Booster R&D

[CowboyRonin]

Is it WAD that rocket R&D runs at about half the pace of payload (capsule/probe) R&D? My real concern with this is
that, with the failure penalties to reliability, it is possible to lock a player in a cycle of failures and
rebuilds with the human-rated rockets that pushes Mercury into the 1970s. I'm not advocating completely removing
the reliability penalty for failures, but it needs to be in some scale with how long it will take to rectify
the failure. If a failure imposes a 1-year penalty to get to R&D reliability, it doesn't take many of those
(especially when the Redstone and Atlas max out around 70%) to really add to the timetable.

If the mechanics are WAD, then I would like to propose allowing the opening of the Mercury project after the orbit
goal (i.e. Sputnik/Explorer), with penalties to capsule reliability tied to the X-15 goals. That will allow the
player to push R&D onto the Redstone and Atlas earlier in the game, while waiting on the X-15 to finish up the
(much easier to research) capsule.