Non-critical failure modes, part failures

[Zacspace]

One of the things about spaceflight that KSP doesn't really capture well is on the spot problem solving and it's one of the things that makes for some of the most exciting stories in both sci-fi  and real life spaceflight. in KSP as it stands, if you encounter a serious problem it's because you engineered it into the vehicle before launch, and the only thing to do about it is either lose the vehicle or save scum and maybe pull off some kind of ace pilot move to save the day. if you don't encounter a mission-ending problem, you probably won't encounter any problems at all.

There's mods for random part failures, but having a lottery decide that you lose the game for no reason kind of sucks. I think failures that are theoretically salvageable rather than total loss of vehicle, or at least failures that result from pilot error/calculated risk would be a neat thing. Like, say every part starts out with 100% chance of working properly, but then using it wrong increases it's odds of failure. Trading paint between your space shuttle and your space station increases the odds of thermal protection failing, landing on the nozzle of your engine maybe reduces efficiency or alters it's thrust vector or just gives it a chance to blow up. Maybe pressurized parts could have their reliability effected by pressure cycles, like real aircraft, so the first flight of your SSTO is perfectly safe but the 10th runs a certain risk of decompression. I think an engineer should be able try and make in-situ repairs on parts either pre or post-failure with the former being most effective and that colonies could do more involved repairs.

With a system like that in place you could intentionally roll the dice with part failure for some in-game benefit. Maybe Bill can retrofit the NERV to give higher thrust/efficiency in order to make that burn you miscalculated, but at the risk of a meltdown. Or you could increase signal range on an antenna by cannibalizing radar equipment, but in doing so you lose altimeter readout and ranging for rendezvous.

Hopefully I've managed to get this across well enough.

[mcwaffles2003]

I think it could be a fun game mechanic but not one I see entering the stock game. I'm just of the opinion that rockets should work plainly as they are built and not leave mission success up to any factors of random chance.

[shdwlrd]

Mmmm.... no. Random part failure isn't in scope for KSP2. That would be something left up to the modders.

Personally as someone with really bad luck when chance is involved; that's a big huge NO!

[Guest]

33 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

Trading paint between your space shuttle and your space station increases the odds of thermal protection failing, landing on the nozzle of your engine maybe reduces efficiency or alters it's thrust vector or just gives it a chance to blow up. Maybe pressurized parts could have their reliability effected by pressure cycles, like real aircraft, so the first flight of your SSTO is perfectly safe but the 10th runs a certain risk of decompression.

None of these sounds survivable, they're all complete loss of mission and crew scenarios.

[MKI]

You don't need RNG to make flying rockets into space hard. I make enough mistakes, I don't need the game introducing issues for me.

 

Leave it as a mod.

[Zacspace]

1 hour ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

not leave mission success up to any factors of random chance.

Yeah, that was kind of the idea. Fly the mission right and it goes right 100% of the time. If you screw something up, maybe you can fix it, or at least survive Apollo 13 style.

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

when chance is involved; that's a big huge NO!

My whole point was that you could choose how much if any chance is involved. Everything starts out fine, but if you treat your spaceship like a bumper car or start taking risks it could be less fine.

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

None of these sounds survivable

These are all things you could see coming a mile away and at worst could require a rescue mission. Mostly you'd just have new mission constraints to consider, like using additional RCS fuel to offset a bent engine bell after landing on it. Or maybe you find yourself with a challenger-type situation on your hands and you can either go for the NASA solution or you could be more risk-averse and make a repair or something. And, yeah, if you keep rolling the dice you could find yourself in a situation that there's no coming back from, like an engine out during a landing but then maybe it's the pilot's fault for trusting an engine that's all banged up.

1 hour ago, MKI said:

Leave it as a mod.

There's no mod for this. There's random failures, but that's pure RNG. I want to be able to break my own ships in interesting ways instead of just blowing them up because dealing with my own ineptitude sounds like a fun challenge.

 

Spaceflight is all about risk management in real life. KSP should reflect some aspect of that, though it should definitely be softened for accessibility.

Edited July 13, 2021 by Zacspace

[Bej Kerman]

Last thing I want is my interstellar flagship to bork itself because RNG. Any failures should be upon the players' shoulders.

8 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

1 hour ago, MKI said:

Leave it as a mod.

There's no mod for this. There's random failures, but that's pure RNG. I want to be able to break my own ships in interesting ways instead of just blowing them up because dealing with my own ineptitude sounds like a fun challenge.

Spaceflight is all about risk management in real life. KSP should reflect some aspect of that, though it should definitely be softened for accessibility.

