A very kerb all mod idea: Safety factor

[Buster Charlie]

So a while back there was a mod showcases that could upgrade parts. This had given me an idea that I don't think would be any harder to implement than that or even tweaks calendar.

 

What is safety factor,  off the top of my head I'd say it's building parts much stronger than they need to be in order to lower the chance of RUD. 

What could be more kerb all than throwing this out the window?

 

So imagine if you could select a part and move a slider to adjust the safety factor.

 

So say 0 to 100, 50 is stock.

The lower the safety factor, the lighter weight the part is (this is a good thing) and maybe it's even a tad cheaper.  But this also lowers it's impact tolerance, and heat resistance.

There are other things it could effect, node strength,  but that's all messy details.

 

The inverse is true ,you can over engineer a part to have a higher temperature and crash resistance, but this causes it's weight to go up, and possibly cost.

 

Thoughts?

[flywlyx]

You should consider add "Kerbal Mechanics" into this idea.

I cant wait to see it 

[wasml]

Sounds doable (having not looked very closely). Mass, Crash tolerance, max temp, node breaking force and node breaking torque appear to be accessible.

Thinking out load here:

You could do as a MM patch to make it easy to add/remove - though a remove might change a ships mass mid flight (not sure if this is true - depends on how a parts mass is stored in the persistence file).

Have a field for each changeable parameter with the scaling factor - maybe 0 for not changeable - maybe like so:

MODULE
{
	name = safeyfactor
	mass = 1.3	// cost = base cost x change ^ 1.3
	temp = 2.4
	breakingforce = 2
	...
}

Of course I would think both mass and cost would be impacted - so would need two numbers per parameter...

Just re read your post and your right - a higher temp material would change weight, cost, ...

Interesting idea - would be a unique mod

Edited March 24, 2016 by wasml