End of mission: Better summary, with recover-all option

[KevinTMC]

After finishing a mission in 0.24, one thing I find myself wanting to know is how much money the mission gained or cost me. As things now stand, I have to make careful notes (before, during, and after), and add everything up myself, in order to have more than a very rough guess as to the answer. This is not optimal, and leads me to thoughts about end-of-mission more broadly.

Part of the problem is that the end-of-mission screen reports funds gained from recovered parts, but says nothing about either part costs or rewards from completed contracts. I would expect it to be fairly straightforward to add some or all of this information to the existing end-of-mission summary for version 0.25.

But another part of the problem is that missions sometimes come home in more than one piece (or break into more than one piece upon landing...I've, er, heard that this happens to other people sometimes, never me of course). A more thorough revision of mission tracking and logic would allow this issue to be addressed, providing those of us who love data and archives with much better records...and it could streamline the end of some missions for everyone. (I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets tired of going back and forth to the Tracking Center to recover multiple bits of the same craft, including kerbals who may have left the cabin but not been able to get back in.)

Here's how I'd do it. When a craft is sent to the launchpad or runway, the mission would be named (the user wouldn't have to enter one--it could default to the craft name, with a sequential number added if it is not the first mission undertaken with that craft). Everything that happens to that craft (including separated parts thereof) would be logged in a mission report, viewable at will both during and after the mission: flight events, financials, science, flags planted, etc. When some part of that craft returns to Kerbin, the "Recover" feature would offer two options: recover just this part, or recover all parts. The latter option would end the mission, and close out the mission report, which would be displayed, and then archived back at Mission Control.

Of course, all parts might not be recoverable at that point--some might still be off-world, or the whole mission may have suffered a catastrophic failure. In this case, when the recover all parts option was selected, all unrecoverable parts would be declared abandoned and flagged as debris.

- - - Updated - - -

This approach to mission tracking could be further expanded in future versions, to include mission planning and scheduling and preparation (in addition to the current building and flying stages). I can't speak for anyone else, but I would personally be thrilled if Mission Control had a calendar I could place missions on, if I could develop my list of objectives or even my flight plan in-game, if I had to plan for adequate time for rocket construction and testing and crew training, and so forth. This is an ambitious idea--possibly unrealistically ambitious for this game, I don't know--but I mention it because this is how a real fully-featured "space program simulator" should feel, in my view.

Would this take away from the slap-some-stuff-together-and-see-what-happens aspect of the game? Yes...but that's what Sandbox Mode is for, isn't it? Or perhaps even within Career Mode, the R&D department could be expanded to accommodate experiments and tests outside the context of full-dress missions.

[cpast]

What if one craft is intentionally split into multiple parts (e.g. a lander and an orbiter)? What if you land two craft which were docked? How about if you send a transport vehicle up, drop off pieces of a station, and come back with other parts -- do the station pieces you brought up get removed when you recover? If not, how does the game know what's what with that?

Craft in KSP are designed to be mixed together, and IMO, it's best to have a system like we have now that never leads to an extremely unexpected result (like autorecovery/deletion of other far-away parts could lead to). For the specific thing of "recover lots of pieces of a ship", it'd be better to have something like "recover all parts near this craft" out to 500m or so.

[KevinTMC]

"Recover all parts near this craft" could be helpful...that's a good idea.

The question of mixing craft together could be addressed by either allowing the creation of multi-craft missions, or allowing craft to be transferred from one mission to another. That might require more organization or management than some players would like though.