A change to the science system to make probes/rovers/stations more useful

[Szkeptik]

Since resource mining was shelved indefinately, it feels like a big waste of work to let all the resource maps the devs have already showed us go to waste. If you remember the screenshots form around 0.19, there were over a dozen resources scattered on planets. I thought, what if instead of mining these, they would become individual sources of science. We have budgets and contracts now, and I think it would be a great way to enhance the science system and at the same time allow for lots of contract opportunities if these resources would become different sources of science.

So you might get a contract to find and recover a sample of Blutonium.

First you would have to send scanning probes out to find deposits on planets.

These wouldn't tell you exactly what it is, only that there is a deposit of something in a certain area. You'd actually have to land and analyse samples in a lab to understand what it exactly is. So you might get lucky and get blutonium on the first try, but it might be something else. We'll need an automatic lab for this, so you wouldn't need to send manned missions every time, automatic rovers could scoop up and analyse it.

The contract would also state what purity of the material they want. An automatic lab couldn't tell you the purity, so you would have to send a manned mission with a more advanced lab module to figure that out. Now purity would vary inside the resource zone, so your team would have to sample many different areas and analyse the samples in the lab to determine what the purity of the material is at that spot. The purity would change along a gradient, so if you keep sampling the area, you could reliably close in on the higher purity zone -which of course wouldn't necessarily be in the center of the resource zone-. This would be a great use for rovers to speed around in a few km diameter area looking for the higher purity samples. The devs could add a sample collection module that would allow you to collect and number a bunch of samples and then take them all back to the lab in one go. Once you find a sample pure enough, you'd have to transport it back to get the contract.

You'd get little to no science for this, since you were working on a contract and the findings are not yours, but you could also go out and find sources of the different materials for yourself and do science on them. The higher gradient you find, the more science you can get from analysing it.

Rethinking and prioritizing science points:

I think we could make the "general" science points we have now less effectual at unlocking techs, and instead redesign the science advancement system by science "types", that could be tied to the type of materials you do science on. To stay with our Blutonium example, if you wanted to unlock nuclear techs like the NERVA or nuclear generator, you'd need to collect blutonium science points for that. Maybe you could also use regular science points to unlock it, but you'd need several times as many of those than blutonium points. This way you could prioritize science and not just any mission to anywhere would yield more or less the same amount of science.

On spacestations:

Since spacestations are currently not very useful, I thought this idea could be extended to give stations some love:

The more advanced contracts could ask you to combine two or more samples of different materials. Since not every material can be found on every planet, you would often have to ferry a resource from one planet to the other. Instead of taking a sample you found on Dres to Duna to combine it with something else you found there, you could have a lab in orbit around Duna, and only take the Dres sample there, and take the Duna sample to orbit as well to do the experiment, and then you could fly the result back to Kerbin with a lot less fuel.

Alternatively: Contracts could ask for different research environments, sometimes demanding a zero gravity experiment with the material, which of course could only be done in orbit.

Different Laboratory Types:

There could be different level laboratories, each more expensive and heavier than the last. The more advanced lab module would require more electricity and staff as well, and give you more details about the material being studied. Contracts could ask for certain details that only a larger lab could mesure.

Tweakable labs:

Since tweakables were added you could designate on construction what experiments a lab can do. I'm sure the devs could come up with many funny experiment types. In small labs you could only designate one type of experiment, larger ones could have 3 types, even larger ones 5 types etc. So you could have a lab in orbit but get a contract for an experiment that your lab can't do. You would now have to build and launch a second lab module for your station that is capable of doing the desired experiment. This would give a point to docking and modular stationbuilding.