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[FREEFALL1984]

parts falling back should get you money?

NASA would love that, right now they're more likely to get sued because it fell on someone's pet begonia or the EPA gets angry because it killed a pink spotted green burrowing rat...

Thats why the player could be rewarded for achieving a safe landing of debris (ie a controlled decent of <10m/s) or fined for an uncontrolled landing, (anything faster than >10m/s)

I was thinking about it a little and my idea was that contracts might work with two kinds of money: when you accept (or win) a contract, you first get some construction budget and you can build whatever you want for this budget but if you don't use all the money available within it, the rest will just disappear. So there will be no "oh I have an SSTO, I can keep all the money and don't need to build anything".

If the budget is too low then you'll need to add from your own money, of course.

So regardless whether you're using an SSTO or classical rocket, you don't get any money during this phase, you can only get some rocket parts which cannot be converted to money later.

When you finish the mission (successfully), you get some extra money directly on your account but this amount will be order of magnitude lower than initial construction budget.

And no refunds. Whatever you build is yours, it is insured for environmental damage (so cleaning up debris is free of charge) but you also get no money back on faulty parts.

This will not remove the advantage of SSTOs completely, but it can remove part of it. In the sense that they will still allow you to build more and reach further but will not be the ultimate weapon. Of course I have no idea what approach devs will use. I just hope they'll avoid all pitfalls of the game variety.

Brilliant, create two "money pools" one for the mission budget, one for the fiscal rewards, the player can then spend his financial rewards on stations and refueling outposts to make his missions easier perhaps though, it would be prudent to transfer a percentage of the remaining mission budget into the money pool, that would encourage efficient building with financial reward.

Any non-reusable component needs to endure one liftoff and one reentry. That's all, after that its life ends and it is scrapped.

Any reusable component needs to endure number of liftoffs and reentries. Real world materials age, and they age the faster the more stress they must deal with. You don't need to make the component again, but you need to check it every time it is used and you need to check it much more thoroughly than a single-use component because beside manufacturing faults, aging faults may appear in it, too.

Putting reusable boosters aside, a space shuttle is a hell lot of weight which you need to lift to space just to bring it back. You need to make sure whole plane can endure atmospheric reentry, not just the return capsule. And you are sending the whole shuttle regardless how big your real payload is.

Space shuttle was a great symbol and certain missions would be impossible or very hard without it, but its real cost was astronomical. Shuttle was chosen because it looked like it will pay off, assuming at least 30 launches a year. Reality was not even close to that and it was much more complicated to prepare the shuttle for another launch than originally anticipated. NASA could have sent twice the amount of payload to orbit for the same money using conventional rockets if they didn't have the shuttle program to care about.

Of course this is KSP and it does not have to be completely realistic. As I wrote before, SSTOs are cool. I like them. But they should not be the ultimate weapon in this game.

I never really considered it like that, if you're looking into the cost per kg of payload then you're indeed right and the space shuttle was extremely expensive, Probably due to the fact that most of the space shuttle itself was in fact unnecessary payload.

You're also right, in order for a suitable mission system to be implemented, there needs to be balancing incorporated for aircraft, maybe on vessel maintenance for example, a small conventional module/satellite consisting of around 20 parts could cost a tiny amount to keep maintained maybe just 100 credits per month (30 days) a large spacestation would cost much more to maintain due to there being more parts perhaps charge the user a token fee of 5 credits per part per month when in kerbin SOI and 20% of that when outside of kerbin SOI unless manned. An SSTO or another aircraft on the other hand could have an exponentially increasing maintenance fee, maybe doubling per flight for an SSTO, so after 5 or so flights a simple 100 part SSTO would end up costing 16000 per month to maintain after another 2 flights it would jump to 64000 credits and so on until it caps at the total cost of vessel when new (of course just a balancing method but to a role player it represents the aging and wear of parts) Obviously atmospheric craft would not pay double (perhaps just increased by x1.1 per flight to a 20% vessel cost cap) That way if you rely on a single SSTO the cost of maintenance would be so high it would end up costing as much as the aircraft itself at every launch. Also because the maximum lift of an SSTO is much lower than a conventional rocket, by the time you get the same weight of components into orbit you've had to launch perhaps 3 or 4 missions and you might as well of used an equivalently priced or slightly more expensive conventional single use rocket. But of course a very small SSTO with minimal parts (perhaps just 20 cheap components) could still prove profitable for the user assuming it is only used for sending single kerbals into orbital rendezvous.

Of course as you say, this is simply speculation and Squad could do anything with it, but it would be interesting to see how they end up balancing the game to encourage the use of conventional rockets as well as SSTO's

Edited March 22, 2014 by FREEFALL1984

[FREEFALL1984]

So all the good little Kerbalnauts are gonna' start strategically placing parachutes on all the staged parts so they can safely float down the surface?,.,.,. Ridiculous Just speaking for myself here but I'm sure others would agree, I have enough trouble designing a decent launch vehicle, let alone worrying about where some empty fuel tank lands!

The fine/reward for the hazardous/safe return of parts would be a very small token amount, we're not talking about a mandatory game mechanic here, simply an optional way of the player earning a few more credits per mission. Also if you're struggling to design a launch vehicle which can successfully reach orbit and carry a few extra parachutes then you're overloading your lifters and should cut back on a little payload.

[Lignite]

"The thing is, we don't play KSP because it's easy, we play it because it's HAWD"

FTFY