(Suggestion) Mod that ties Research together with Materials mined by eg. Karbonite

[Lancezh]

We have all these nice Ressource Mods but essentially nothing really to do with it except to build Rockets on EX-Launchpads, or convert them into fuel. I love the idea of progression in the new 0.90 but what this game now is lacking is an actual need to mine certain stuff aside from making a refuel station.

What if you could only unlock certain research if you bring certain rare materials back to kerbin ? Say some higher class Engines require rare materials that can only be found on the mun, or on other external planets ? Or even further you can only build certain rocket elements (like atomic motors) if you have a stock of materials or you have to buy them from external sources (see below)

There's a market for certain minerals with fluctuating prices and if you bring them back you can fund your space exploration with that as an alternative to missions... Could be an offline Multiplayer variant as well where multiple players access the same "market" with the ability to buy materials off of other players, only works of course if you have research costs tied to harvested materials in any way.

Is there anything similar out there already, it bugs me every time that the harvested materials we can get kinda serve no purpose (aside from refuelling) ?

[Streetwind]

That is a very tall order... still, if someone does make a mod like this, I'd probably be interested too!

In the meantime, you can kind of simulate something like that, at least for mod parts that use non-stock resources. For example, take Near Future's nuclear reactors. They run off of an EnrichedUranium resource. After you install this mod, you could go and change the resource definition to not allow tweaking in the VAB/SPH. Then, write a MM config that makes all the reactors and storage parts start empty. Suddenly, the only way to use these reactors is by mining the uranium yourself and shipping the stuff back home where your unfuelled reactor-driven spacecraft are waiting in low Kerbin orbit.

It's not quite the same as tying the research itself to the mining of a resource, but in terms of the effect on gameplay it's largely identical. You can do the same with anything else that runs off of a mod-added resource; at worst you might need to write a custom conversion process for one of the Karbonite converters if it isn't supported yet (which is just another MM tweak). You could even do this for the stock XenonGas resource as well, since it's non-critical to the progression before the point at which you unlock the ability to mine resources.