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A simplified but more comprehensive concept for a new breed of part failure mechanics. Failure is facilitated by interaction with planet mods or the universe and not (as usual) letting yourself be taken by surprise by an RNG and a countdown machine. Its purpose is to add more tangible gameplay value to planets. This rises from an unrelated discussion on a planet mod's Discord server, of how planetary rings in this KSP could be more tangible and hence, hazardous, and I saw a connection back to my earlier post, linked here: Some folks I discussed with: @WarriorSabe @StarCrusher96 Some folks who may find this evolved concept interesting: @linuxgurugamer (who showed interest in taking a shot at coding the predecessor), @Angel-125 (who owns a mod that contains a whipple shield and interstellar engines: WBI DSEV), @R-T-B @prestja (Kopernicus devs). The component concepts that came up were as follows: Durability How a part fails is decided by the health gauge itself and the saturation and mitigation system. In a nutshell, saturation is how much punishment the part can take before it starts actually failing (this has its own gauge). If saturation is below a certain minimum, no damage is taken. If that minimum is exceeded, health (and if possible, other stats) start falling. The higher the saturation bar is, the faster the positive stats fall. The relevant stats to implement would be crash tolerance, heat tolerance, joint strength. A bonus feature of the impact system is that parts with certain attributes or modules, if hit with seemingly non-lethal force, can still stand to have modules shutdown or status flags raised that can be used by other mods to represent a situation. Example: an exposed crew cabin gets hit: the glass shatters, all its resources empty out, its modules stop working, and a life support mod uses the flag (or more) for a compromised habitat. It will require a kerbal with the relevant trait and skill to "repair" the part and clear the status flag(s). The part could have a flag that requires a scientist, and a flag that requires an engineer. While these flags up, modules can refuse to start, and resources can continue to empty out. Debris Fields Assuming planetary rings and Kopernicus asteroid fields could have tangible micro-meteor debris fields, their threat would take the form of raycasts occurring, with random vectors, speeds and virtual masses, trying to strike the active vessel. The saturation and mitigation system are virtually not present when traveling at leisurely low interplanetary speeds. It's mostly the small and basic matter of building your ship to be extra sturdy (whether by using struts, structural parts with higher crash tolerance, or involving ablative hull plating in your ship designs). These systems begin to become prominent when encountering extremely dense debris fields such as the proto-planetary discs of young stars. The faster you go, the more the impacts tend towards the frontal surfaces of your ship, and saturation of your forward shields become a concern. Visualization: A basic and sufficient visualization for an impact would be sparks (there's an engine flameout plume or 2 for that, for example) at the point of impact. The planet-level collision areas would ideally be setup like resource bands for ISRU or Kopernicus asteroid fields themselves, but instead of customizing resources, you're customizing ranges of micro-meteor speeds, sizes, force, frequency. Corrosion This is heavily detailed in the linked thread above, and concerns any and all planets that were made to be corrosive but cannot be as no mod for this mechanic does exists to date. But to simplify for here, this manifests in the ability to set corrosion parameters for a planet's: Atmosphere (including strength, whether acid or alkaline, and an altitude curve so there can be a safe region and a hazard region); Surface (strength, whether acid or alkaline, whole planet or per biome); Ocean (same params as surface); Exosphere (possibly. I'm not aware of any case of corrosives in vacuum but having it still makes for some creative freedom). The health bar and saturation system are the most prominent here as parts are subject to DPS (damage per second) due to prolonged and heavy exposure. Measures can be taken to reduce the effect of ambient corrosives on individual parts or the whole ship. Hull parts could be tailor made (being fabricated the right way and with the right stuff) or boosted (painted with ablators or potentially toxic anti-corrosives, or insulated by an electromagnetic field) to have great(er) resistance. Visualization: A part that is overwhelmed by corrosion could have indicators in the form of the black-body overlay (but that it starts glowing purple. Seems fitting for a starter. It's like having the poison status in an RPG) and a purple saturation bar. This glow and this bar show how much the part is being punished and is the same as hearing a geiger counter crackling increasingly loudly. If you can get away in time then this bar empties and health stops falling-- you don't die immediately if you let that bar fill up but you know you won't last that long a 2nd time. Heat (Conductivity/Thermal Stress) Everyone knows that if you heat certain substances enough, they physically weaken, and melt, but some can stay strong or become stronger. When the saturation bar (due to heat) stars filling up (let's say, it acts up between 80% and 100% of the part's heat tolerance), joint strength and crash tolerance for parts with low resistance start going down and they become increasingly wet noodle, increasingly easy to break something off if it is impacted or if a high powered engine suddenly fires at full throttle. Health doesn't drain away in this case, however it adds a new dimension to "Deadly Reentry." Heat (Reflectivity) Certain heatshields work by being mirrors and not sweaters or ablators. (See: Icarus ship in the Sunshine movie.) A shield in this case is ideally only useful for reflecting light and heat from a star, and would be appropriate for the likes of Parker's Solar Probe. If appropriate and if KSP allows, this may be as simple as giving the part an emissiveConstant value > 1 so that it's exceptionally radiative, and values for the keys concerning insulation which will lessen the part's ability to exchange heat with other parts. If I have the right image, a mirror heatshield is very slow to absorb heat and very quick to emit or reflect heat. However, it should not allow to be used as a cheaty new form of radiator or reentry-rated heatshield. This may easily be done by giving it a very low dynamic pressure rating (as in deployable antennas). Cryo-Hazard A big one that's been sorely overlooked by Squad. Parts (including kerbals) should have a defined lower temperature limit (skin and internal, not too far from Kerbin's ambient temperature of roughly 290K). If the ambient temperature (especially on splashdown, as in cryogenic seas) is extremely far below these limits, the part will suffer module failure or instantly shatter. Module failures here may possibly be unfixable unlike from debris impact. Parts that have extreme lower limits ideally should not also have good overheat resistance. Thermal gradients become serious business. Visualization: There's no special effect to add here. Relativistic Speed Impact This one only becomes important to vessels using reaction engines to travel interstellar. As your ship reaches speeds measured in fractions of c, you face the debris field mechanic in a different and more aggressive way-- a constant rain of micrometeor impacts, which brings relevance to whipple shields in KSP. The faster you go, the harder you're hit by even the tiniest of objects, and the more frontal surface area you have, the more impacts and DPS you have to face. The more you have to face will add up to saturation from relativistic impact forces. If your frontal surfaces start saturating, their health chips away, so you'll have to watch your cruise speed, buff the shield somehow, or add ablative layers. Whipple shield parts would have the unique property of having resistance to the relativistic virtual masses that fire at it during these speeds. Any other parts, if struck by a single relativistic virtual mass object can be blown off or melted, not being recognized as able to withstand it. Whipple shield parts would be expected to come not only in the form of frontal shields, but a suite of modular pieces like stock structural panels so that you have plenty opportunity to get creative with your armor design. Visualization: The frontal surface of your ship could be peppered by little flares representing explosions of the tiny masses on impact. Some heat could be picked up as a side-effect. This is not necessary at all but only for a hint as to where you're being hit and could be switched off by default. ... Documentation I was asked by @ValiZockt to produce documentation for stats that would be immediately important in the VAB info window or the PAW. So I created it. OneDrive link. I'll add concept writing for configuration options for planets later, but these options near-entirely borrow from how Kopernicus' HazardousBody module works. This module can already assign heat zones to planets via: altitude + latitude + longitude curves, grayscale texture (heat map), biome filters.

