Hey!
This cool stuff that you are making!
I have a suggestion regarding the (burning) cargo pods recipes. Before I came across the hardcore mode project I was already looking for a mod to make the pods some logistical entity, because infinite pods seemed weird.
Then I came across this gem:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/recycled-rockets-cargo-pods
I think the way that Orbital917 implemented layered recipes of the pods, requiring a thruster and the rockets requiring the pods and thrusters is really elegant and balances out very nicely to be vanilla+
Looking at the modpage, he clearly put a lot of thought in to it.
Could you perhaps consider integrating this pod recipe as a core, instead of the 50 steel plate, 8 iron stick? So for example a Vulcanic cargo pod recipe would be: 5x processing units, 5x low density structures, 1x thruster and 50 tungsten plate.
I think the cost implication of this recipe would add quite the incentive to build the infrastructure to safely (re)use the pods and not waste them.
I think his current implementation of recycling of the rockets themselves in his mod might not be exactly in the spirit of what you are trying to achieve with the modpack, but I think that following the same philosophy as the cargo pods, it would make sense to have the actual rockets also be separate logistical entities that can exist outside of the silo.
