Continuous Science parts

[SirJoab]

Just a thought on scientific instrumentation; I think it would be great to have instruments that slowly build up science points while active, and those can be transmitted/recovered when the user decides it's been long enough. Instruments I can think of right now would be:

Siesmometer

Radiation

Weather (wind speed and direction)

Precipitation

Atmospheric Spectrometer

A variant of the Mystery Goo container (aging mystery goo?)

Ant Farm (you know Kerbals would want to see an ant farm on Eve)...

These instruments would build science very slowly, but could yield a large amount of Science if the player was patient... And of course the probe/lander would have to still be capable of transmitting or returning the data after sitting for so long.

Whaddya think?

[Kegereneku]

Hum, for starter it would require KSP to keep track of active subsystems on spacecraft that are not focused on by the player.

But I think such a feature would be necessary for satellites anyway.

However the big objection I have against it, is that could just "spam" science unless the quantity of science is infinitesimal (mostly because of timewarp). We have to remember that you need only so much science to complete the entire tech-tree.

And if we make the science-pool of those instrument finite to solve the problem, then what would be the point ?

The only reason I see for such instrument would be to justify satellite, but they can be justified by other means.

[SirJoab]

I had thought about those problems too. My answer to Sceince spamming would be to make the accumulation of points taper off exponentially. The game wouldn't have to track the instruments real time, just simply record the time the experiment started and run the exponential equasion when the science is requested. They could also make an instrumen only capable of recording data for a limited amount of time... maybe a year... then if the data isn't retrieved in that time it would be lost. And you can only retrieve data once from an instrument, so you wouldn't simply have science points ticking in...

[goldenpeach]

Or, we could do something else: we use the same system as the other experiment(even for the part where you lose science when transmitting) BUT the experiment take some time to be realized.

That way, you can't spam science!