Thanks for the feedback, in the newest version I've addressed a few of these
Liquid bottleneck was actually the input-output state of the pipe connections. I've bumped the buffer a bit as well, but could pipe out at 15x crafting speed with no bottleneck. Loses the pipe through behaviour which is unfortunately a build breaking change, but se la vie.
I intentionally didn't have different costs so that simulation didn't replace all packs. If I differentiate costs, there is a good chance I either make it slightly better than every other science or slightly worse, meaning that you only use simulation or never use it. At fixed cost it lets you do simulation in place of the sciences you don't want to do.
There isn't any way to check at prototype stage where a space platform is. I'd like to avoid more runtime scripts to avoid the performance overhead. I've been thinking about adding a "surface" at the solar orbit. But I'm still brainstorming ideas of what should be there.