[1.2.2] Realistic Progression Zero (RP-0) - Lightweight RealismOverhaul career v0.53 June 12

[stratochief66]

On 3/16/2016 at 1:19 PM, chrisl said:

 

The "First Crewed Orbital" contract has "advanceFunds" set to 200,000.  The 1/LEO contract (one-man repeatable orbital contract) has "advanceFunds" set to an average of 120k (10k/orbit with 3-24 orbits required).  The milestone rewards about 2 times as much as the repeatable.
The "Crewed Lunar Landing" contract has "advanceFunds" set to 2,000,000.  The 1/Moon contract (repeatable moon landing) has "advanceFunds" set to an average of 150k (50k/12hr with 12-72hr landed required).  The milestone rewards about 13 times as much as the repeatable.
The "First Space Station" contract has "advanceFunds" set to 500,000.  The "New Space Station" contract (repeatable station contract) has "advanceFunds" set to 20,000.  The milestone rewards about 25 times as much as the repeatable.
I'm going to get 8.24mil up front, plus another 3.55mil on completion, of "Crewed Lunar Landing".  That's 11.8mil.  I got about 2mil for "Crewed Lunar Flyby".  Just not sure you should get nearly 6 times as much for landing on the moon versus simply flying by the moon.  Yes, there's more tech needed to actually land.  But the award just seems excessive to me.

As for the LLO contracts, maybe we should setup the 1/LLO contract as a milestone instead of as a repeatable.  It doesn't look like we have a milestone for actually orbiting the moon so 1/LLO would be a good option.  And it seems wrong to have them both show up repeatedly.

 

Thanks for doing all the research chrisl ! I think there should be a narrower milestone:repeatable reward ratio, between 2-13 seems quite wide. What do you think would be a decent ratio to aim for? 2-4 perhaps?

I would have to do to the dV and mass math to see if 6 times the reward makes sense there, but it sounds about right. It takes a lot of extra dV & mass to re-achieve lunar orbit, then to send a craft back to Earth and have it survive re-entry.

I also agree with making the LLO a milestone rather than repeatable. Achieving LLO feels like a milestone on the way to surface missions.

Of course, all I can do here is weigh in. I don't know the contract creation or modification system at all, but if you PR some of these ideas (or we can discuss them more here or in an RP-0 Github Issues page where they are easier to reference) they sound reasonably likely to be merged.

 

@PTNLemay if you are still around, I think those engines don't gimbal. In RO/RP-0 you either rely on aerodynamic surfaces like wings to help you hold a position, or the ability of the engine nozzle to move (gimbal). I think the engines you are using there don't gimbal, and so one you are above the air, you would need to either use engines that gimbal to keep the craft pointed forward, or use spin stabilization. If a craft is spinning along its long axis (like a top) forces that try to tip it over can effectively be resisted due to the spin, causing the craft to stay pointed forward.

 

Edited March 18, 2016 by stratochief66

[NathanKell]

Ah, crap I thought I responded to you @PTNLemay. Sorry. I can't tell you why the mass is wrong without knowing all the parts on your craft; I do know there's a serious issue in RealChute (that I discussed with @stupid_chris but I'm not sure when he might get to fixing it) regarding mass, so if you have any chutes aboard that might be it. @stratochief66 the A-4 does actually have some thrust vector control; you're right the real engine doesn't gimbal, but it has carbon vanes in the exhaust to shape the thrust vector; in RO that's simulated as four mini thrust transforms and gimbal for all of them. So there should be some control authority.

RP-0 only updates avionics status on staging (technically: when the part count changes), so if you start the stage locked you'll stay locked until you stage again and have fewer parts. So that's why it doesn't unlock.

 

@chrisl I would tend to go for a ratio of at least 5:1 if not 10:1 for milestones and repeatables. This is because, as I explained in my last post, the milestone has to pay for all the entrycosts, where the repeatables just have to give you more money than you pay building the vessel for it. And entrycosts are anywhere from 20-100x the unit cost of parts.

I'm not sure how I feel about crewed lunar orbital; it's not a real counterpart to the uncrewed missions because for uncrewed there's a clear distinction between a flyby probe and the orbital probe. However for crewed missions you will need to burn probably at least 400ms at perigee to make sure you get a return to Earth (because the usual periselene you'd have on a free return is too high for the contract to complete!). So we're already talking about a significant, although nonetheless much lower, investment in resources. A traditional ballistic lunar flyby almost certainly won't lead to a low enough periselene to let the contract complete (though any astrogators are welcome to prove me wrong).

