Contracts
How the contract board works as a system: what an offer says, what the money adds up to, what each tier of work pays, and which jobs come back.
The board itself is the list of jobs on offer to you right now, and it is different every time. This page is the rules behind it. Open the Administration to read the offers.
The Programme — the ordered chain of missions at the top of the same board — plays by rules of its own and is listed separately: The Programme.
What an offer says
Every row on the board carries the same eight things, in the same places.
| On the row | What it is |
|---|
| Title | The job, in a few words. |
| Company | Who is paying. A name only; no company treats you differently from another. |
| Brief | One sentence of what they want and why. Offers only; a job under way shows its goals instead. |
| Pay | The green line on the right: the advance now, the reward on completion. |
| Offer countdown | How long this offer stays on the board before it is swept off and replaced. |
| Deadline | How long you would have to finish it, counted from the moment you accept. |
| Goals | One to eight conditions, all to be met in one flight. Listed under a job that is under way, with ✓ for met and ○ for outstanding. |
| Passengers | A » line, on the jobs that carry people. On an offer it says how many; once accepted it names them. |
The money
| Payment | When | How much |
|---|
| Advance | The moment you accept | What this offer quoted, paid in credits |
| Reward | The moment the last goal is met | What this offer quoted, in credits — and discovery for research work |
| Penalty | The deadline runs out, or you give the job up | The advance back, plus a tenth of it (nothing at all for the Fresh Start Grant) |
An advance of 100 costs 110 if the job is never finished. Failing and giving up cost exactly the same; only the mark in the recent list is different. The penalty never takes your credits below zero.
Nothing else about a contract touches your money. Launching still costs the rocket's price and recovery still refunds what came home, both unchanged by whether a contract is riding on the flight. See Credits and discovery.
The Administration's levels
The building decides how many jobs you may hold and how hard the ones you are shown may be.
| Level | Under way at once | Contract tiers shown | Cost |
|---|
| 1 | 3 | 1 | free |
| 2 | 5 | 1 – 2 | 35 discovery + 3,000 credits |
| 3 | 7 | 1 – 3 | 110 discovery + 12,000 credits |
The full building entry is in Buildings, and the steps are in Upgrade a building.
The three tiers of work
Every job carries a tier, and a tier opens with an Administration level. The sheet on the building calls this CONTRACT TIERS. Each entry below gives the whole tier: how many different jobs are in it, how long you get, and what the work pays end to end.
Tier 1 · flight tests
Open from the start · 23 jobs
Prove a part in the air over Earth: fly an Engine and light it, take a fin load above 5 km, open a canopy in a band of altitude, hold full throttle for half a minute, bring a capsule home. The starter rocket can meet most of them. Five of them are carrying work, which pays best of anything at this tier: a client's package up and back, and two that want the package set down somewhere else — twelve or twenty-five kilometres from the pad, which means flying along rather than straight up.
| Figure | Value |
|---|
| Jobs at this tier | 23 |
| Advance | 80 – 170 credits |
| Reward | 390 – 780 credits |
| Both together | 470 – 940 credits |
| Deadline once signed | 2 days |
| Offer stays on the board | 2 days |
| Jobs that always come back | 10 |
| Carrying work | 5, all freight |
| Jobs that carry passengers | none — no tier-1 pod has a seat to spare |
Tier 2 · orbit and passengers
Administration level 2 · 33 jobs
Work that needs a rocket which reaches space: a separation above 10 km, panels opened past 100 km, a heat shield loaded on the way down, an apoapsis at 200 km, a Sat Controller put in orbit. This is also where the tourist runs start, and where a job can name the Crew Capsule. Not all of them leave the air: four ask for a passenger to be carried somewhere — thirty, forty or a hundred kilometres from the pad — or held in the cloud deck for the best part of a minute.
| Figure | Value |
|---|
| Jobs at this tier | 33 |
| Advance | 200 – 450 credits |
| Reward | 1,050 – 2,100 credits |
| Both together | 1,250 – 2,500 credits |
| Deadline once signed | 4 days |
| Offer stays on the board | 2 days |
| Jobs that always come back | 16 |
| Carrying work | 14 — twelve tours and two freight |
| Jobs that carry passengers | 12, one passenger each |
Tier 3 · the Moon, Mars and docking
Administration level 3 · 29 jobs
The long flights: readings from the Moon and Mars, heavy struts set down on grey ground, an ablator used up on a Martian entry, a rendezvous and a latched docking, and the tours that take somebody to another world and back.
| Figure | Value |
|---|
| Jobs at this tier | 29 |
| Advance | 600 – 1,150 credits |
| Reward | 2,700 – 3,900 credits |
| Both together | 3,400 – 4,900 credits |
| Deadline once signed | 7 days |
| Offer stays on the board | 3 days |
| Jobs that always come back | 14 |
| Carrying work | 11 — ten tours and one freight |
| Jobs that carry passengers | 10, one, two or four passengers each |
Note
The counts and ranges above leave out the
surveys: one per point of interest, six at tier 1 for Earth and the rest at tier 3 for every other world you can land on, each dealt only once you have landed on its world and never again once its point is found. What each pays is in the
list of points of interest.
Note
A higher level never hides the lower tiers. An Administration at level 3 draws from all three, so the quick tests keep appearing beside the long ones.
The board
| Figure | Value |
|---|
| Offers shown at once | up to 10 |
| Where they come from | drawn at random from the tiers your Administration allows |
| Kept for carrying work | 2 of the 10 |
| When an offer goes | its countdown ends, or your tiers change; a fresh draw replaces it |
| How long an offer stays | its tier's figure, give or take two fifths, so offers leave one at a time |
| A job that just left the board | sits out the next draws for four days while other work is left to deal |
| The same job finished in one day | at most 5; then it is off the board until a day after the first of them |
| Recent jobs listed | the last 5 |
| Marks in the recent list | ✓ finished · ⊘ given up · ✕ deadline missed |
Letting an offer expire costs nothing and uses nothing up. Only accepting does.
