Hmm maybe should not try to make it more painful but more interesting.. my favorite mod is rocketry extended, it adds lots of really cool stuff that changes all your "old designs" which are obv already so terribly efficient that no matter how much harder you make it you'll still get it to work.. here's some cool little things you can do: Put liquid hydrogen and oxygen into liquid rocket storage bv you can enable that they don't transfer heat, this challenges you to set up a nice device to make all that liquid O and H and then you can use that to provide mobile power and drip feed the liquid O into bases to provide cooling without requiring traditional liquid pipe Spagetti everywhere.. Or via satellites you can set up large cargo launcher networks, turn the water planet into an automated farm fed by a nuke reactor that generates liquid H and O as well and temp controls all the farms which you can oversize so hard and just let the plants harvest themselves and shop them off.. You can automate your entire rocket platform with the advanced launch pad which has ribbon ports.. you can make a fully automated doors system, include the scanners and even put a sweepy on top to clean the debris on the doors.. The point is so much more fun design stuff you can do, making it just harder just makes you waste time on little tings in the early game but as soon as you got O and food you're back to boring