Difficulty Option: Revocer Parts into Inventory

[monophonic]

First, I fully acknowledge this sort of thing has been discussed in the past. Nevertheless, I could not find any posts recent enough to have considered the existence of the difficulty panel and career dynamics as they now (0.90) stand. Also the threads I could find did not propose exactly the model I am about to outline. Oh, I'm not aware of any mods that do this either, so feel free to point me to any that may exists.

In short, I would like a difficulty option added to let any parts I recover be added to inventory instead of getting a refund for them. I should still pay the recovery fee, which would be the difference of the buy value and the (distance-from-KSP-determined) recovery value of the part. Then I could use those parts to build new crafts without paying for a new part.

This would bring up new choices to be made in ship design. For example, I might have to choose whether to buy a shiny new Mk1-2 pod for the three kerbal Duna mission, or reuse the two Mk1 pods from a previous rescue mission and just buy a third Mk1. I would enjoy making these kinds of decisions, while I do know others would not. That is why I suggest making it an optional feature.

It would also add to the difficulty, since you might run into a situation where you cannot afford to recover a craft. Especially from the other side of Kerbin, if you happened to land there. You might also find yourself in a situation, where you cannot do a mission with the parts you have in inventory and cannot afford the parts you would need to buy, but could if you had been refunded the recovered parts instead. Personally I would like to try and figure out these sorts of problems as well, so they are a plus for me. As usual, others will disagree, hence make it optional.

Keeping the feature as simple as an inventory count per part would help keep the implementation work simpler and shorter. I would be just happy to wave over any refurbishment issues for the benefit of gameplay, as in stock game the parts are completely failure-free anyway. There would not be any new art to be made, only some texts would need to be changed depending on which recovery mode is in effect. Of course that would mean some work on certain GUI dialogs, which is to be expected. How the inventory is saved in the persistence file would be the other big part of the code side. I don't know how Squad would do it, but I think something new would need to be made. There doesn't seem to be anything like it in the persistence file as of now.

So, in closing, I think this would be a smallish feature made with medium effort that would disproportionately increase my enjoyment of the stock game.

[DeMatt]

I'm not seeing how "recover part and be charged for depreciation due to distance" is different from "receive depreciated value due to distance".

[monophonic]

I'm not seeing how "recover part and be charged for depreciation due to distance" is different from "receive depreciated value due to distance".

Not at all, if you reuse the part. If you can't, the first case is a bigger loss by the value of the part. In the second case you can just use the money towards some other part that you can use. Therein is the challenge I like: How to get continued use, thus value, out of those old, obsolete parts and the cost sunk on them?

I know financially it's the exact same thing to just buy the old parts again, but it simply does not feel the same. And I would have (in-role) reason to think more carefully what all I can recover and how. It isn't a big feature, just a small detail that would suit my mentality better.