New tier in the science tree

[mrabinovich]

Disclaimer: I'm little more than a complete newbie, so I'm aware that my proposal may sound ridiculous to experienced players.

I've just unlocked all science in the carreer mode without even going beyond the orbit of Duna or landing on another planet. It seems to me that a new tier of extremely expensive science could add motivation for further exploration. Each technology from that tier should cost realy much, e. g. 3000 science, and unlock a superior piece of equipment that can make exploration of the outer planets and Jool moons substantialy easier. Also, the combined cost of this techs should exceed the maximum accumulated science, so that the player will have to make decisions about what to research instead of unlocking everything after a few Mun and Minmus missions.

Example tech: advanced nuclear propulsion, requires nuclear propulsion and meta-materials, unlocks an advanced nuclear engine that has 2x mass and fuel consumption of LV-N, but 4x thrust.

[tychochallenge]

Get the KSP interstellar mod. It adds a bunch of new nodes beyond the current ones in addition to exciting new propulsion and resource processing:)

[MKI]

The current tech tree is pretty easy to finish science wise.

I would rather see more nodes in the current tree implimented only after career mode is more completed.

There still needs to be reputation, contracts and a money system implimented. The money will make missions much harder to build and keep launches smaller, thus making the tech tree harder to finish fast. Depending on how much repuations, contracts and money affect career mode, career will be much different to play.

In the mean time defiantly check out what tychochallenge mentioned.

[regex]

The money will make missions much harder to build and keep launches smaller, thus making the tech tree harder to finish fast.

Don't speak in absolutes about a subject we literally know nothing about. Money could end up affecting the game in a much different way.

Depending on how much repuations, contracts and money affect career mode, career will be much different to play.

This much is true but, again, it's important to stress that we have no information on how money or reputation will be implemented, so any statement regarding the difficulty those mechanics is pure conjecture.

As for the OP's suggestion, I agree that another tier would be nice or reduced science rewards would be cool. One thing we do know about career mode is that money, reputation, and science will be interchangable (at least according to the current ideas the devs have), and that contracts will be optional, so we can probably assume that (in the future) you could do a full career by only gathering science, so the excessive rewards now make more sense when you're also using science to gain money and reputation.