TRUE Realism Overhaul!

[Comet Tail]

Certain members of the community, myself included, love Realism Overhaul. But even with all the amazing work done on that series of mods, there's one huge chunk of realism still missing from the game...

The amazing world of government contracting!

So here's the idea of what the mod would do:

You can choose to play as big, established companies like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, with a brand-new amazing contract from NASA! With this option, you get to play as an executive. Meddle in your engineers' designs. Wait until they've finished designing a rocket, then go tell them it needs to lift much more weight to orbit! And most of all, get as much sweet green money-juice out of that contract as possible, making your design as complicated as you can - right up to the point of cancellation! And when you've done that, you can report every penny you've pulled out of NASA to your investors!

Or you can play as a manager in NASA. Remember, your Ion drives are completely necessary to go to Mars - after all, if they aren't, then you wouldn't get funding to keep working on them! Get real friendly and convince upper managers just how vital your Ion drives are for a manned mission to Mars. And whatever you do - don't go under budget, go over budget so that next quarter they'll really see how badly you need a bigger budget!

You can play as the head of NASA himself, as in the original game. But this time you don't actually design your craft, you just contract most of it out, and watch as your contracts grow bigger and bigger! Have presidential candidates come over to your state and promise to do big things with NASA when they're out of office and have no power to live up to their words! Be amazed and actually regain some hope for humanity when small startups work 18-hours a day to actually stay within their originally contracted budget!

Or, you can play as one of the recent start-up private companies. You can do what's absolutely impossible, and the disullisioned engineers elsewhere in the industry think what you're doing is impossible - but boy do you show them wrong! However, you have to work 18 hours a day to make this happen. If you spend any less than that, there's always a big line-up of people willing to take your place if you fall behind!

 

 

So how's that for a realism overhaul? 

Spoiler

 

(Disclaimer; I don't know of much executive meddling in actual designs, but I do know the Atlas V, or at least the Common Core Booster, was never intended to have SRB's attached, and when engineers were told to make it lift a lot more, this led to an odd non-symmetrical design. And I don't know much about the executive history of Ion Drive development - other than there have been proponents for it as a means of manned missions to Mars, which is kind of absurd, really, but you see a lot of "let's all do our own thing and see if we can go to Mars with it" type of work at NASA nowadays, as opposed to the straightforward goal-oriented Apollo approach. Kind word for Ion drives, though; they really do have a place at least on unmanned missions.)

Eh, it probably comes off worst than I meant it, but it's just kind of a little joke at how much nicer our little Kerbal programs are than the real one. Don't get me wrong, I still love NASA, kinda eh on the United Launch Alliance, and SpaceX is amazing, but the real world is quite odd.

 

But in case that all came off as a bit too negative, here's a neat reminder that NASA's still doing awesome stuff, even outside of SpaceX contracting:

Spoiler

 

Check out NASA's awesome flight schedule - they're planning to land a probe on Europa, and do a manned Lunar flyby as early as 2021-23!

 

 

[Jas0n]

I feel like this sounds like a different game, where the focus is more on the economy and society aspects rather than rocket science. 

[Comet Tail]

Eh, it's largely satirical, just kind of poking fun at the real aerospace industry.

Edited May 18, 2017 by Comet Tail

[StupidAndy]

sounds like another game, like the other person said, but I would still get it