I've been carrying this idea for a few months now and I figured it would be quite neat to have. Its customization and versatility would be at least on par with the Kopernicus feature: HazardousBody, which replaces HazardousOcean and does not require the hazardous body to possess an ocean or atmosphere. Its overall purpose is to add that missing aspect of challenge, of risk and reward to exotic planets in your favorite planet mod(s). The idea first came to me while watching beaucoupzero's video of a KSPI shuttle entering into Deemo, the yellow acid moon in @AndrewDraws Extrasolar mod and sadly not taking damage from the atmosphere. (Video link starts at 10:00, you don't have to scrub it or watch the whole thing.) HazardousBody can be applied and restricted by altitude regions, points with effect radius (making only the insides or immediate areas of volcanoes deadly in-game), latitude regions, possibly even complex toroidal regions. It can even accept a grayscale map texture (which needs investigation). It's an incredibly powerful feature just for manipulating heat. But there is more to a deadly planet that exposed lava. So, what I'm envisioning is a cousin to HazardousBody. With how complex it can get and its deep involvement with parts, I doubt I can hope for it to be fully realized as a feature of Kopernicus, but as its own part failure mod or a sub-feature of another part failure mod, or a certain habitation mod. Suitable existing mods that come to mind are Kerbalism, Kerbal Health, BARIS and Oh! Scrap, owned by @Sir Mortimer @garwel @Angel-125 @severedsolo. Also paging @linuxgurugamer because why not? How I imagine it will work in-game is: Parts carry an HP gauge and a resilience factor (equivalent to this is the DEF or SP DEF stat in monster/magic battle games). Resilience is how reactive or non-reactive the part is to the acid around it, and HP scales with mass by default but can be influenced by one or two factors such as heat tolerance or part category. Depending on the resilience value given to a part, it is implied to largely consist of weaksauce Aluminum sheets...or consist of a very buff, complex Carbon lattice. Some parts, despite having a powerful outer hull composition, may still have exposed innards that aren't and can't be as well protected such as intakes or shrouded solar panels. There will be facilities to refurbish parts and restore HP (very much like any maintenance process within a failure mod), but not all parts can qualify such as early-game crewed parts, delicate science instruments or certain classes of engine. Kerbals would be most vulnerable to corrosion. Just as with EVA fuel, when a kerbal leaves the ship they may take from a limited, onboard supply of dispensable anti-corrosion coating, and when they board or disembark, the part possessing the hatch should have especially high resilience or should take corrosion damage. Planets will have two or three corrosion factors, simply measures of how powerful its acid (or alkali) is. One for ground, for the ocean, and for the atmosphere. Why separate factors? It's possible for a planet to have a corrosive atmosphere and a neutral ocean, or a neutral atmosphere and corrosive ocean. The ground factor will apply to anything immediately touching the ground (such as landing legs or EVA kerbals). The ground could be saturated by acid rain. The ocean...pretty straightforward. And to the atmosphere (basic, scaling in intensity with atmosphere pressure). Additionally, this ideally should also accept a float curve for atmospheric intensity and would enable such things as the boundary in Venus' atmosphere above which it's still completely safe to fly but below which are the acid cloud deck and sudden acid rain. Ideally, the corrosion should only affect the outermost parts of a ship and work its way inward, giving substance to the concept of applying armor to your ship. Advanced features: Certain modules will break and become unavailable if the part bearing this module has sufficiently corroded (taken a certain fraction HP loss). This can easily help simulate breached cabins and greenhouse environments. If a part has an ablator module then whatever resource is used by this would be consumed and would mitigate the corrosion damage. Parts can be destroyed (critical failure) after taking a certain fraction of damage before losing all of their HP, such as a fragile tank full of highly reactive resource like CryoTanks and LH2 or Oxidizer. Kerbals and certain parts can have upgrade-able resilience factor or HP. Life support mods (Snacks, Kerbal Health, Kebalism) will respond to excess HP loss on the kerbal and apply their appropriate negative status (stress!, poisoned, panic, fainted) to the kerbal. This, if it was realized as a mod could add much more immersion, when applicable, to an interplanetary or interstellar experience in KSP. Activate this alongside part pressure limits, and hostile worlds like Venus in RSS, and Deemo in Extrasolar will get that much more interesting and immersive.