Research Module: Why not add a SciData producing module to POB's?

[Karst]

That's the basic idea, yeah, but I wouldn't call figuring out the details of this "easy".

I played around with this concept before (for a credit-producing pob system, but the concept is the same). It was basically a cyclical route around the houses, in which each house produces one good and requires two others. So, a pob in any house would have two necessary supply routes.
Now in a system that produces a commodity that's sold at a fixed location, you can simply calculate the price by the total trip length from the suppliers, but since scidata is worth the same everywhere, you'd have to either use that total time as a basis to calculate the production rate for different, regional circuits, or have a single system that sources from everywhere, or everywhere that's being considered for balance, anyway.

That's certainly doable, but the problem with suggestions like these is that they're essentially just cool concepts that nobody then bothers to figure out real numbers for, and thus they rarely go anywhere.

Edit: You're right that this problem already exists, and arguably shows the difficulties of such systems. However, this is pretty different from batteries, because regions have little influence on the presence of an individual corvo the way they do on a pob. And it's a similar situation with capfarmers, since the main time investment is in the farming, not in any sort of travel. Regions affect pobs far more, since if for example, you would have to build a pob in Liberty for part of some factory process, the government and general playerbase of Liberty would have dramatic influence over your ability to use the system.

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