Tutorial

Just as if RP1 wasn't complex enough, you installed this mod and your eyes have glazed over the UI. Welcome to Headlines.

Step 1 - Understanding the goal

With Headlines, you aim to attract and retain the highest profile crew to maximize KSC production. Played well, and with luck, famous crew members are worth a lot of funds in benefits. How to get there?

1. In order to get a 10 reputation reward, you must have 10 hype available. If you don't, you can gain at most what you have in hype and the overflow become your hype for the next time.
2. Pilots are your main asset to gain hype. They are much more effective when backed by a media campaign, but work most of the time to keep your program in the public eye by performing media appearances. You can't micromanage these media appearances, but get a lot more control over them during a media campaign.
3. As your program goes from a startup, to an underdog, and so on, the quality of applicants goes up. So, to get good crew, you must ensure that you don't waste reputation gains from contract by completing them when no one care about you.
4. Fame is a race, and stalling is the same as falling behind. The highest is your program's credibility, the fastest it fades over time. Pacing your progression helps in staying at the top.

Step 2 - What to make of your staff Program Manager (PM)?

Who is your program manager? Initially, this is not a crew member: they won't retire nor get into fights with your crew. You can promote a crew member to this position only if they are better than the staff PM. If you ever withdraw a crew member from being a program manager, you will reassign this staff PM to the role.

• Scrapper: Expect dysfunctionality as the PM will sow discord. You may want to replace a scrappy staff PM with a crew PM soon.
• Inspiring: A rare and valuable quality. Essentially, inspiring PMs have a higher effective profile when it comes to leadership tasks.
• Pilot: They are very pro-fast pace for launches. They will even slow down research to make assembly faster. They are, however, much better at dealing with the press. This matters a lot for a PM.

Once that you have a very famous crew member that you can spare, you definitely will want to replace the staff PM. A legendary PM can inspire your crew to build powerful teams, and speed everything up in the KSC.

At first, expect the PM to have an underperforming control over the program. This is normal. As they gain experience, they will more often get Nominal control. When this happens, you'll be able to micromanage crew members and have them prioritize to suit your strategy.

Step 3 - Making your crew members famous

Focus on growth

You will find a priority on the Program tab called Growth. If you have a decent PM, every time that they have nominal control of your program, they will direct your crew to train, go on study leave, raise funds, recruit better applicants. Training raises the profile of a crew member, and their profile is how good they are at their job.

Fly your crew members

Complete x-planes contracts in live events and not only you'll efficiently accumulate reputation, but also build individual crew members fame. Build fame from the bottom: it is better to raise the profile of your lowest profile crew than to create a superstar who will start to think that they are too good for your program and leave. Fame depends on reputation earning during a flight, particularly a live event flight. You may want to pick a high profile crew at first and make them legendary with the Break sound barrier so that you may make them Program manager immediately after. Otherwise, build from the bottom, not the top.

Fame, like reputation and hype, decays over time.

Step 4 - Go LIVE when it matters most.

In the Media tab, add one contract to a media campaign by clicking on the [+] button beside this contract's title. This means that you are making a pledge to complete this contract in the next live event.

If you are short of hype, set a campaign up and you will see a spike in hype. Each pilot should have a media appearance, especially if the campaign is longer than 5 days. Much longer campaigns will see an accelerated pace of media appearances. It all comes down to the number and quality of pilots working on media blitzes. The UI will let you know if you should expect a campaign to be long enough to fully hype a contract.

Going live is especially powerful if you expect many records to be broken when the live event starts. This is because hype isn't used up during a live event and for smaller reputation gains, and thus each hype point can be used more than once.