After restarting career mode with the Better Than Starting Manned[1] mod, I've found that the science collection has been much more enjoyable than vanilla. The changes to the research modules are fairly simple, but improve the science collection enormously - each type of science is sort of a mission in itself. Each module is given more distinct use-cases, which means the rocket design for a certain type of science collection changes depending on what you want to collect. For example, gravity scan is per-biome and at high and low space only. Seismic detection is for surface landings only. Temperature and atmosphere are high, low and surface, but biomes are not used. Mystery Goo and Surface Samples /must/ be returned to kerbin for analysis, which makes them higher difficulty and higher reward 'missions' effectively. It opens up more options; can make things like a gravity-scan probe that loops around (maybe on your ScanSAT probe), or a very light lander probe that just gets a seismic reading. The splitting of probes vs manned vs collection missions works well, and removing the transmit penalty on research differentiates probes vs collections. The transmit penalty in vanilla makes it saddening to do anything but bring all the science back every time on a generic manned ship with all the modules attached - it's always the same style mission. Removing some of the sillier science acquisitions - EVA reports at the launchpad, etc, reduce spamminess and make for better science rewards for the /actual/ science collection missions. I think this sort of direction would improve the gameplay mechanics of career mode for 0.24, without being such a significant development cost. There are lots of things in BTSM that I feel improve gameplay, but these changes in particular I think slot nicely into vanilla, bringing improvements without being disruptive. Of course, this is all under the assumption that science collection in 0.24 is the same as 0.23.5, but who knows what wonderful changes Squad has already made. tl;dr - differentiate science module usage - reduce transmission science loss - require samples to be returned to kerbin - reduce excessive biome spamming
