Feasibility of an entryCost mod?

[Nnimrod]

So one of the biggest, and least addressed issues with balanced and engaging career gameplay is failure to adequately model the economic challenges that real space programs/rocket companies face. With that in mind, could a mod that checks for various things which modify entryCost, and then returns a modified entryCost be made?

 

Consider two example engines, engine A and engine B. Engine B is a related descendant of engine A. The mod checks to see if engine A has been researched, and if it has it checks for a module called "EntryCostMod" or something like that within engine B's .cfg. Inside "EntryCostMod" it finds engine A = .45, and if engine A has been researched, it multiplies engine B's entryCost by the specified value (0.45). This would make an awful lot possible.

 

For bonus points, some way to handle contracts to buy a certain quantity of parts would be amazing, but difficult I think. Perhaps a reasonable surrogate for this would be to have a bit of code that keeps track of every time you buy a part, and to have a module in the part .cfg  called "QuantityDiscount" or something that looks at the running list of how many times you've bought a part, and uses a simple formula to apply a discount to the cost of that part such that buying the part over and over again makes the cost asymptotically approach a specified portion of the original cost.

 

Thanks for taking a look. EDIT: Forgot to mention, but if the quantity discount bit is possible, would it also be possible to make it work for resources like fuel?

Edited January 11, 2021 by Nnimrod

[hemeac]

Agree, this would be great if one could distinguish this level of granularity.  BDB does this to an extent with their engines insofar as some of the variants with the  B9 part switch require an upgrade.  I am trying to do this more cleanly within my update to my tech tree mod.  Each engine will be first unlocked as a "prototype" and then subsequent tiers will unlock the "base specs" and then a follow up tier for an upgrade.  Yet you are also describing something a bit more complex in that one could link engines by technology type.  So if you have researched an expander cycle engine, all subsequent parts that are expander cycles would be relatively cheaper to unlock.