Career system

[JacobB094]

I found the contract system used by KSP and its imitators such as Juno to be rather unengaging and random. Here, I present an alternative, more involved and realistic setup that would probably result in a better experience. It's partially inspired by Mars Horizon.

Overall, it's an approach based more on planning and running long term missions than on launching as many rockets as possible to tick boxes. Rocket launches improve the player's periodic income in some way, rather than providing a flat reward. Maintaining space infrastructure is encouraged, flags and footprints missions are just a stepping stone to long term ones. That also means manned gameplay more focused on LEO ops, but with a real scale Earth, that's probably a good thing (and besides, anything beyond Earth is going to be long duration by definition).

1. Money. The primary resource is money, earned primarily through the quarterly budget. Every three months, the player gets a specific percentage of money from the national budget. This can be increased in a few ways. One is increasing reputation, which gives you a bigger slice of the pie. The second is to make the pie bigger by launching economic satellites, which contribute to the country's economic score. Third is to fly commercial missions, which add extra funding each quarter for the duration of the mission. One note about the budget is "use it or lose it" nature, if you have any money left in the bank by the end of the quarter, you should allot it towards something, like an ongoing construction or research. Allotted money disappears from the budget, but then you don't have to pay it as the project goes (for projects that take less than a quarter, some may prefer to instantly allot the whole cost, but spreading it out should be the normal way). The player can, and are even should, aim to go slightly overbudget. Any overruns would have a reputation penalty, but at a small overrun, it would be relatively insignificant. Large overruns could be costly, though, a right balance would have to be found.
2. Reputation. The secondary resource earned primarily through completing objectives, launching high profile missions and government or military satellites. It represents the government's opinion of how the space program is doing. It affects budget percentage, astronaut pool and events, running out of it can lead to a game over. As above, can be spent to exceed the budget. Losing a high profile mission is a hit, losing astronauts is a major hit. Reputation decays naturally at a slow rate, but it should only be an issue if you absolutely cease all activity.
3. Economic and science scores. They aren't really resources, but rather factors which affect how big the national budget is in absolute terms and how much of it goes to science, respectively. They could be affected by factors unrelated to the player's actions, but in the game, the space program would be the primary means of influencing both of those, by developing various aspects of its science infrastructure.
4. Research. Running research takes money and time. There is a base level of research funding tied to the country's science score. Technologies are divided into trees, which have several "lanes", which represent a particular discipline of progress. For instance, life support tree has separate lanes for oxygen, pressurization, greenhouses, and so on. All technology trees have an overall level that advances at a modest pace, based on that baseline research funding. Player can influence the speed at which they develop by giving general research grants in an area of their choice, as well as by increasing economic and scientific scores. In turn, each tree's overall advancement would grant a bonus to economic score. Specific technologies are researched when the player chooses them, but the technology's relative position with regards to a given tree's overall level would determine the overall cost. So for instance, developing a flight computer far ahead of current state of the art (say, IC level in discrete transistor era) would be possible, provided the player researched the prerequisites, but it would be enormously expensive and take a long time. That said, if the player can afford it, any technology researched "ahead of time" would give the overall progress a kick. To some degree, the player could trade the time for money, or the reverse, by using a slider to overfund or underfund a particular tech, but the relationship shouldn't be linear, with diminishing returns at at the high budget end of the scale, and disproportionately large time increases if too underfunded. This slider could be adjusted at any time during development. There could be a random element to this as well, where there's a chance at an early breakthrough or going overbudget. This would be inversely proportional to the budget slider (underfunded technology has a small chance of getting done a little early, overfunded has a chance of going over time and over budget). Yes, I'm a fan of both Automation and SoTS.
