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Generally there are two ways to play KSP. 1. Sequential missions - completing a mission from start to finish, thus focusing their attention. The downside of this is warping through time and pushing the clock years in the future. This is especially bad for multiplayer and space races. 2. Parallel missions - launching, setting up maneuver nodes and alarms but not time warping. This maximizes the amount of missions you can do with a particular tech level in a certain time window. I propose a third: 3. Parallel-sequential missions. A good way to play I think would be to finish a whole mission then go back in time and continue with other missions from the moment you launched. Recorded mission milestones would be added to the main timeline. And the science points would come in the future, thus respecting the timeline. I think this would be useful for space races also, because I'm that case the timeline is very important and you can't really time warp because you're losing opportunities to launch more missions. So there's a lot of freedom to be gained by being able to go back in time. But from a gameplay perspective it's also very useful for the flow of the game to be able to focus on a single mission and finish it. This system allows for massive gameplay expansion.. like stage recovery, having single player space races against an AI controlled agency and rocket construction time passing in the stock game. Not to mention multiplayer (see multiplayer thread)! Later edit: Interaction with the craft could be feasable without resetting the recorded events timeline from that point onward if we have mechjeb-like automated control using milestones. The craft (or capable subassembly in case of separation) would just try to adapt and continue with the mission even if crippled or modified. If the physics simulation doesn't allow it to be successful (not enough Delta V for example of broken solar panels) then.. yes it would fail.

There are 4 launch pads - we could design craft then have time automatically advance the appropriate amount to account for construction and mission preparations. We could thus have 4 missions on the launch pads simultaneously. The parallel-sequential missions system (having recorded mission events placed on the main timeline and returning to the past) proposed in another thread enables having this feature in the stock game.