Science Button

The flask button in the left-hand action panel (the flight HUD) is a one-press shortcut for collecting science. When a science opportunity is available at your current location, pressing it tells every science instrument on the active vessel to run whatever experiments they can, right now, without you having to open each part's action menu individually.

It is the flight equivalent of walking down your vessel and hitting "Run experiment" on every instrument at once.

Button display rules

The flask indicator signals that your vessel is somewhere science can be gathered: i.e. at least one instrument aboard has an experiment that is valid for your current situation and, where relevant, your current science region on the body below you.

Pressing it only does something meaningful when:

• The vessel you are flying is the active vessel.

• The vessel has control.

Button pressing rules

The following rules are applied.

1. If the vessel currently has no control, nothing runs and you get an insufficient control message.

2. Loop to all science parts on the vessel:

   1. Loop to all experiments of the current part:

      1. The experiment is evaluated: it runs if all of these are true:
         - The current situation/region is valid for that experiment.
         - The experiment is not already stored.
         - There is enough crew aboard (crew-based experiments only).
         - There is enough storage to hold the results.
         - There is enough Electric Charge / resources to power it (unless infinite power is enabled).
         - There is not already an experiment running for this part.

      2. Experiments that can't or shouldn't run are quietly skipped.

Experiment running rules

• Instruments that have a deploy animation open up.

• Timed experiments run a countdown and draw Electric Charge (or their required resource) until they finish.

• Contextual experiments (the situational ones) complete as soon as their condition is met rather than on a fixed timer.

An experiment can be interrupted before it finishes and will stop early (with a notification) if you:

• Leave the valid region or situation before it completes,

• Run out of the resource it needs, or

• Lose crew or storage needed to keep it going.

Interrupting for any of these reasons produces no report for that run.

Success rules

When an experiment finishes successfully, the game creates one or two Research Reports for it, depending on the experiment type:

• A Data report (transmittable), and/or

• A Sample report (must be recovered or returned).

Report value is scaled by where you are — the body, the situation, and (if applicable) the specific science region. The finished reports are placed into the vessel's science storage, and the Research & Development / science inventory panel is surfaced so you can see what you just collected.

Notification rules

Because a single press can touch many experiments, you may see one or more notifications summarising the outcome. Typical messages: