A Reusable Spacecraft Hangar Mechanic

[Whirligig Girl]

* 100% recovery for spaceplanes is overpowered. Add some maintenance/building costs. Ideally, introduce a hangar mechanic to make re-use vs build-new a significant gameplay decision.

So instead of building a spaceplane (presumably out of the parts that you had) each time, you save a spaceplane in the hangar in whatever state it was when you left it, and then you can edit it as a ship, but removing parts costs money too, unlike when you build a new ship. Placing parts would still be important if you wanted to overhaul a plane, and especially if you wanted to add cargo.

Meanwhile, building new ships would not only assign a cost to parts, but to the joints between them, and then another price for the cost of running the VAB's machinery such as cranes and lifts and trucks. So a ship that costs 10000 funds might add a 70 to 90 fund increase due to the part assembly, and a times 0.123 or so to that from the VAB. The assembly modifier might improve with the tier of the VAB, but of course, that would further putting the difficulty curve in the wrong direction.

So while you could salvage all of the parts from a crashed rocket that broke into pieces, even at the KSC, the parts recovery value of 99% wouldn't mean you could put it all back together for the same price. Recovering a big rocket that's still put together would keep the funds for the part joints, but it wouldn't be able to be reassembled in the VAB as easily, since you're still assembling them out of parts.

Or you could just take the fully assembled bit and save it in the hangar, where you can relaunch it with little to no extra servicing costs, except that you can not just take in broken parts.

I figure there would have to be a saving mechanic so that if you break off some parts of your ship, you could rebuild them exactly in the hangar. Saving would also be useful for designs where you fine tune the fuel tanks and you need just the right amount in them at launch. Fueling cost would of course be added on to servicing cost.

Building payloads would probably be done in the VAB. Once you've built a payload, you can instantly transfer it to the Hangar, but for the same cost as building and launching it. Then you can place it however you want. Perhaps placing a part directly onto a ship in the hangar might cost more than in the VAB, unless you are using a docking port. The difference being that taking OFF parts would also have a cost compared to the saved ship. I think that if you use a docking port though, no placement cost at all should be added to the craft, because you're just putting together pieces. It doesn't cost anything to dock two existing ships in space, so it shouldn't cost much to put them together in the Hangar.

Similarly there might be a need to take a recovered spacecraft and put it on a non-reusable launch vehicle (Space Shuttles!). So you could then take a ship out of the hangar and put it in the VAB with no extra building or assembly costs, and then build out a launcher for it. The thing would be that you couldn't change anything in the shuttle at all, it would be it's own part for all intents and purposes in the VAB.

TL;DR: Build once, launch as many times as you want.

And there's another thing: Gus gets way more strategies. For instance, maybe you could have a strategy that takes away from VAB costs but in exchange makes hangars more expensive to use, would be great if you're running a big-dumb-booster powered space program.