5. Construction. Like research, developing both your facilities and building your vehicles takes money and time. You can trade one for the other to some extent, with similar diminishing returns towards the end of the scale, but no chance of "breakthrough" (the rocket won't spontaneously spring into existence, no matter what). The space center is planned out on a grid (could be square or hex). Access roads for vehicles connect all space center buildings, with crawlerways or rail tracks (player's choice) connecting VABs to pads. Taxiways and runways work a lot like roads, regular vehicles can drive on taxiways, but not on runways. Putting admin too close to pads or runways results in penalties. Other logistics could be considered as well, the largest of VABs could also require a smaller crawlerway/railway to either the runway or seaport (or to the onsite factory, N1 style), to enable transporting oversize components.
6. Missions. In KSP, a contract amounts to "get there and you're done". A better approach would be to consider a mission as a long term commitment. The mission gives its bonuses for as long as it's operating, as long as the ground control and mission support are fully staffed. Missions also have phases, typically one will provide its bonuses only in the operational phase, but also only require staff (with their associated salaries) and facilities at that point. While the transit phase for Earth orbit missions would typically be a matter of hours, this would be important for interplanetary missions, which could spend years in transit, with only skeleton staff monitoring the probe. Early game manned missions would naturally generate a chunk of reputation, though of course that would boost the other factors, too. Generally, one spacecraft is one mission, but for space stations, the "station sustainment" would be a separate mission from each expedition to it. By default, it would be associated with the first component launched, though it could be shifted manually should the player want to deorbit the core of a particularly modular station.
7. Milestones and development missions. Those are the first missions the player flies, primarily focused on rockets themselves. Flying a milestone mission is required to unlock technologies behind it, for instance you need to send the first human into space to research more life support technologies, or perform the first docking to improve docking systems. Development missions are similar, but for a milestone that has already been achieved. They give bonuses to the any research unlocked by the milestone. This will happen on other missions, too, but a development mission is flown only for this.
8. Economic missions. These are mostly communication and weather satellites. Their primary role is to contribute to the country's economic score. Those are all things that make the economy run better.
9. Government missions. Represents things like spy satellites, military warning systems and the like. VIP rides also belong there. These heavily improve the program's reputation for as long as the satellite remains operational. Those encompass all things that are mostly of value to the various government agencies.
10. Science missions. Space telescopes, planetary research and so on. These improve the country's science score, and interplanetary ones often come with reputation gains, as well. This are all the things scientists care about.
11. Commercial missions. A late game type, and the only one which you can't schedule at will. They're spacecraft owned by a sponsor who asks you to make it and launch it, with full cost coverage (but also a cost ceiling). They can be any of the above types, but they also pay out a lump sum of money into the budget for however long the mission is ongoing. The mission sponsor will pay enough to cover the mission's upkeep and then some, but will cease payments at the contract's end date. You don't have to shut down the satellite, but you'll have to pay the upkeep yourself. The exception is manned missions, as these would incur penalties for not returning the customers to Earth before the given date (you can reuse the on-orbit hardware, though with reusability in play, you may be required to return that, too).
12. Assignments are overall objectives given to you by the government. Say, land on the Moon. Those are basically "story campaign" objectives. They should be general commitments to direct the space program's development over a long period, rather than specific KSP-like contracts. Fulfilling an assignment would grant a reputation boost and a permanent one time bonus to both scores, the quicker the assignment was completed, the higher the bonus.
13. Design competitions are the last way of getting ahead and something of an optional addon. If HSP has a plane component, this gives the player the reason to design them. Basically, a set of requirements with a deadline is posted. The player can then submit, before the deadline, a design that fulfilled all the requirements. For instance, they may ask for a ballistic missile that had completed a successful test, carrying a payload of X for a range of Y. That means you build your ICBM, then fly a development mission to prove it works. When that's done, you submit it for a reputation bonus. Design competition can be government (ballistic missiles, fighter jets), civil (airliners or GA) or dual use (cargo aircraft), awarding reputation, economic score, or both. A fun feature could be, if you complete a cargo aircraft competition, to have your design occasionally land on your runway under AI control, delivering stuff to the space center, instead of a pre-built generic plane.
14. Events. All sorts of random events which the player can react to. They can be positive or negative. Going overbudget can result in an audit, with different outcomes based on a variety of factors and player's choices.