[chrisl]

Maybe this has something to do with my install but in my RO/RSS/RP-0 game, I keep getting "Scan xxx for resources".  These are SCANSat contracts and require the M700 Scanner to run.  Trouble is, unless something has changes, the M700 scanner is not an RP-0 part and if you send it up, it doesn't actually seem to do anything.  I suppose these would go away if I turned on "ScanSatOfficial" in Contract Configurator but I don't want to lose the HiRes/LoRes/Biome Scanning missions which do work.  Anyone have any ideas what may be going on?

[chrisl]

14 hours ago, NathanKell said:

@chrisl I would tend to go for a ratio of at least 5:1 if not 10:1 for milestones and repeatables. This is because, as I explained in my last post, the milestone has to pay for all the entrycosts, where the repeatables just have to give you more money than you pay building the vessel for it. And entrycosts are anywhere from 20-100x the unit cost of parts.

I'm not sure how I feel about crewed lunar orbital; it's not a real counterpart to the uncrewed missions because for uncrewed there's a clear distinction between a flyby probe and the orbital probe. However for crewed missions you will need to burn probably at least 400ms at perigee to make sure you get a return to Earth (because the usual periselene you'd have on a free return is too high for the contract to complete!). So we're already talking about a significant, although nonetheless much lower, investment in resources. A traditional ballistic lunar flyby almost certainly won't lead to a low enough periselene to let the contract complete (though any astrogators are welcome to prove me wrong).

I guess the real question I should be asking is, what are we trying to make the advance/reward for a contract cover?
Obviously we want to cover the cost of the launch vehicle.  Contract isn't worth much if you're losing funds to complete it.
For Milestone contracts, we also presumably want to cover any entry costs associated with "buying" new parts.  After all, players are recommended to play RP-0 on Moderate or Hard, both of which require Entry Purchase.  And it's further suggested to reduce funds from contracts by 20% if not playing with Entry Purchase
Based on that, I'd say 5:1 for milestones vs repeatables is probably a good target.  In my game, my "Apollo 8" setup (which I used for the Crewed Lunar Flyby contract) cost me about 250k to launch.  That contract actually gave me about 1.4mil advance which means I had about 1.15mil to cover entry costs.  I don't remember feeling slighted when it came to that.  My subsequent 1/LLO contract (which I ran with the same basic setup) only awarded 140k so it didn't cover the launch.  1/LLO is a repeatable orbit mission but it's probably still feasible to see it (or even the new HSFOrbitalMoonGenRepeatable) as the repeatable version of first_MoonFlybyCrewed.  Either way, maybe it needs a slightly increased award or maybe I'm just spending too much on my launch vehicle.
Of course, I ran first_MoonFlybyCrewed before 0.46 so I'm guessing since the advanceFunds was changed from 500k to 1500k anyone running that contract now would get closer to 4.5mil which seems excessive just to cover the launch vehicle and entry costs.

Now, if you're playing with KCT, you probably want a bit more funding to cover research development costs.  And If you're playing with TestFlight, I'm guessing you also want some extra funding to cover all the non-contracted test flights you have to run.  But both of those mods are only Recommended so to account for them (and any other mods that require additional in game funding), I think players should be increasing their FundsGainMultiplier via new game settings.  I don't think we should be setting up contracts on the assumption that recommended mods are being used.

[NathanKell]

On the contrary, _everything_ is set up with the assumption that recommended mods are being used. That's why they're recommended. If they were merely "choose, or choose not, up to you" then they wouldn't be recommended.

 

Also (a) you're forgetting just how much higher entry costs (and building upgrades! Don't forget them) are compared to part costs. As I said, they are 20-40x what the unit cost of a part is. And (b) your LV is way, way overpowered and indeed your CSM is too. For a lunar-orbital mission, let alone a flyby, you don't need more than about 6 tons TLI. And you can manage that on a Saturn IB-Centaur. If you want to chuck 3 people, that only goes up to about 10 tons, again not that much LV required (compared to Saturn V's 45t TLI). Remember that Apollo 8 had a mass simulator instead of the LEM, and went with a fully-fueled ~30t CSM (double the delta V needed for LLO, let alone a flyby)

[stratochief66]

@chrisl

Yeah, balancing should be for the recommended mods, as they are recommended, I personally play without Entry Costs most of the time (since i'm mostly just testing and relaxing) so your numbers made sense to me.

