My thoughts on the science system

[hazarada]

It's fun to fiddle with all the science gear and transmit important data.. for the first 5 minutes. After that it becomes a bit of a chore and you hotkey all the equipment and while in space, curse at yourself for not adding more solar panels to make it faster. I suggest breaking the science generating object into at least 2 categories:

1. Gear that is always on and transmitting automatically, things like temperature or gravity readings require statistics to have any significant meaning. This would also give a point for creating unmanned orbiters or landers with ongoing long missions (like we see in real life). The amount of science generated would also have to be adjusted (depending on additional uses for science discussed below) to something like a mediocre initial boost that levels off to a low flat rate over x amount of minutes played.

2. Things like surface samples or experiments would be big chunks of science that would would have a low cap on how much of the data you can transmit via radio. No matter how fancy your spaceship is(well with current technology anyways), its no substitute to getting a surface sample back to a lab. This would create the need to return ships instead of just slapping massive amounts of electricity generators on it.

that would create the need for at least 2 radically different ship designs, to take it further, heres another subcategory of science modules

3. Gear that is heavy, needs lots of electricity and/or fuel of some sort and generates science in big chunks over long periods of time, for an example - a lab module. Now we have the need for stations because its not economical to land the monstrosity that is able to feed the lab and transmitting the results is too inefficient.

Now for the extra uses of science:

1. one obvious one that comes to mind is just selling it (i'm assuming there will be a money system at one point since all the items have a pricetag)

2. improving the efficiency of various gear, for an example 100 science invested into an engine yields 1% better lsp, the next 1% cost is multiplied by something like 1.5 and so on. The modern trend in games is to use a fixed and/or capped perk system but personally i'm not a fan of that.

3. TBH i'd also like to see the current use for science tweaked somewhat, bulk purchasing a bunch of modules for x amount of science on a tree makes little sense to me. I'd rather have science points + money invested into various categories that increase the chance of unlocking a module over time which you can then purchase for a flat fee of science + money. The reasoning for this would be as follows - you invest the science you gather and money to various fields of theoretical science, every now and then that results in a practically useful concept achievable by a larger flat investment.