[JacobB094]

Considering yesterday's discussion, I decided that a dedicated "Commercial" game mode could have some merit, alongside the above "Government" game mode. So here's the writeup for this alternate version, which is less "for all mankind" and more "for all the money". This will likely be the higher difficulty mode.

1. Money, reputation and scores work more or less the same. Economic score not only makes it easier to hire skilled workers or larger loans, but also get bigger, more lucrative deals.
2. Reputation now affects stock price, rather than affecting budget directly. This improves the player's ability to get loans, gain funding by selling stock, and keeps investors happy. In particular, loan management would be a major part of the financing system, especially early on.
3. Research has one major difference: each tree has two progress bars. One indicates the general state of the art, the other your own company's advancement. Technologies that are below state of the art can be bought instantly, technologies that aren't will need research as normal, and will advance the company's "tech advantage". Maintaining a tech advantage in a given field provides a reputation bonus, however it will require a significant investment, to the point that shoring up research score should be necessary to keep the overall progress going. Tech advantage can be converted to advancement in state of the art by licensing out patents, this will of course make some money.
4. Commercial missions are the initial way of making money. They work just as in government mode.
5. Design competitions work like they do in government mode.
6. Design sales. The alternative to waiting for a design competition is to make a design and try selling it. This could be a major subsystem if developed further, but the simplest implementation would see a number of performance metrics (for a cargo plane: price, operating cost, cargo space) dependent on the current level of relevant technology trees. If it can beat those metrics during development missions, the design will sell, and it will sell for as long as the required metrics (constantly growing due to research score based technological progress) don't catch up to its performance numbers. Price would also factor into it, applying a positive or negative modifier to metrics, but also affecting the market size.
7. Rent-a-sat. The player can set up economic or scientific missions using company's own funds, then rent the spacecraft to paying customers. Normally, it would be done by putting it up for rent on open market. Occasionally, a company might show up and ask to rent the whole thing for a set duration. The overall market size would depend on economic score, while having a lot of sats would naturally increase it, a careless player could encounter market saturation.
8. Company satellites. A mid-game option. Instead of renting out satellites, the player could, at some point, start a satellite-based business. So for instance, weather and mapping sats would gather data, which could be sold, price depending on resolution and coverage. Satellite radio and TV would be more complicated, with the potential number of subscribers dependent on coverage, but the bandwidth would also matter for whether you can broadcast HD, UHD or just SD signal, as well as the TV station's budget, subscription price and focus (sports programming, cartoons or 24h news?). Satellite phones and internet pretty much require very high coverage before they turn any profit, they depend on bandwidth, latency and subscription price.
9. Space tourism. From suborbital flights to space station stays, this is another mid to late game activity. The player would set the price, then schedule a flight. Early on, once the tickets have sold out, later on they could have it scheduled right away, if the market is big enough they'll sell out anyway. Other than tourists, scientists and eventually whole research teams can be sent to space, as well as commercial passengers and groups such as film crews.
10. On-orbit manufacturing. Eventually, the space stations themselves will be making money. Note, the player generally won't be sending raw materials, but rather highly refined feedstock. Thus, asteroid mining products would require refining before they can be used in the factory. One station could do both, but it'd be quite large and power hungry.
11. Interplanetary business. At first, the player can do commercial sample return missions and sell the samples for money. Later on, it would expand into asteroid mining and interplanetary tourism.

I'd expect gameplay for both modes to converge in the late game, with stuff like colonies, orbital power production and industry mostly working the same, no matter if you're a government agency or a private company. However, the early game would be quite different.

[Katniss218]

Just as a note, I have read it, and broadly speaking, it sounds interesting