However, as @NathanKell says, balancing should be for the recommendations which include entry costs which are quite high (20-40x the parts cost as NathanKell pointed out) and that is if you select all the right parts, I usually mess up and end up buying extra parts as I fumble through to a final design.

 

@chrisl A 250k launcher by the 20-40x range would cost you 5mil to 10 mil in entry costs. Now obviously you had a few of those parts unlocked/bought already, and some could be applied to other missions, but you should see @NathanKell 's points from those numbers. High entry costs are what justify the high ratio.

Edited March 18, 2016 by stratochief66

[chrisl]

But I'm using entry costs.  I'm just not using the Test Flight mod.  Maybe that means I should reduce my FundsGainMultiplier but I'd have no idea what a good rate would be.

I use FASA for most of my rockets.  Before getting to the lunar missions, I did 3/LEO which required that I purchase everything for the Saturn 1B.  So when I got the Lunar Flyby contract I only had to buy the parts to upgrade to the Saturn V.  Based on a test game I've got, that would mean:
Saturn S-II Stage - 14k
Saturn S-1C Stage - 14k
Saturn V Engine Fairing - 14k
Saturn S-IVB Stage After Interstage (for the Saturn V) - 3.5k
Saturn S-II After Interstage - Top - 3.5k
Saturn S-II After Interstage - Bottom - 7k
F-1 Series engine - 409k
 

I may be missing a part or two, but that's only 465k in entry costs.  That's a huge difference from the 5mil to 10mil you seem to be expecting.  Even if I had skipped 3/LEO completely and had to buy everything for the Saturn V with just the Lunar Flyby contract, I'm still not seeing anywhere near 5mil in entry costs.  Maybe 740k for the Saturn V launch vehicle plus 1082k for the Apollo CSM.  Add in about 635k for the LEM (which you don't need to worry about until you take the Lunar Landing contract) and that means a completed Saturn V only has an entry cost of about 2.5mil.  And that cost is covered by at least two milestone contracts and (assuming you don't just try to jump from the equivalent of Mercury-Atlas to landing on the moon) 2 repeatable contracts.  Yet I'm estimating those two milestone contracts alone are handing you 12.5mil just in advance fees (remembering that the 1.5mil I earned for Lunar Flyby had a base value 1/3 what it is now).  Are my entry costs incorrect? 

My lunar landing capable Saturn V costs right around 250k to launch (I was mistaken before... the orbit only version is only around 225k).  With a 12.5mil advance for Lunar Flyby and Lunar Landing milestone contracts, minus the 2.5mil in entry costs, I could launch this stack 40 times and still have all the "reward" funds from eventually succeeding in the contracts.  Since I've never played using the Test Flight mod, would it have taken 40 attempts to succeed?  If not, then what am I missing?

I guess I should say that the reason I've never used Test Flight was, in my previous careers (prior to 1.0.5) and even in the pre-Apollo stages of my existing career, I always felt the contracts didn't cover the extra costs for testing parts.  It could be that the 0.46 changes to contract rewards is intended to correct this and I'm just going from barely having enough (pre 0.46) to having plenty (post 0.46).  If that's the case, I'll shut up about contract rewards.    With 1.1 (hopefully) coming out soon, I don't really want to restart my 1.0.5 career so I'll just take the funds I'm getting and have fun with them.

[NathanKell]

v0.47 for KSP 1.0.5.

Thanks to winged7, Zarbizaure, NathanKell, nightingale, chirsl.

• Revise the RD-270 cost revision.
• Revise AIES probe core costs to be in line with the Cube core.
• Place/price SXT airbags.
• Move BNTR engines to more appropriate node.
• Sanify solid motor placement; at some point placement got very messed up.
• Pretty-print altitudes in km for various sounding rocket/x-plane contracts.
• Fix issue with Successful Reentry contract completing too early (return home didn't check other conditions had been completed).
• Update control locker plugin to check mass every second rather than only during staging. Less realistic, probably (to the extent tonnage-based limits have a real basis), but less annoying.
• Fix issue with station contracts.
• Fix longstanding issue with high-atmosphere X-Plane contract not loading.
• Add new later-game suborbital X-Plane contract.
• Standardize rewards among the three suborbital contracts.
• Up limit of available HSF contracts.
• Properly place 0.625m X-15-rated tanks.
• Move AJ10 Advanced to Tier 4 engines (mid 60s) since it now has the AJ10-138 (Transtage) config on it.

