Science Cap

[Tellur]

I got this idea from discussion with Yemo when talking about his SETI-mod.

There are several mods out there that make KSP more demanding, more realistic, what have you. There's Deadly Reentry and FAR, and Remote Tech and DangIt! - they all make it harder to get that sweet-sweet science we all like so much.

Then there are mods that give us more ways to get that science - Station Science and Orbital Science, I'm looking at you!.

We have the community tech tree that requires us to get more science to catch... unlock them all, and hard mode that restricts our science gain.

But in the end we can still get almost all our science from Kerbin and it's moons, provided we have the right mods and we don't play on stupidly hard.

The mod I'm proposing implements science caps on the various... let's call them difficulty tiers. Once you reach that cap... well, you'll have to look elsewhere.

The idea of this mod is to get players out there, to shoot for new targets once they mastered getting to the Mun. To have a reason to build up an impressive satellite array that can reach all the way out to Jool.

The very basic implementation would be the simple cap. Numbers are entirely made up for now. Let's say you'll only ever get 200 science out of Kerbin. After those 200 science you'll have to shoot for the Mun (or Minmus). The Mun and Minmus are the next tier - maybe together with high above the sun. Together they can give you 400 science. Doesn't matter how you do it, which experiment you use or in which biome you are performing them in. Ideally that would include contracts, but that might be a bit more difficult to implement (still possible though, I believe). From there we go outwards. Next are Duna, Eve their moons and high above the sun - they form the next tier. Then come Jool and its moons and ultimately Moho, low above the Sun, Dres and Eeloo, but those are just examples how they could be grouped. It might actually be better to have each planet as their own tier, but I think you get the idea.

A more advanced iteration could convert science collected over the cap into funds/reputation, similarly to the contracts that do something similar for normal science (maybe add custom contracts that tweaks the numbers as well?).

Anyway, just an idea that I wanted to throw out there. I looked at it myself, but sadly my coding expertise is lacking.

[Yemo]

This is an awesome idea and would greatly benefit the balance of the game.

It would go in the direction of depreciating marginal returns, like in every innovation/evolution driven scenario.

The first mun surface samples should yield high returns, but every additional sample contains an amount of repeated information. So that at some point, it is more efficient to go to a more distant location (another planet) to get results.

Translated to gameplay mechanics, the science cap per body would be much closer to this than the current 5th biome yields same returns as 1st biome.