Some improvements/balancing suggestions

[phas]

Improvements

Planetary transfer

I'm not afraid to say that i use MechJeb. Still i'm more or less able to do without MechJeb anything i can do with MechJeb, minus one really important thing: planetary transfer. Plotting a precise transfer in vanilla KSP is nearly impossible. Even using an external tool , it's really difficoult to tansfer that data to a precise manouvering node. This is manily because you don't have precise informations on the manouvering node. Getting to Eve or Duna without a proper mod, is a unrealistical not-really-funny try-and-error process.

With the new "buildings upgrades" in the 0.90, it would make sense to have the ability to plot some type of orbital manouvers, mainly planetary transfer, from the upgraded Tracking Station.

Fuel transfer and Center of Mass in spaceplanes

Building an SSTO spaceplane and getting into orbit is not that hard, even without RAPIER engine. The main problem is to be able to land when you consumed a lot of fuel (and maybe released a satellite), moving your COM away from your Center of Lift making your plane totally unstable.

You can get back some stability moving fuel around, but not having info on your COM/COL make that another try-and-error annoying process. When you are back in atmo, you can have some feedback, but it can be too late and it can be a mess. There's a mod that gives you some useful info and with TAC fuel balancer you can get some decent results, but all-in-all is a comples solution for a not-so-complex problem.

One easy solution would be to have the info on COM/COL in flight. Another would be to have a system to automatically move fuel around trying to keep COM fixed.

Contracts for building incremental space stations

Space stations doens't have that much functionalities but they are fun to build. This is somewhat a pity in career mode, when you have to work with money constraint. In the actual contract system, you would never assembly a space station in orbit and with all the new mega-boosters you would never assembly anything in orbit probably.

One simple solution would be a set of contracts that says "put in orbit a space station with that-and-that-and-that and two docking ports, named KSS-01" and then issue another contract that says "Attach that-and-that-and-that to KSS-01" or "Put three new kerbals in KSS-01" or "Raise Electric power capacity of KSS-01 to X" and so on.

This could be also extended to contracts to build a spacecraft in orbit.

Balance

Ion engines

Ion engines are very low thrust and very low thrust-to-weight. Ok, this is realistic. They are not really useless, you can build some very small, very light satellite with a lot of delta-v and still ~0.4 TWR. But now with a staggering cost of ~15.000, even considering the rocket equation, they aren't very useful. Unless you have to put some satellite somewhere where you need EXTREME amounts of delta-v, so much that you probably never need so much, a LV-N or LV-909 is way a better, more economical, simpler way of moving your satellite around.

Two solutions:

- Unnerf ION engines, increasing (even a little, 3kn? 4kn?) thrust and/or ISP, lowering weight, lowering cost

- Make some ION specific contracts (but this sucks)

Science transmit

Transmitting science is more or less useless. Apart from the few places where you can't (

) come back, namely Eve surface and outside solar system, if you can go there, you can come back and usually coming back costs less delta-v that going there. The budget of the contract has more than enough money to come back and you want to bring a kerbal to collect eva reports, crew reports and suface sample and then you have to come back (if you are not Danny2462...). Therefore antennas are useless for science and that's a pity.

Solutions:

- Do contracts for unmanned exploration of some parts of the solar system, with a lower money yield. (optional, as a prerequisite for manned exploration contracts)

- Unnerf science transmission for some advanced science instruments: i've already explored Mun, i discover Gravioli Detector, i just send a probe FOR SCIENCE

- Boost science yield for remote science transmission if there's a science lab in the vicinity: i orbit a science lab on Eve, i drop probes and get higher science results