Discounted Subassemblies

[CalculusWarrior]

One thing that occurred to me as I was playing KSP is that I have very little consistency between builds. For example, I will rebuild a new lander design and/or orbital stage for each mission.

I feel like if I was operating a real space program, I would want to use hardware from other missions which has already been tested and ratified to keep costs down. (Sort of like what the Constellation plan was to do with Space Shuttle hardware, and what SLS is currently doing)

It goes beyond just reusing bits of your launch stage though. Perhaps your service module performs exceptionally well, but you don't want to have to pay full price for a design which has been tried and tested many times.

As such, you can just grab a subassembly of that part 'off the shelf' and rather than pay full price, you instead have a discount on what the module would have normally cost (you still have to construct it, after all). This also helps when building launch stages, as instead of rebuilding your massive 'Jool V' launcher and paying out the nose for it, you simply grab a discounted version.

What does the community think?

[Dodgey]

This is already in the game. It's the right most tab. You need to have one part already loaded.

[psyper]

thats a good idea. And also the more you use a sub-assembly the cheaper it becomes because you're mass producing it more.

[Winter Man]

This is already in the game. It's the right most tab. You need to have one part already loaded.

No, he's not on about introducing subassemblies, but reducing cost for them because they're 'mass produced' in effect.

[blizzy78]

It would be too easy to abuse that feature to keep costs down. Just construct something, save it as a subassembly, then begin your new craft and place the subassembly for lower cost than the sum of its original parts.

[Winter Man]

It would be too easy to abuse that feature to keep costs down. Just construct something, save it as a subassembly, then begin your new craft and place the subassembly for lower cost than the sum of its original parts.

It wouldn't have to happen the first time you build something. All it'd take would be a little counter saying how many times a subassembly had been launched and to work out the discount from that.

[Justin Kerbice]

Good idea, a good way to do this is to separate design cost from total building cost. The first one will be paid for the initial build. But it'll start to become quite a nightmare to add as design include 1st build, testing and tweaking.

[Kasuha]

I think it is a bit early to be suggesting cost savings if we still don't have money in the game.

I also think this would be hard to implement - as soon as you attach the subassembly to the ship, it's not a single part anymore and you can remove or replace parts on it and change it according to your needs. Calculating the price of that would be probably not very simple or transparent.

[Winter Man]

I mentioned in my thread below somewhere about reusing landed sections that you could implement subassemblies in the VAB view as uneditable. That'd solve that pretty easily. And I think this is the perfect time for these types of suggestions as contracts are starting to be implemented now, so money won't be far behind. Better to suggest these things before certain relevant sections are already implemented than after a point that would require too much code to be changed (rather than just added), otherwise what's the point in suggestions at all?

[maccollo]

It's not a bad idea I think. Perhaps each time you "buy" something from sub assembly, the total cost goes for that thing goes down by a few %.

Edited February 26, 2014 by maccollo

[Algiark]

Or if you know you're going to use a particular launcher or whatever you could pre-order a certain subassembly in bulk and get a discount