Science Progression and Mods

[OmniscientQ]

I know, I know. "Alternate Tech Tree Configurations" is listed as a thing-not-to-be-posted-here. And there's plenty of mods out there that alter the current tech tree configuration. I've given a few of them a try. There's the Community Tech Tree and Yonge Tech Tree Plugin. Both address what is a fairly important problem with modding new parts into KSPs career mode, which is how to fit the dozens (sometimes hundreds) of new parts into the basic tech tree.

The Community Tech Tree adds enough new nodes all over the place that you can certainly find somewhere to put your new Space Widget at whatever science point cost you think is appropriate. The downside is that if you don't have enough mods, you wind up with some pretty sad and lonely tech nodes. When I tried it, I wound up buying those empty tech nodes because I honestly felt sorry for them. The Yonge "Great Big Sky" tree tries for a more granular approach, making dozens of new part nodes, and redistributing the stock parts among the new nodes in a way that almost lets you buy just the ones you want. Not a bad idea, but has some flavor problems of its own, especially when installing modded parts like Near Future.

And here's where the problem really becomes apparent. The Near Future parts are distributed among the stock tech tree (sort of) and don't really fit in at all. You wind up with very part-heavy final nodes in each category. Near Future is also compatible with the Community Tech Tree, which gives a much more reasonable part distribution. No such compatibility exists with the Yonge tree, however, because the folks responsible for Near Future didn't explicitly create it, which leads to the Whirligig nuclear fuel reprocessor sitting in the Advanced Instrumentation node next to the... gravimax detector? Every pack of modded parts is like this. If you want to add a tech node of your own for your parts, it might overlap with someone elses tech node where, honestly, the two sets of parts should go together.

Which is why I'd like to discuss (as in, please come argue the details and pros and cons) a whole new science system, and not just another tech tree mod. It'd solve quite a few problems if, instead of having a tree with various branches and nodes on it, we had science disciplines that we could devote our science points to. In fact, if you take a look at the stock tech tree or the Community Tech Tree, this is pretty much what we have now. There's a path for rocket science, a path for life science, a path for materials science and engineering, a path for aerodynamics... What if we simply formalized that system?

Instead of belonging to the "Aviation" tech node, the tail fin and elevon parts simply required a science rating of 45 in the "Aerodynamics" field? The basic jet engine requires a 35 in aerodynamics, but also a 35 in Engineering. Advanced command capsules? High Engineering scores, with a moderate Biology score. Long term habitats? High life sciences and moderate engineering. Nuclear engines and nuclear power plants? You can start off with a basic RTG with a few points in Nuclear Physics but a high Engineering score. You have to have an already high score in other fields before Nuclear Physics starts to be useful.

Or something like that. The requirements for each part are debatable.

The most awesome part is that modded parts could be dropped right in by setting the science requirements without having to worry about which tech tree systems you'll support. So long as we have a decent spread of science disciplines to choose from, we won't need anything more. I'm thinking that six would be a nice, round number. Aerodynamics, Materials Science, Life Science, Rocket Science, Electrical Engineering, Nuclear Physics. This opens up possibilities for acquiring science as well. Each part can provide science points for just a single discipline if you wanted. The Materials Bay produces materials science points. Gravioli detector provides nuclear science points. Atmosphere fluid sensor gives life science. The Mystery Goo... provides a little bit of everything, a fact which the eggheads back at the KSC don't like to think too hard about. Each body in the Kerbol system might provide a higher bonus to one discipline than the others.

I'll admit that such a science system might lose us a bit of flavor since the text on the various tech nodes are hilarious and well-written, but it can be made up in other areas. Would it be worth the trade? Is the entire system bland and unimaginative? Is it almost right, with just a few small tweaks required? I doubt such a thing is moddable under the current 1.0 game, but let's leave that aside for now.

EDIT: Removed my poor attempt at formatting links to the mods named, added planetary possiblities.

Edited September 17, 2015 by OmniscientQ

[Rath]

like it

[legoclone09]

Yes! This is an amazing idea, have some rep!

[pandaman]

Nice idea, certainly could be the seeds for a better system overall.

[OmniscientQ]

I really doubt it, but would it be possible to mod something like this with 1.0? Making a mod of it would mean it'd be yet another tech tree, and so it wouldn't resolve the incompatibility inherent with all the other mods out there. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks, and I'm getting more eager to try it. It wouldn't be pretty, though. The best model I can come up with to make this work in 1.0 would be to have empty science nodes in a line to represent progress within the disciplines, costing a few dozen science each, with "free" tech nodes branching off of them. Which just means more empty science nodes. And representing the tech nodes in 2D would get ugly fast.

I've been trying to imagine what the science system would have to look like if this were implemented officially. It's easy to imagine the disciplines as color-coded progress bars, but you can't have the tech rewarded by each discipline laid out in a row for easy perusal the way the tech nodes are now, especially with ones that have multiple disciplines as requirements. A 3D science model with the disciplines arrayed in a circle, with the tech rewards hanging in the center from lines leading to each discipline at the height required could work, but... That could get confusing for a user to navigate and understand what they're seeing, especially as mods with hundreds of parts get added. With the new in-game encyclopedia, it'd be possible to just have a browsable wiki-style list of the tech parts that you can look up by discipline.

It wouldn't be easy to come up with a user-friendly format, but I imagine that it would feel more... sciencey. The current tech nodes have mod difficulties as noted above, but they also feel like a business transaction in which I buy packages of parts, and not like discovery... Maybe that could be part of a difficulty slider: hiding the potential rewards of each discipline so you have to navigate them blind, or only showing the next potential reward. It wouldn't pose an actual problem with out-of-game wikis and personal experience to go on, but could be a form of self-imposed challenge.