[NathanKell]

@chrisl: I'm not arguing that you're unable to afford contracts due to entry costs. I'm arguing that the milestone : repeatable ratio should be quite high. If contract rewards across the board are too high, then we should lower them across the board. Further, milestones don't just pay for entry costs, they also pay for KCT upgrades and building upgrades, and some amount of non-contract' missions. And, yeah, they cover the test launches if you have (as recommended) TF installed. That's because unlike the repeatables, which you're doing only once you've flight-certified your hardware, you have to go from 0 to certified to complete a milestone.

Oh, and I'm fairly sure that entry costs for Apollo hardware should probably be higher; I have grave doubts that the CSM, in particular, is as expensive as it should be (in terms of entry cost or part cost).

[chrisl]

9 hours ago, NathanKell said:

@chrisl: I'm not arguing that you're unable to afford contracts due to entry costs. I'm arguing that the milestone : repeatable ratio should be quite high. If contract rewards across the board are too high, then we should lower them across the board. Further, milestones don't just pay for entry costs, they also pay for KCT upgrades and building upgrades, and some amount of non-contract' missions. And, yeah, they cover the test launches if you have (as recommended) TF installed. That's because unlike the repeatables, which you're doing only once you've flight-certified your hardware, you have to go from 0 to certified to complete a milestone.

Oh, and I'm fairly sure that entry costs for Apollo hardware should probably be higher; I have grave doubts that the CSM, in particular, is as expensive as it should be (in terms of entry cost or part cost).

I don't disagree that the milestone : repeatable ratio should be high.  I just wonder if we have it too high in some places and if the rewards themselves are too high in others.

For instance: Station milestone has advanceFunds set to 500,000 while station repeatable has 20,000.  The advance for the milestone is probably fine (though you'd have to see if TF incurred too many extra costs) but the advance for the repeatable doesn't even cover most launch vehicles. 

Another instance: Lunar landing milestone has advanceFunds set to 2,000,000 while lunar landing repeatable has (50,000 * [1 to 2.25 based on contract length]) (looks like I was off when I said "average 150k"... that advance should be 50k-112.5k).  Normally I'd say that the repeatable advance isn't enough to cover the launch but once you factor in the 2.5 body multiplier, you likely have plenty.  But when you put those same multipliers against the milestone, you get a huge chunk of funds.  And, at worst, a 17.8:1 ratio.

Last instance: Prior to 0.46, Lunar Flyby milestone had advanceFunds set to 500,000 while lunar orbit repeatable had 50,000.  That 10:1 ratio was great.  But now we have a milestone of 1.5mil with lunar orbit repeatable set to 50k+20k/crew (looks like that equates to 70k-90k).  At worst we're at a 16.7 : 1 ratio.

Again, though, since I don't use TF I can't be sure if the increased ratio is needed.  How many launches would you estimate it would take to "go from 0 to certified"?

[NathanKell]

Then Apollo costs are pretty screwed, since I really, really doubt that it's the case that it should cost less than 10x the per-part cost to unlock all that. So, again, a 10x difference from repeatable to milestone is too low. When entry costs alone are usually 20-40x, let alone all the other stuff we discussed.

I agree that the station repeatable's advance cost is probably too low--my launch was ~50k, but I was not optimizing for cost at all.

[chrisl]

22 hours ago, NathanKell said:

Then Apollo costs are pretty screwed, since I really, really doubt that it's the case that it should cost less than 10x the per-part cost to unlock all that. So, again, a 10x difference from repeatable to milestone is too low. When entry costs alone are usually 20-40x, let alone all the other stuff we discussed.

I agree that the station repeatable's advance cost is probably too low--my launch was ~50k, but I was not optimizing for cost at all.

Fair enough.  Guess the first step is to take another look at the entry/build costs for various parts and make sure those are balanced.

[Varamin]

I have been playing my first RP-0 career for some time, and recently it has reached a point where I wanted to start sending Kerbals to other celestial bodies. So, I began to design a launch vehicle that could lift 100t to LEO. Since I have hydrolox engines, I imagined they would be more efficient, and tried to use them in lower stages. However, the first stage becomes enormous in size, simply because of hydrogen's low density, and the tank costs a lot of funds. Should the tank be a significant part of the cost? Replacing the lower stage with tried and true kerolox engines results in great cost savings seemingly not so much because the engines are cheaper, but also because the tank is smaller. Am I experiencing something weird?

