Rocket Failures

[Leuf]

Rather than all your research culminating into building a sure fire rocket that always succeeds you can start building lower tech rockets with a high chance of failure or continue to research and wait until you can launch rockets with a higher chance of success. This would allow different play styles. Do you focus on expansion and acquiring mass amounts of resources so you can launch a dozen crude rockets all at once in the hopes that one of them makes it to orbit? Or do you improve all that can be improved and have a rocket with a 99.5% chance of success? Do you make a second one to be sure? 99.5% is not 100%. Or do you go somewhere in between?

To make this work there has to be a consequence for failure. If the rocket explodes on the ground it destroys the silo and surrounding area. If it goes out of control it can crash into a random area, assuring that it's never completely safe to launch the earliest rockets no matter how far out you build the silo from your factory until you've built a more advanced rocket with range control. And of course any rocket launch provokes a devastating response from the natives so that everything after will be much more difficult.

I think this fits with the story that you're unexpectedly stranded on the planet. Rocket science is hard, even for rocket scientists. Your first attempt at launching something into space is probably not going to end well.