The Economy of Programs & Launch Complexes (PLC)

Reputation

According to SpaceCenterSettings.cfg:47, every 1 reputation generates 100 subsidy as yearly funding.

Confidence

Confidence is spent to activate programs at faster paces and more yearly funding. On average, every 1 confidence generates 105 yearly funding.

Figure 1: analysis of incremental yearly funding. EOS is the outlier where BN activation cost is not 2x of FAST cost.

Figure 2: the conversion rate seems rather consistent cross early and late-game programs.

Confidence Acquisition

There are two approaches to acquire confidence.

Confidence Acquisition via Optional Contracts

You pay engineer salary (a cashflow) to build and launch crafts to complete optional contracts. As the game progresses you would need to complete more challenging contracts to earn confidence, therefore the cost of confidence acquisition increases over time.

On average it costs you 25 cash for 1 confidence in early game and up to 80-100 cash for 1 confidence in late game.

Figure 3: estimation of craft cost for optional contracts, based on crafts from my previous runs.

Confidence Acquisition from Science

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Cash and Inflation

Rush vs No-Rush Implication

Assuming that you currently have $n$ engineers, and you would want to increase your engineering productivity by $0<x<50$ percent. You have two options:

• Hire $x$ percent more engineers: you pay $3xn$ cash immediately and $5xn$ salary yearly.
• Alternatively you could rush build $2x$ percent of every project for the same outcome, and this option costs you no immediate cash but $10xn$ salary yearly.

Given that the two options produce the same increment in engineering productivity, we could draw an equation that 3 cash = 5 yearly funding. By plugging it into DCF formula that ${\frac {1-e^{-r}} r} = \frac 3 5$ we would obtain a discount rate $r \approx 1.126$.

Confidence as the Anchor

We already know from previous analysis that confidence gets more expensive over time in terms of cash/salary. If we consider confidence as the anchor, we could estimate the inflation/discount rate by fitting an exponential regression to the equivalent value of cash. It turned out that this approach leads to a similar estimation $1.12 < r < 1.14$.

Figure 4: fitting of an exponential regression

Engineering Productivity

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Research Productivity

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Science

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