I always felt that there is a lack of information about other planets in KSP... i own KSP for almost 4 year now, and still i went interplanetary only ones or twice on Duna... the lack of infomation (in the game) about other planetoid and the lack of time to experiment myself always restrained me to get further then Minmus.
I mean, create and testing stuff in Kerbin SOI is fair... but the second u leave that bubble u have years of travel, and any error cause millions of losses in your founds account and more important, kerbals lifes.
At least for me, there is just not enough technical documentation on how to face new planets other then the 3 ones that i'm used to... i can tell if a ship can reach LKO do stuff at Mun and come back in one piece by simply looking at it, but outside Kerbin SOI i have no clue.
You can call me lazy, but what i want to say is: i always wanted in this game a building in KSC where i can go, select a planet and have a good documentation of it's enviroment, composition, lore, stuff i must be aware of, border of the atmosphere, it's density and composition, maybe in a clear heigh/density graph, and anomalies discovered, day lenght, revolution lenght, a detailed surface and ore map once i scanned it, and many other information like that.
All the info may not be available from the start... probably u'll have to send missions to them and run experiments to unlock the relative info, but ones you acquire that, you have the clear documentation at KSC, at your disposal for accurate planning. That's why a ground telescope. It collect all the knowledge from the Kerbol system. And no, the tracking station does not do that. The tracking station gives u general info of the planet you're looking at but it's function is to keep track of missions, ship and object in space, not to analyze planets.
Even if i don't agree about the idea of a building generating science i really like the OP suggestion. Sending probe around the system will then have a concrete meaning, beside collect a bunch of common science points...