[NathanKell]

Nope, you're not. Hydrolox is expensive, especially because it requires such special handling. You get amazing performance, but you do have to pay for it.

[Temeter]

Meaning, you are doing it absolutely right: Hydrolox is good to keep the upper stage light, but you usually want Kerosene or Hypergolic propellant for the lower stage. Also assembles more easily, because you can deal with the enourmous size of H2 tanks by just making them use the same diameter as the lower stage.

More modern hydrogen rockets, such as the Ariane 5+6 and the Space Launch System, use massive (and presumably cheaper) solid rocket boosters in combination with a cryogenic core stage. The Ariane 5's SRBs make up half the rockets weight.

If you are just going for cost efficiency, it often even makes sense to just skip hydrogen systems on smaller rockets and LEO launchs. If you want to min/max a bit, In RP-0 the RD253/275m and RD-0210 are incredibly cost efficient (+ incredible T/W ratio). Using RD275 booster rockets is often cheaper than actual SRB's. Same reason these engines are used on the Proton rockets until today. Of course with the downside of using incredibly dangerous, toxic fuel.

EDIT: If you have Bobcats soviet engines pack, the NK-9/33/43 engines are very cost-efficient as well, while delivering a bit more flexibility in terms of higher ISP and restarts.

Edited March 22, 2016 by Temeter

[New Horizons]

In my game I am using a kind of interesting mix of RO, RP-0 and 6.4 x scale RSS. After accepting lots of contracts from Mission Controller Extended 2 (MCE 2) to increase funds my reputation value seems to be pretty high = 82 %. 

I already crossed the Karman line crewed, but do not get any further suporbital contracts from RP-0, but many Sounding Rocket tasks. I wish to test my first first iterations of a manned Mercury Redstone style rocket for funds of course.  How are those contracts triggered? Is it even possible that I skipped that regime of contracts because of my high reputation value? Are there dependencies on techlevel or so?

 

Further more I have to admitt, that my install is heavily modded and uses things like Engineering Based Techtree, Real Fuels Stockalike and such things. With deactivating some Engine configs from RO this works out fine - beside financial system beeing out of control a bit - there for those MCE 2 contracts for raising funds. 

 

 

 

[chrisl]

So I recently got the new "First Space Station" contract and put up Skylab (RN_Skylab mod) as my station.  Then since the Skylab can hold up to 6 crew, I sent up two Apollo capsules with 3 Kerbals each.  Lastly, to complete that first space station contract, I had one capsule with 3 kerbals return home.  Contract completed.  Very cool.  But my Skylab still has 3 kerbals on board which should be fine.  Then a (real) day or two later I noticed a new contract available to me: Station Crew Rotation.  Very cool.  So I setup a new rocket, this time using a Big Gemini, and send it up.  This BigG only included 2 crew but that's all the contract says it requires so I figure everything should be fine.  But what I noticed was the first part of the contract, "Bring at least 2 crew to the station" never changes it's status.  The "Crew: At least 2 Kerbals" doesn't show complete even though there are definitely two Kerbals on my BigG.  And the "Rendezvous with" parameter says "spaceStation (TBD)".  I figured maybe that might change after launch, but it didn't.  It also didn't change when I got my BigG with 2.3km of Skylab.  So I looked in the contract file and noticed that Rendezvous doesn't happen until you're within 1000 so I continued to close.  Now I'm at 681m from Skylab but it still says "spaceStation (TBD)" and that I don't have 2 Kerbals on my spaceship.  So I look at the contract file a bit more and notice that one of the requirements for the contract is:

expression = VesselIdentifier(spaceStation) != null && Vessel(spaceStation).CrewCount() == 0

So if I understand correctly, it's looking for any orbiting vessel that is identified as a spaceStation but only if that vessel currently has no crew on board.  My Skylab hasn't had 0 crew since it was first launched so I'm not sure why this station crew rotation contract even became an option for me and I'm guessing that's why it's still listed as "spaceStations (TBD)".

But also, why would we want this contract to only find stations that have 0 crew?  The ISS is basically never without a couple astronaughts on board but they still do crew rotations.  Shouldn't the contract just be looking for stations in orbit and selecting one for it's target at random, regardless of how many crew are currently there?

[NathanKell]

@New Horizons RP-0 is not going to work with your setup, period. It's not modular or open like that; the list of requirements is exactly that, requirements. If you go changing them, or replacing bits of them (like with RF stockalike), it's gonna fail.

 

@chrisl I am also confused why that contract triggered, because it should not. @nightingale any idea there?

