Tweaking Science and the Tech Tree

[Steampunked]

I have been playing quite a bit of KSP since 0.24 dropped and while I know that the career mode is still very much a work in progress (need more mission types introduced, need less extreme RNG dependent scenario generation, need stranded kerbals to be spawned in orbits other than 0 degree inclination, etc etc) I still feel like Squad is undercutting themselves with how they married funds and science to the contract rewards.

I posit that funds and reputation should be the sole payout for completing a mission (even a science/testing based mission). The player does missions to accrue funds to pay for his own missions for his own research. With higher reputation comes access to higher quality kerbals. Kerbals can be recruited to be pilots or to the research team. Higher quality pilots yield higher quality science from experiments, and higher quality research team yields higher quality science transmitted from probes (this also gives us a reason to actually use probe cores as well). Higher reputation also gives access to bonus mission objectives that otherwise would not appear for a given mission.

I also think that we should do away with part tests past tier 2 or tier 3 parts. Instead there should be actual missions- investigate anomaly on Mun @ X,Y,Z coordinates (with a marker on the Mun to show where). Or put this company's satellite in orbit at X altitude and Y inclination.

I also think that part costs should be re-balanced to be a little more expensive. As it stands, it feels like funds are just a trivial way of keeping score.

Just my 2 copper.

~ash

[Guest]

I agree with most of this, especially the generated orbits for Kerbals, but instead of removing science payout from contracts, because it makes sense in many instances, increase the science costs for each science node. In fact, I'd go so far as a three- to five-fold increase in node cost because it is so easy to gain science now.

As far as parts costs needing to be increased, there has actually been word from the devs that more costs are on the way, so I'd wait to see how that plays out. It'll still be pretty easy for long time players, though, so difficulty options should be added.

And, of course, the caveat on launching craft for the talking heads should be that they can be removed once the mission is done so that we don't have to look at them past the mission.

[Steampunked]

Well, to your response about spawned items in orbit... the game could simply have a limit on the number of items spawned around a given body. I would actually like to see some persistence here... in fact there could be a whole series of missions that result in slowly building a station for a client (and possibly de-orbiting it eventually). Also, I think that entities spawned around a body should have less random orbits... instead of randomly spawning at 127567 meters, they could spawn at 5,000 meter intervals on varying inclinations at 5 degree intervals.

At the end of the day, I think the devs need to realize that career mode is not a sandbox and that they need to foster more interaction with game created objects.

[Guest]

Well, to your response about spawned items in orbit... the game could simply have a limit on the number of items spawned around a given body. I would actually like to see some persistence here...

You mis-interpret my caveat, it is meant to be optional. Some players like the persistence but IMO it should be entirely optional because generated craft would eventually become simple clutter. I don't even want them hidden, I want them gone.

in fact there could be a whole series of missions that result in slowly building a station for a client (and possibly de-orbiting it eventually).

That's not a bad idea at all so long as the previous caveat remains.

[Steampunked]

Perhaps there could be a slider in the options tab to allow varying amounts of clutter?

[Guest]

Perhaps there could be a slider in the options tab to allow varying amounts of clutter?

Why? Just give the player the option of terminating "clutter" craft without penalty if they want to.

[Steampunked]

Sorry, I should have been more clear. On/Off toggle and if you choose to turn it on, have a slider that will determine how much persistent game spawned stuff you can have. If that's too complicated to implement than just an on/off would do.