The differences between Sandbox and the new Career Modes

[pvtnum11]

The difference of Career vs. Sandbox (as far as I have played them, anyway - tongue-in-cheek:

Sandbox - Yeah, six of those widgets look great, really liking the symmetry going on here.

Career - that part costs me HOW MUCH? Going without!

Sandbox - Mun mission... I'll have a 30-percent delta-v buffer, so that means I'll have roughly 10,000m/s of total delta-v budget for the entire trip.

Career - this design is on the ragged edge of an ideal delta-v budget... and that's cuz I'm broke.

Sandbox - I don't care if I will never need to use the gigantic solar arrays (short of ion probes), they look cool.

Career - OX-STATS are practically free! But I'll only use four, since I want to mimimize air drag on the ascent...

Sandbox - Six antenna, because redundancy and Rule of Cool.

Career - What's an antenna? Are you implying I'm not coming back to Kerbin? We don't need no stinking antenna.

Sandbox - I need no less than six crew to fly this mission to Jool and back.

Carer - Hey guys? I need ONE brave soul with nothing to do for the next five years.

Sandbox - 600-part ship on yet another routine trip to Duna and back. Framerate sucks, but it looks cool.

Career - 50-part ship on a first-ever trip to Eeloo and back. But hey, DAT FRAMERATE.

Sandbox - Those ARM Rocketdyne parts are great for shoving 300 ton monsters into LKO.

Career - Those ARM part cost HOW MUCH? Nope, we'lre doing this with Skippers and maaaaaybe Mainsails if I'm feeling... generous.

Sandbox - 300 tons to LKO, goes nowhere.

Career - 20 tons leaving LKO, already moving out to Jool.

Sandbox - MORE STRUTS!

Career - Gah, even struts cost money.. okay, here's just a few struts, but no more.

Sandbox - Welp, botched a landing, killed the crew... better luck next time, guys!

Career - *cries*

Sandbox - Man, this game is super easy and fun!

Career - I am sweating bullets trying not to botch a Munar landing, because if I do, I'm broke as hell and might as well wipe the save and start over.

Sandbox - MOAR BOOSTERS are for losers who can't set up fuel lines right.

Career - I have never been so wrong in my entire life.

Sandbox - half of my ship is not fuel, but it looks cool!

Career - My ship is about 90-percent fuel tanks by weight, but I'm still looking for any not-fuel weight I can shave off.

Sandbox - I'll just sort of half-bake my burns and hope it works out, since I have spare fuel I can correct it with, later.

Career - SILENCE! I need more time to tweak my maneuver nodes! Every drop of fuel is precious!

[AlexinTokyo]

And that's pretty much how it should be

[KerbMav]

.

Well ... yes ...

[Sirrobert]

Loolll.

[WWEdeadman]

xD

Yeah, I can relate.

[Red Iron Crown]

Well done, so very true. XD

Nitpick: OX-STATs have no drag.

[SkyRender]

Not my experience. But then, I am the guy who invented the two-mission tech tree maxing strategy, and the one who discovered that it works perfectly fine even with Funds in place. I could screw up mission #1 twice and still have enough to run it again, and mission #2 I could have similar results and still come through just fine.

[pvtnum11]

I just figured out that OX-STAT panels (and some other things) are massless and have no drag (yay, time to add zillions of them). However, they still cost money, so in the interest of XTREME SPARTAN BUDGETARY CONSTRAINTS I'll probably still use them sparingly.

[GeckoOBac]

I have to say that the new Career mode does indeed encourage me to get those Kerbals back to KSC, to plan and create my missions in a more efficient way and it's overall more satisfying.

However, cost is not a constraint. Frankly I have so many funds I could make a stack of Rocketdynes high enough to get out of Kerbin's SOI... The missions "retrieve scientific data from space around x" are just cash cows... Build a bunch of satellites, send them into orbit wherever and just keep milking them!

[LordFjord]

Sandbox - I ignored it so far

Career - I build whatever I want, the cash is irrelevant and is coming in easily - despite of major drawbacks, still not having maxed out the science and only reverting if things fall apart in the 1st minute of flight. And I am a notorious at forgetting to quick save.

Mission variety is great thanks to Fine Print and Station Science.

[Bacterius]

Can't say I've had cash issues with the new career mode. Worst setback so far was forgetting batteries and stranding an eve ship worth about $250k in solar orbit. I had over 4 million already at the time. I guess the revert button is responsible for saving some of my more.. costly failures, but it would be hard to go bankrupt if you're even remotely paying attention to your launch costs. And even if you're new to the game and not too good yet, there are plenty of easy (or even trivial) contracts that pay pretty well.

Edited August 5, 2014 by Bacterius

[pvtnum11]

Yeah, once I adjusted my way of thinking to low-cost and efficient designs, everything went more or less fine. I now have a fairly large budget surplus to splurge on things I want, instead of just what I need for the mission. Better flexibility and all that. Pretty much done with the tech tree and yeah, flag-planting and 'gather science at x' missions are nice little cash cows.

[Russoft]

Can't say I've had cash issues with the new career mode. Worst setback so far was forgetting batteries and stranding an eve ship worth about $250k in solar orbit. I had over 4 million already at the time. I guess the revert button is responsible for saving some of my more.. costly failures, but it would be hard to go bankrupt if you're even remotely paying attention to your launch costs. And even if you're new to the game and not too good yet, there are plenty of easy (or even trivial) contracts that pay pretty well.

Yes, but believe me, playing without revert has totally changed my game!

[Kerbart]

"30km and 12° relative inclination. Yes, that'll do for an LKO rendez-vous. I can just burn the gap"