Do you dream of being a space tyrant hero? Want to develop a railgun that will chuck a lump of matter at an unsuspecting civilian hostile combatant at relativistic speeds? Perhaps you found some Exotic Ridiculite out in the Belt, and you think it might just be the key to owning your very own planet cracker suffering eliminator.

Sounds like Development Projects are right for you.

Development Projects are the tool for making your wildest designs come true. Collaborate with your (hopefully well-funded) research institutions to develop new designs for anything from ship weapons, engines and armor, to agricultural facilities and orbital habitats.

Here's how it works:

Starting a New Development Project

When you start a new development project, you can specify what you want from a small handful of options:

1. Spacecraft Modules
   • Here, you can design the individual ship modules that will eventually go into an overall ship design. You can choose from:
     1. Engines — These make your ship go places.
     2. Power Plants — These give your ship the juice needed to go places and do things (including keeping any sentient organic lifeforms alive in the harsh void of space).
     3. Habitation — Unless you want to strap Commander Jim's frozen corpse onto the outside of your ship, you'll probably want a place for your organic lifeforms to eat and sleep (comfort optional).
     4. Weapons — The primary method of giving someone you don't like a bad day. Weapons are broken down into a further handful of categories, but you can read about that over at Weapons Design Overview.
     5. Sensors — These let you peer into someone else's ship and read their internet history. Also what weapons and cargo they're carrying.
     6. Active Defenses — Some defense systems require go-juice in order to actively neutralize incoming threats, like point defense and magnetic fields.
     7. Passive Defenses — When Mr. Derpy AI Point Defense lets you down, be sure to take some classic armor with you, just like knights of old. Design new types of armor here, and determine its thickness later when you put it on a spacecraft in the Spacecraft Design screen (#2).
     8. Cargo Holds — If you want to deliver interplanetary pizza in 30 minutes or less, you'll need a place to put it.
     9. Computers — As a wise man once said, "The old targeting chip ripped out of an AGM-114 is going to be a hell of a lot worse than the AI-capable supercomputer that's at the core of your fresh-built year 2550 command battleship."
     10. Science Instruments — Because you'll probably want to make sure you're not locating your new Titan colony on top of a massive methane sinkhole.
2. Spacecraft
   • This is where you can start a new project to put together all of those shiny new ship modules you've designed. You'll determine what engines, power plants, hab modules, weapons and other facilities the ship should have, and all of its expected performance specs will be automatically calculated for you on the fly (so you know, maybe don't use a bottle rocket array as USS Big Bertha's propulsion system).
   • In addition to composing your spacecraft's modules, you can also tune a set of variables here, like fuel capacity and per-section armor thickness.
   • Designed modules (from #1) are immediately accessible for use in the spacecraft designer, even if that module's development isn't complete yet. This means that you can design your spacecraft in tandem with one or more modules, without having to wait for each individual module to be completed. If a module completes but isn't performing as expected, you'll have the option to review the spacecraft design at any point in its development and make edits based on the outcome of your newly completed modules, though redesigning mid-development will entail a bit more development time.
3. Launch/Landing Systems
   • Overcoming planetary gravity is hard. So is safely returning to it. This is where you design new systems for doing both!
4. Surface Units
   • Design new tanks, artillery, infantry units, and other methods of harming someone else defending yourself on the ground.
5. Colony Facilities
   • A plastic tarp probably won't work too well as a habitation unit on Mars, so this is where you tell those dumb engineers how to make proper facilities for things like habitation, agriculture, industry, medicine and others.

Development Projects are designed in such a way that you can complete one in just a few clicks, worrying about pesky details like Engine ISP and Railgun Muzzle Velocity only when you want to. Of course, you'll probably get much more performant designs if you tweak those things yourself, but if you just want to flip the table and say "gimme a damn railgun STAT" and let the engineers worry about the details, you're free to do so. Now even grandma can engage in space warfare!

Time, Funding and Getting What You Want

While you're designing your slick new spacecraft, be sure to keep an eye on how much time it will take and the expected level of funding you'll need. This data will be shown to you in the design screen and automatically updated as you tweak variables.

1. Time — If you just told your online-university, minimum-wage engineering staff that you want an Alcubierre drive made from regular old normie matter, they will happily let you know that it may take on the order of 1,000 years for the theoretical science to catch up with your crazy fantasies, before laughing at you privately.
2. Funding — Each design will give you an ideal level of funding for the project based on things like "have we made these before?", "how much available capacity do our research institutions have?" and "how well do we understand the theoretical science behind it?" It's up to you to determine how much funding you would like to allot towards development, but keep in mind that underfunding may lead to subpar results, as outlined below.
3. Likelihood of Success — Ask for the impossible, and you're likely to be disappointed. Aim for simple goals, and you might be pleasantly surprised. The designer tells you a rough estimate of how likely the project is to meet your expectations with ideal funding.

The Proposal System

The Development Project system should only be as involved as you want it to be. If you want to spend hours tweaking variables on your fancy new railgun, you should be able to. Likewise, if you don't care about nerd stuff like Muzzle Velocity and Projectile Weight, but you find yourself in need of defense against those pesky Martian Separatists, you should also be able to simply say "hey engineers, gimme a railgun" in just a few clicks.

To facilitate this depth-optional approach, EM will utilize a Proposal system. Once you've completed a design, it will be Submitted for Proposal, which basically means it goes out to all the best Research Labs in the land, who will each come back to you with their own proposal. You'll receive one proposal from each Institution that specializes in the design you're submitting.