I've played Kerbal Space Program now to the point that I'm no longer really interested in the pre-defined missions in Career Mode. For awhile, I want to just focus on exploring space my way. This doesn't mean I don't want to perform missions, it just means that I want to be the one defining the parameters.
Unfortunately, now I don't have any way to track my missions in-game. I often find myself, after some time away from the game, loading up KSP and having to spend my first several minutes just trying to figure out where I left off. During this process, I need to answer questions like:
- What spacecraft do I have out there, and what's their current status?
- Why did I put those things out there in the first place?
- What am I supposed to be doing with them next?
- Did I leave any of my spacecraft in a condition which would prevent me from doing what I wanted to do with them?
This problem would only be compounded should I ever choose to run more than one mission at a time. Right now, I'm avoiding that just so I don't have to worry about forgetting the status/objectives of one mission while I'm spending time working on another - let alone remembering all of them when I walk away from the computer.
I could simply work around this by jotting stuff down in Notepad or something similar, and popping that open whenever I'm running KSP. However this would be a very manual process which breaks game immersion and presents a number of other undesirable inconveniences and/or failure points. So, I'm instead looking for a solution to implement player-defined mission tracking in-game.
Bare-Minimum Requirements
- Enhance the KSC Tracking Station and/or provide a separate in-game interface to include the following minimum details:
- Spacecraft name
- Player-defined notes
- Implement all features in-game without need for player to manually launch or manage data in an external app.
Preferred Additional Features
- Allow player to define missions.
- Allow player to assign spacecraft to missions.
- Allow filtering of spacecraft list by mission.
- Allow filtering of Tracking Station and/or Map views by mission.
- Provide "to-do list" type interface for player-defined mission objectives.
- Allow player to define success milestones which automatically track mission progress.
- Example 1: Check off a mission objective when [spacecraft] has achieved an orbit matching [orbit parameters] within [acceptable margin].
- Example 2: Check off a mission objective when [spacecraft] has landed on [body] within [range] latitude and [range] longitude.
- Allow the player to define failure milestones which automatically alert to conditions that will prevent mission completion.
- Example 1: Fail the mission if [critical components] are damaged on [spacecraft].
- Example 2: Fail the mission if [specified Kerbal(s)] die.
- Example 3: Fail the mission if [spacecraft] trajectory goes beyond [orbit parameters] before [specified objective or success milestone] is completed.
- Option to pop up a missions status overview on KSP game load.
- Should include list of active missions, associated spacecraft statuses, and next objective/milestone.
- Archive of completed/failed missions.