And yes, while modern continuous-occupation stations do crew rotation like that, the contract is an early first pass at setting up crew rotations. So it requires the empty station because other the sequence will get messed up--although the main reason is for knowing when to spawn the contract and apparently that's failing.

Look at it this way: it would be much worse if the contract asked you to rotate out a crew that had only been there for a few days, and were possibly still in a contract to be there longer, than the fact that you need a day or so of non-occupancy. Yes, some contract packs do that sort of thing. RP-0 does not, and will not.

[chrisl]

7 minutes ago, NathanKell said:

@New Horizons RP-0 is not going to work with your setup, period. It's not modular or open like that; the list of requirements is exactly that, requirements. If you go changing them, or replacing bits of them (like with RF stockalike), it's gonna fail.

 

@chrisl I am also confused why that contract triggered, because it should not. @nightingale any idea there?

And yes, while modern continuous-occupation stations do crew rotation like that, the contract is an early first pass at setting up crew rotations. So it requires the empty station because other the sequence will get messed up--although the main reason is for knowing when to spawn the contract and apparently that's failing.

Look at it this way: it would be much worse if the contract asked you to rotate out a crew that had only been there for a few days, and were possibly still in a contract to be there longer, than the fact that you need a day or so of non-occupancy. Yes, some contract packs do that sort of thing. RP-0 does not, and will not.

But would you actually have a case where this contract might try to rotate crew out that might effect another contract?  Part of the contract requires that you launch a vessel and rendezvous with the stations and that vessel needs at least 2 crew.  If the space station already had crew on board (perhaps because of another contract, perhaps just cause you left some folks behind), you'd still have to bring up a capsule with at least two more crew on board and rendezvous with the station.  And until you complete the rendezvous portion of the contract, the "stayOnStation" portion can't be started so the 30 day timer shouldn't start up until the rendezvous happens.  And then (after the time expires) you have to send at least 2 crew home but there isn't a check to make sure you take everyone so if you already had kerbals on the station, as long as at least 2 of them returned, you'd be okay as far as the contract is concerned.

[NathanKell]

@chrisl: Then you would not be required to bring anyone home ever. Also, yes, unless we want to restrict the player to only ever being able to have one crew rotation contract running at once, multiples would collide.

[chrisl]

51 minutes ago, NathanKell said:

@chrisl: Then you would not be required to bring anyone home ever. Also, yes, unless we want to restrict the player to only ever being able to have one crew rotation contract running at once, multiples would collide.

Doesn't the "vesselGroupCrewReturn" portion of the contract deal with the minimum number of crew that return home?  It has a "HasCrew", "minCrew=2" parameter so I wouldn't think it could count as completed if the craft that actually returned home had less than 2 crew on board.  Though I suppose there would be no way to verify that the 2 crew that actually returned had actually been on the station for 30 days. 

[NathanKell]

@chrisl: Yeah, it's that last bit. The 2 crew on the station when you arrived might still be there 6 years later.

[chrisl]

15 minutes ago, NathanKell said:

@chrisl: Yeah, it's that last bit. The 2 crew on the station when you arrived might still be there 6 years later.

I'm wondering if Contract Configurator has a way to get a list of Kerbals that exist on a station (either when the contract is created or maybe just when the crewCabin ship makes rendezvous), then verifies that the returning craft not only has at least 2, but that those 2 were part of the original list.

[NathanKell]

Yes, that would be the best, if we could grab the crew on the way up and make sure they head down. That said, I still want to prevent someone just leaving crew on the station indefinitely (at least for this crew rotation contract; remember these are just the first pass at station contracts).

[chrisl]

14 minutes ago, NathanKell said:

Yes, that would be the best, if we could grab the crew on the way up and make sure they head down. That said, I still want to prevent someone just leaving crew on the station indefinitely (at least for this crew rotation contract; remember these are just the first pass at station contracts).

*nods*  I suppose if there is a way to figure out which kerbals are on a space station, you could also figure out which kerbals were on the capsule that was trying to rendezvous with the station.  That way you could setup a contract that required you to fly up a crew (2+), stay for 30 days, then return that same crew, regardless of who you might already have on the station and/or who you might bring up in that 30 days.  Then you could have a different contract that looked at who was already on a space station and had you bring them home while taking up a different set of kerbals.  Would be especially good if that 2nd type of contract could also determine how long each kerbal who was already on the station had been in space.  But not sure if any of this is something CC can currently do.