Space race and/or maneuver node manager

[herbal space program]

Hello everybody,

This is my first post in these forums, although I have lurked here a fair bit. Please forgive me if this is old hat or if it is already slated to be included in the contracts system. I have been playing KSP since about 0.18, and have done nearly all of the basic exploration challenges in sandbox mode. Once career mode got started, I felt like one of the most interesting challenges I could give myself was to see how much science I could generate in the shortest possible span of game time, i.e. to try to win the "race to space" against an imaginary opponent. Needless to say, this requires both careful planning wrt launch windows as well as launching and managing a large number of missions simultaneously. So my first suggestion is that the amount of money you can get for specific achievement should be in some way related to how quickly you can get it done in terms of game time. I think this would add an interesting level of strategy to career mode. Again, please forgive me if that's already what is planned. In that vein, the main headache in playing this way for me right now is the danger of missing your window for one of the many maneuvers you have to execute at the right moment for each mission. This headache has been significantly mitigated by having maneuver nodes become persistent in the last update, but it occurred to me that it would really be cured if somewhere in the game there was a "maneuver node manager" window, that lets you view all the maneuvers you've plotted in chronological order. Perhaps it could even pause and alert you if you're about to timewarp past one of your plotted nodes from another mission. At least for me, that would significantly reduce the number of "$%@#! I sailed past Jool into interstellar space!" facepalm moments. So?

[Sirrobert]

For your second suggestion, what you want is a stock Kerbal Alarm Clock (check it out, it's a mod that will solve all your problems)

I agree, we really should have something like that

As for the spacerace, I'm not sure. I'm afraid it might punish players that don't want to race and just want to play slowly. Which would mean they miss out on the bonusses.

So it'd be important that those speed bonusses are either optional (pick a mode, race or casual), or unimportant, and just a fun extra