Jobs that come back, and jobs that do not
Accepting a job is what decides whether that company will ever ask you for it again. Most of the flight tests are a one-off: they are asked once, and once you have taken one on it is retired for you and never drawn again. The rest are the steady work, and no amount of flying uses them up.
The counts are in each tier's table above: 10 of the 23 tier 1 jobs always come back, 16 of the 33 at tier 2 and 14 of the 29 at tier 3. Every piece of carrying work is among them, by design. Everything else is likely to be gone once you have signed it, so a board that stops showing an old favourite has not broken.
Retirement is yours alone, and it never touches an offer you simply ignored.
Figures that change from offer to offer
Most jobs leave their numbers open. Parts to a height may ask for six parts to 2 km on one offer and ten parts to 5 km on the next; a long burn may want 15 seconds or 45. Every offer draws its own figures when it is dealt, and they are the ones written in its title, its brief and its goals — the goals your flight is judged against are exactly what the row says.
The pay follows the draw: a harder figure pays more than an easy one, and every offer's money moves a little on top of that, so two offers of the same job rarely quote the same sum. What an offer quotes when it is dealt is what you are paid when you sign it and finish it.
| Figure | Value |
|---|
| Jobs with open figures | 18 at tier 1 · 23 at tier 2 · 3 at tier 3 |
| Money in the tier tables | what a job pays at the middle of its figures |
| Pay at the easiest figure | about a quarter less |
| Pay at the hardest figure | about a quarter more |
| Spread on top | up to a tenth either way |
Research contracts
Research work pays discovery as well as credits, and it always comes back. A client names a reading — an instrument, a band of altitude, a world — and pays for it every time, not just the first time a place is measured the way the survey does. It is the discovery you can always fly for once the achievements within reach are earned.
| Job | Tier | Needs | Discovery |
|---|
| Temperature at a height | 1 | Thermometer | about 4 |
| A series of readings | 1 | Thermometer | about 3 |
| Pressure at a height | 2 | Barometer | about 8 |
| Temperature above Earth's air | 2 | Thermometer | about 9 |
| Low over the Moon | 3 | Thermometer | about 16 |
| Martian air | 3 | Barometer | about 18 |
The figure is the middle of each job's range; the offer on the board says the exact amount.
Carrying work
Every paying job is one of two kinds. A test proves a part: it is asked once or twice and then retired for you. Transport carries something for money — a passenger, a client's package, a satellite to its orbit — and it never retires. The board writes TRANSPORT above the company's name on those rows. The one card marked RESCUE is neither: it is the Fresh Start Grant, there only while your credits are under 1,000.
| Figure | Value |
|---|
| Transport jobs in the game | 30 |
| By tier | 5 at tier 1 · 14 at tier 2 · 11 at tier 3 |
| Of those, tourist runs | 22 — 12 at tier 2, 10 at tier 3 |
| Board slots kept for them | 2 of the 10 offers |
| Do they retire | no — every one of them always comes back |
| Tier 1 pay, both together | 680 – 940 credits |
| Tier 2 pay, both together | 1,750 – 2,475 credits |
| Tier 3 pay, both together | 3,750 – 4,850 credits |
Two of the ten offers are filled from the transport pool before anything else is drawn — tourist runs first, and freight only where the tier has no tour to give — so from tier 2 on there is nearly always somebody waiting to be flown somewhere. Nearly, not always: those slots are a floor rather than a quota, and if you have already signed every transport job your Administration can show, there is none left to fill them until one ends.
Freight is transport with nobody aboard, and it is the only kind at tier 1, because no pod that early has a seat to spare. A freight job asks you to fly with something aboard, reach somewhere with it, and recover the ship — the RECOVER chip in the flight menu, not merely a landing. Recovery refunds the parts on top of the reward, so a rocket you fly back in one piece earns twice.
Tourist runs
Twenty-two of them, and no two ask for the same flight. Tier 2 is all Earth: some of it varies the orbit, and four of it never leave the air at all, varying instead how far across the ground the passenger is carried. Tier 3 varies the destination.
| Tier | What a client is buying |
|---|
| 2 | a 15 km hop · above the air · an apoapsis of 300 km · a stable orbit · two minutes above 100 km · a circular orbit with its low point over 200 km · an ellipse out to 1,500 km · a landing on Table Mountain · 30 km from the pad without leaving the air · a minute held in the cloud deck · 100 km point to point · 40 km out and never above 5 km |
| 3 | lunar orbit · a landing on the Moon · a pair of passengers to the Moon · the floor of Pad Crater · a flyby that only crosses the Moon's sphere · Mars orbit · a landing on Mars · an orbit of Fleeb or Plumbus · a night at a station · four passengers to orbit |
The four-passenger run is the only one that needs more than a Crew Capsule: four riders and an astronaut want five seats, so it takes two Passenger Cabins as well.
| Figure | Value |
|---|
| Passengers handed over | 1 or 2, on accepting |
| What they cost | nothing |
| Roster room they take | none |
| Can they be dismissed | no |
| When they leave | when the contract ends, however it ends |
| What they need aboard | a seat in a Crew Capsule, beside an astronaut |
| How the job finishes | on the recovery, not the landing |
A passenger still aboard a ship stays on your roster until that flight sets them down, even after the contract itself has ended. See The Meek.
Where contracts do not exist
Contracts belong to the shared world. In sandbox the board opens and says so: nothing there can be accepted, no goal is judged and no reward is paid. With no connection at all the board says that instead, and waits.