Career and energy musings.

[dangerhamster]

Something that occurred to me whilst looking at a mining rig. And apologies if this has been suggested before.

Whilst craft have an energy budget/requirement the KSC has the benefit of Kerbins worst utility suppliers in that there are no running costs. Okay a one off payment upgrades a facility presumably increasing the energy requirement (especially  R&D) but it remains a once only expense. How about each facility having an energy requirement that has to be met? Like comnet this would only be turned on if wanted. The requirement would scale up along with the building.

Initially this could take the form of a bill that must be paid at a set interval, penalties for non payment could perhaps be reduced capability or some facilities unavailable until payment.

On the flip side there could be researchable techs giving sub-upgrades such as solar power, improved building insulation or even a receiver for beamed power. These sub-upgrades would have to be paid for and in the case of beamed power orbital facilities built and deployed. This opens up the possibility of selling excess energy to the non space obsessed citizens of Kerbin (wherever they are).

[Wjolcz]

I'm guessing the main problem here is that you have noticed that the funds accumulate very easily in the career mode, so:

4 hours ago, dangerhamster said:

On the flip side there could be researchable techs giving sub-upgrades such as solar power, improved building insulation or even a receiver for beamed power. These sub-upgrades would have to be paid for and in the case of beamed power orbital facilities built and deployed. This opens up the possibility of selling excess energy to the non space obsessed citizens of Kerbin (wherever they are).

This kind of mechanic could be replaced with space mining. I really think there should be a way to mine xenon from certain, far away places (like the Jool system, even though it doesn't make much sense but what does in KSP?). It doesn't really fix the lack of the ukpeep costs, but that's something I'd like to talk in the second part of my post.

The problem: the abundance of funds.

The solution: monthly capped budget (based on reputation) + tech needing money instead of science points.

I play my career that way^^^ (thanks to a few mods) and it's very nicely balanced. I have to watch my funds, wait for them to accumulate (a nice way to introduce the time-passing mechanic) and carefuly decide if I can afford new tech, a failed launch or a facility upgrade. And it's not that complicated as it might seem. All that would have to be done in the stock game is:

-Replacing science points with reputation points as the science experiments' outcome
-Getting rid of science-to-tech research mechanic (and the science points entirely) and introduce money as the main R&D currency
-Reoriginizg the tree to make it look like this.

Edited December 4, 2016 by Veeltch