I just "lost" my career game

[DivisionByZero]

I had started a 0.25 career game trying to challenge myself with a bunch of "hard mode" mods and hard difficulty settings in the game. Well, I just decided my save was screaming toward "loss" conditions with the loss of my latest launch vehicle.

So, I play with KCT which makes the ship building take a while, but really makes for some fun additional play. I was also trying to make OKS/MKS stations everywhere and get up the KSPI tech tree as quickly as possible. Add to this DRE+FAR and RT2. In general, it's very challenging and here's my observations of what I did wrong.

First, I messed up in my strategies. I started a 40% intern program about mid-game because I didn't realize I would stop getting the three-star contracts without the reputation! This made for a massive hit to my funding increase which, on hard difficulty settings, is already meager. I thought I was being clever with decent stage recovery in KCT, but it wasn't helping enough. This was one issue.

The other issue, besides not getting 3-star contracts, was that I made the mistake of accepting contracts way in advance of being able to complete them. While you get the commission, you have this contract taking up space in your contracts list. It further stoppers-up the number of contracts you can get slowing down the cash increases.

The next issue was setting up the RT2 networks needed for exploration with probes. This is a big drain on funds and I could have been a lot smarter about it than I was. I had all these satellite contracts early on in the game, but my early satellite launcher was really low tech and once deployed, did not have any maneuvering. (This is the sort of thing you do when you don't have a satellite network in place in RT2 and you're lazy). Big mistake. I should have added maneuvering to reposition the satellites into useful orbits and make a decent constellation for RT2 work around Kerbin/Mun/etc. When I finally did have tech to launch a decent comm-Sat into KSO, I did it with an SSTO that mostly worked. The problem, though, is that on the last launch, I had a problem on re-entry and most of it burned up (though not all and the crew managed to bail!). When you have 100k tied up in the SSTO hardware, it hurts when you have to build a new one from scratch. So, I could have leveraged the satellite contracts much better than I did.

Finally, the MKS/OKS parts are expensive! Well, maybe not the parts, but shipping up machinery for the modules is pricey (and heavy). This was the ship I lost. I should have simulated it in KCT, but I thought I had the delta-V in the bag with my launcher. Wrong. I even cheated my own rules and reverted twice to try and get it right. No good. Turns out the delta-v was probably there, but not the TWR for the upper stage. I was using an atlas low-profile and I'd always start re-entering the atmosphere before I could circularize... just couldn't burn the LFO fast enough with that little bugger! This was a big loss as the 5 kerbals in the space station would now have to wait until I had enough funds to build the ship again as I was at 125k funds and needed something like 270k for the machinery and launcher.

The last straw was my manned Minmus mission to explore/land/return. I had it all set up perfect in the transfer, and then went somewhere else. Well, I think the ship hit the Mun's SOI or something because when the alarm clock told me to come and check, the ship was no where near Minmus and was in a retrograde orbit. I was setting up the transfer back (had the delta-v to do it) but the result was that I would not reach Minmus SOI until 35 days out or so. This was too long for the Kerbals in the space station to survive (TAC LS was going to run out near then). This meant I'd have to pull the kerbals back down and spend *more* funds doing it. It just wasn't working out anymore.

So, I unlocked most of the 300-science tier and 2 of the 550 boxes. It was fun, but then started getting really frustrating when I saw how the funds were (not) working. Lots of lessons learned on this one.

Now I have to decide whether to try again immediately, or simply wait out my favorite mods getting updated to 0.90! I might not choose hard difficulty this next go around...

[2001kraft]

Wow. I had similar failures with carrier but not this high.

Do the settings as you did them before.

If you know your mistakes already, then you know what to fix.

Just bang it immediately, and make sure not to repeat your mistakes.

Good luck.

[DivisionByZero]

Thanks for the encouragement, 2001kraft! I may do the same settings but start once all of my mods are updated to 0.90. It's a time investment and the new features in 0.90 look pretty sweet.

[2001kraft]

Yes, indeed. And you're welcome! I'm glad you're getting back at it.