almost - in this video here. I linked it to 13 minutes in were I start to set up the node. It's not a perfect free return but it's an extremely cheap return, which for our purposes is pretty much the same thing - all we care about is having as low a delta v as we can. It LOOKS like a free return and if I'd had Kerbal Alarm Clock installed to slow me down on SOI changes it probably would have been, as you'll see in the next video if you watch it. But I got pretty close to the moon and had an aerobrake on Kerbin in the same path, which is the important part.

Also, the idea of using the jet pack to get to the surface of minmus from orbit sounds interesting, but how do you rendezvous with your ship when you go back into orbit? With the navball and maneuver nodes it would be easy, but you don't have those on EVA.

It's hard. I'm not gonna lie. I set my Kerbal up facing the planet and his head's then always North, and then I just "dead stick" the maneuvers. You can create nodes, and then just go "Well I need to burn prograde and north, so that's right and up on my Kerbal." Check the map often so you can see what you're doing.

Edited January 24, 2014 by 5thHorseman

[G'th]

^ Well when you set up a free return you likely won't have the path actually shoot straight back to Kerbin unless you get everything just right to mimic the Apollo free returns. (The figure 8)

Instead, what you'll see is a path that slings around the Mun and then shoots off to the left or right depending on where your encounter is. If you zoom out you'll notice that that path still puts you back into Kerbin orbit, just a very, very high one. If you set up your transfer burn right, you should be able to set it up so that you fly by the Mun at your desired periapsis and then return to a Kerbin orbit with your desired periapsis.

And as for using EVA to get to Minmus' surface. You'd be better off just getting into orbit with your Kerbal, and then using your ship to rendezvous with the Kerbal. It'll be much less complicated that way.

[qromodynmc]

I believe campaign mode gave me more ideas,I was only using mainsails,Orange tanks,simply rocket designs before,after carrier mode,I started to make more different style rockets,I have gone to more planets.

My recommendation for you Dont transmit data,Just go to mun/minmus,take samples and come back to kerbin,Just mun and minmus have enough science to unlock most of parts.