R&D Overhaul

[Guest]

At the moment, you gather science and unlock a ‘category’ which might contain 4 or 5 parts of varying usefulness. 

Would it be better to have each part unlockable as an individual and the tree organised in conjunction with the categories in the editor?

For example, you’d have a branch “Engines” and a branch “Command Pods” and so on. But each step would be a single part which would cost say 5 science to unlock (it would increase as you moved up the tree).

So I might choose to unlock the Terrier engine, then realise i need a FLT400 tank so I could unlock that (assuming it was next, I might need to unlock the FLT200 first)  at a cost of 10 science rather than having to unlock maybe 3 or 4 different categories just to get the basic part I want?

Things like basic solar panels or landing legs would be available much earlier this way as well but obviously they’d be very limited in what they can do hence the incentive to unlock more.

[Wizard Kerbal]

I like it the way it is. Sometimes, the earlier parts are useless, but they come with parts like the Mk1 liquid fuel. Then doing that, I can get my hands on actually good aviation parts.

[Fraktal]

I already proposed modding the tech tree for that, but was told it'd break compatibility with a lot of other tech tree mods.