Imagine this for career mode(Community brainstorm)

@TestRunner Thanks for your ideas! However, I may not include all of them, some are a bit ambitious.

Let me give you the most uncreative and "no thought was put into this at all" idea, because it's so obvious, and it's probably what they're gonna do anyway.

Contracts...

• An airline company wants a jet (cargo or civilian).
• You have to compete against another aerospace companies for the contract and the funding that comes with it.

• you will need to tune the aircraft to reach the specification (fuel efficiency, service ceiling, etc...)

  ---

• The government wants an aircraft with some special performance (high Speed, high altitude, things like that...)

• Basically asking for reconnaissance aircraft or drones or fighter jets even....

Now I'm thinking small, and only an aircraft oriented mode.
But it can be just a "side mission" kinda thing and not related to the main career mode.
Like when your company is "in a pickle" and needs more money/funding. Or something like that.

@TestRunner Yep. Actually just like astroneer. But I just feel like sr2 isn’t really designed for crafting what you need, more of that money-buys-everything kinda style, just because that would really honestly feel weird with the kind of designer we have, besides, it’s not shredding your idea, it’s more like critical thinking.

@TestRunner That’s starting to sound a bit like astroneer. I don’t think mining is the best idea...

Recognition and reputation

Over time, new parts would become available, just by simply launching X number of times. Launching rockets would increase your recognition, and using newer parts would give you bonuses, though those bonuses would eventually lose their effect. Having high recognition would also unlock new parts, and so would researching new ones, assuming that was a feature. Note that those would also have the bonus. Having low reliability (as mentioned in the comment below) would decrease reputation, though having higher reliability and successful launches would increase it. Astronauts dying would quickly increase recognition, but would massively decrease reputation. There would be different things you could do during a launch, like achieve low earth orbit or land on the moon. Each would come with a wad of cash, along with a small amount of extra recognition and reputation. You would be able to pay to get stranded astronauts rescued, at the cost of cash and reputation, though it would be better for your reputation to get them rescued than let them die in space.

Reliability

Different parts should have different reliability scores. Reliability might be based on shape (like in the case of wings), the mass of things attached to them (like hinges), or their parameters (like engines with different fuel types/pressures/etc). A part should have a probability of failure curve that increases over time used/activated (for things like wings this would only count time in atmosphere, for engines it would only count time where the engines were firing). Parts could have penalties for cycling (i.e. slamming the throttle up and down over and over again should wear an engine out more quickly). At any point an active part could randomly fail (low probability early on, more probably as time and penalties increase). Parts should have different possible failure modes: becomes non responsive (i.e. an activatable part stops functioning), structural failure (one ore more of its part connections disconnects), or explosion (limited to fuel tanks and engines). Assuming there is some legitimate reusability component of career mode, crafts being reused should carry forward their time/use penalty unless money is spent to "refurbish" the craft thereby resetting the reliability scores. Assuming there is some sort of tech tree component to career mode, players should be able to spend R&D dollars to increase the base reliability of different parts.

This would encourage players to build redundant systems, have launch abort/escape systems, minimize stress/heat damage to parts, and avoid excessive throttle adjustment.

Related suggestion from @pedro16797

What if you could pay a currency (reputation, etc) to have a astronaut rescued?