Grand tour contracts coming soon? (possibly a spoiler)

[Marclev]

You've been warned by the title! But best I can tell noones mentioned anything about this yet, so I feel sort of a bit proud for spotting it

...

The "SDK" for .25 (i.e. the library you import to make a mod) appears to have a contract template in it called "Grand Tour". It's hard coded to not be available, but overriding the "Meets requirements" setting (i.e. in a quick mod I made to test this out) suddenly gives me a new contract when playing the game: "Grand tour of 4 celestial bodies"!

No idea why it's disabled by default (I assume that it's not stable yet?), but hopefully this is a sign that we're getting grand tour contracts in the next version!

And a screenshot to prove I'm not crazy:

Edited October 17, 2014 by Marclev

[SkyRender]

Looks like you have Fine Print installed too. Anyway, there could be some pretty fun things to come out of multi-celestial-body-target missions, but the rewards would have to be adjusted quite a bit up from that I think.

[Vaporo]

I'm pretty sure that this has been around for a while. I think that if you open up the contract cheats in the debug menu in 0.24 it would say "generate grand tour contract."

I never got one through gameplay, but I think that's just because I never bothered to raise my reputation high enough.

[RocketPilot573]

Before .24 came out I do remember it being said that go to several planets was a contract, I guess they just didn't like it.

[biohazard15]

How about releasing the said mod?

[Marclev]

How about releasing the said mod?

Yes, I'm intending to, but needs a bit of cleanup first.

Edited October 18, 2014 by Marclev

[Shuttle]

I personally think developers should add as many contract types as possible. I don't understand why this particular contract didn't make it to the release.

[Marclev]

Yes, I'm intending to, but needs a bit of cleanup first.

For anybody that's interested, I've now released this as a mod. I've also enabled interplanetary rescue operations (again in the code from stock, but never seem to appear) while I was at it.

Link:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97386-0-25-Lost-in-Space-v-0-1-%28Grand-Tour-Interplanetary-Rescue-Contracts%29

Edited October 18, 2014 by Marclev

[worir4]

The reward looks quite low. Isn't a landing on the mun more than that?

[el_coyoto]

I don't understand why this particular contract didn't make it to the release.

I think it might be because planning and designing a Grand Tour trajectory of several moon/planet flybys would be kinda hard in stock game.

There are external tools like KSP Trajectory Optimization Tool that may help design such missions though...

MechJeb seems to be already able to do "porkchop transfer window" picking, might be worth it to suggest a "Grand Tour finder" in the MechJeb forum, but I suspect the code for such a solver to be quite hairy and take a lot (too much?) time to integrate in MJ...

[magnemoe]

I think it might be because planning and designing a Grand Tour trajectory of several moon/planet flybys would be kinda hard in stock game.

There are external tools like KSP Trajectory Optimization Tool that may help design such missions though...

MechJeb seems to be already able to do "porkchop transfer window" picking, might be worth it to suggest a "Grand Tour finder" in the MechJeb forum, but I suspect the code for such a solver to be quite hairy and take a lot (too much?) time to integrate in MJ...

Mechjeb generates nodes after the previous ones so you can do complete mission planning. Say you are going from LKO to Dress, Plot transfer burn, put an 0 m/s node on path outside Kerbin SOI, ask mechjeb do do an intercept node and it will as last node is outside Kerbin SOI, without the node you get an error.

Next go to Dress and put down an fine adjustment and ask mechjeb to circulate at Pe, you now have an decent dV cost overview.

You can use this too plan longer, I have done so around Jool, the problem is that the inaccuracy increases making it very hard to plot nodes inside SOI.

[el_coyoto]

Mechjeb generates nodes after the previous ones so you can do complete mission planning. Say you are going from LKO to Dress, Plot transfer burn, put an 0 m/s node on path outside Kerbin SOI, ask mechjeb do do an intercept node and it will as last node is outside Kerbin SOI, without the node you get an error.

Next go to Dress and put down an fine adjustment and ask mechjeb to circulate at Pe, you now have an decent dV cost overview.

You can use this too plan longer, I have done so around Jool, the problem is that the inaccuracy increases making it very hard to plot nodes inside SOI.

Yup, I know that you can queue several maneuver nodes in MechJeb, but the problem for me is more finding if a given Grand Tour exists.

For example "Is it possible to do a Kerbin->Eve->Duna->Dres->Jool Grand Tour, and if yes, what is the departure date and the delta-v budget?".

If I'm not mistaken, to generate such a mission plan, people usually use constraint solving algorithms rather than trying every combination of departure dates and trajectories by hand.