New Contract Suggestions: Endurance, Medical, and Biological / Life Science

[AndrewBCrisp]

I wanted to say, first and foremost, that I'm loving the contract system thus far, but a few mission ideas have been sticking in my brain and I thought I throw these up for people to consider.

Endurance Missions

The basic idea is to have a Kerbal - or a multiple Kerbal crew - in an environment for a set number of days and then return them safely to Kerbin. If you wanted to consider them to be long-term low or micro-g experiments, I think we'd be on the same page. For obvious reasons, flying and suborbital conditions would not be suitable.

An example contract would be:

We want you to put a Kerbal in orbit around Kerbin for 6 days and return him safely.

I would recommend having limiters on the time depending on the capsule parts a player has unlocked. For example: single-Kerbal capsules might have an upper limit of 5 days. The Mk1-2 3 Kerbal capsule might have a limit of 20-30 days, and the Hitchhiker container have limits up to a year. Failure modes for the mission would be either: the Kerbals leave that particular environment before their time is up (e.g. a Kerbal crew in Munar orbit decides to take a jaunt down to the Munar surface), or the Kerbals are killed on return.

Rewards for successful completion would have an emphasis on science points and reputation more than funds, I would think.

Potential problem for this contract type: I don't know if there's a variable for this already in existence, but we would need to track not only how long a mission is going on (as happens already) but how long a Kerbal has been in space. That way, you can build a space station, and then send up new Kerbal crews for new endurance missions, rather than building new stations for each mission. However, especially as you go further along in career, you might already have Kerbals in a given environment who already meet the conditions for a new endurance contract when it shows up, leading to potential abuse. Not sure how to solve that one (or if it needs to be solved).

Medical Science Missions

This would be a mission that requires a station or a surface base with the Lab Module attached. Much as we do in real life, we can imagine Kerbals wanting to learn how their bodies adapt to low and micro-gravity environments, and if that can lead to new treatments for whatever ails Kerbals back on Kerbin.

An example contract would be:

We want you to conduct Kerbal medical tests on the surface of the Mun.

A "Mission Specialist" Kerbal would become available in the Astronaut Complex - our medical guinea pig, as it were. The mission would involve getting said Kerbal to a lab-equipped (and powered!) station or base in the environment in question, and have the Kerbal man the lab. Once the Kerbal is in the lab, you can conduct the experiment by right-clicking on the lab module and hitting "run test", and then either transmitting the results back to Kerbin (with a data loss as with other experiments), or recovering the data along with the Mission Specialist Kerbal, and then successfully returning the Mission Specialist Kerbal back to Kerbin. The Mission Specialist then vanishes (presumably to be poked and prodded by doctors after his experiment, and then to write his no-doubt Kobel-Prize-winning research paper).

Biological and Life Science Missions

This would probably require a new part: the life sciences module. I envision such a part being about the same size as the Materials Bay, and operating in much the same way. Essentially an enclosed environment where various small plants or animals can be stored and studied. The module could be used with a probe, a capsule, a station or a base, and can be replenished by the Lab if need be. This module can also be useful in the Science game mode as well as Career.

Two example contracts would be:

We want you to study the short-term growth of plants in space around Minmus.

We want you to study the long-term growth of plants on the surface of Eve.

Short-term studies would be like existing experiments - right-click and run the experiment and transmit or recover the results. Long-term studies would be like endurance missions, in that the module would need to be in the given environment and powered for a set amount of time. A failure mode for this would be if the module becomes unpowered either before the experiment is run or before the needed mission time has elapsed, since a loss of power probably means the plants and animals inside are now dead.

There might be plans for this in some of the contract mods I've been hearing about, but I thought I'd put this out in the hopes something like this might be implemented officially.

Thoughts?

[thereaverofdarkness]

+1

I'd definitely like to see more interesting and less random-feeling contracts. An element of randomness is fine but the current contracts are way too random.

I support.