There will be mods for this - other than that, I agree there.  I want to break my ships in my own interesting ways, I don't want the game to just break my ships on its own. Ships should work as they do right out the VAB.

[Zacspace]

4 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Any failures should be upon the players' shoulders.

My deal is I think RNG fits best between player actions and the consequences. You'd never do the bad thing if it always resulted in failure, but you might if it was a roll. And there's lot of things we can currently get away with in KSP without consequence that should probably have some consequences, I say let the consequences be rolls.

[mcwaffles2003]

10 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

My deal is I think RNG fits best between player actions and the consequences. You'd never do the bad thing if it always resulted in failure, but you might if it was a roll. And there's lot of things we can currently get away with in KSP without consequence that should probably have some consequences, I say let the consequences be rolls.

Can you give some examples of scenarios you feel would fit this?

[Bej Kerman]

24 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

44 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Any failures should be upon the players' shoulders.

My deal is I think RNG fits best between player actions and the consequences. You'd never do the bad thing if it always resulted in failure, but you might if it was a roll. And there's lot of things we can currently get away with in KSP without consequence that should probably have some consequences, I say let the consequences be rolls.

There's no consequence with rolls, it's just bad things happening for no reasons. I say that rolls are a cheap way of making the game exciting, although really it'll just lead to more frustration and "What did I do wrong there??". You didn't do wrong, the game did. There's no consequence with rolls - I just can't overstate how cheap RNG would be.

[Zacspace]

Just now, mcwaffles2003 said:

Can you give some examples of scenarios you feel would fit this?

Jet engines underwater

spaceship parts + seawater = fine I guess

smack spaceplanes into eachother at 49m/s? no big deal.

using sensitive parts as landing struts (engines, magnetometer boom, solar panels. the last 2 of these can break to be fair)

Expecting almost anything to work on the surface of Eve unless it's hardened for that environment. (maybe not a reasonable gripe, but my favourite thing about the Venera missions is how overbuilt they had to be.)

Right now the only penalty the game has to levy against us for being weird is completely destroying the part, but I think it would be unreasonable to blow up a player for daring to touch seawater. That's often how we recover stuff after all. (plus we make boats sometimes) But what do you think would happen if spacex tried to re-fly one of the Falcon 9s that they dunked without refurbishing it? I don't know either. Probably not good, but the only way to know for sure would be to light it up and try it out. They could also be content with never knowing and just refurbish the booster to control risk and be safe.

Also crashing spaceships into each other goes completely unpunished in KSP unless you're REALLY moving when you do it. Challenger was brought down by colliding with some foam, and they rolled for it in real life! Not the first time they did either, just the first time they lost.

2 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

You didn't do wrong, the game did.

If you're in a situation where you can't tolerate risk, then you did wrong when you rolled the roll. If the game was constantly RNG checking you for no reason and sending you back to the drawing board that would be stupid. it should only do it when you do something dumb that might work despite being dumb, like landing directly on your engine because you forgot landing legs. You're asking for trouble, will you get it? is it worth the risk? up to you.

[mcwaffles2003]

13 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

spaceship parts + seawater = fine I guess

So no splashdowns or seaplanes? Also, the game is literally getting boat launches now so apparently parts surviving water is implied as intended by design now.

14 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

smack spaceplanes into eachother at 49m/s? no big deal.

23 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

Also crashing spaceships into each other goes completely unpunished in KSP unless you're REALLY moving when you do it. Challenger was brought down by colliding with some foam, and they rolled for it in real life! Not the first time they did either, just the first time they lost.

Never seen this happen b4 but that sounds like a collision detection or rigid body bug that should be fixed, not have a gameplay mechanic added to it. When I flip a rover at 8 or 10 m/s it normally disintegrates

15 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

using sensitive parts as landing struts (engines, magnetometer boom, solar panels. the last 2 of these can break to be fair)

RNG on useful parts that can randomly ruin a mission for using them as intended.

15 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

Expecting almost anything to work on the surface of Eve unless it's hardened for that environment. (maybe not a reasonable gripe, but my favourite thing about the Venera missions is how overbuilt they had to be.)

Eve's environment isn't like Venus, its neither deadly hot nor acidic. Having those kinds of environments be more prevalent would be cool though.

Sorry, overall I'm just not seeing where the fun is in this.

Maybe instead of RNG give parts health bars instead and make conditions that cause damage over time or in chunks upon impact/overstress and when significant damage has been taken on there is either a malfunction or the part is destroyed? This would get rid of the boolean part is at 100% health or part is destroyed problem while also not introducing random chance into the game. Part health could be inspected with alerts or an overlay like the heat stress overlay.

[Zacspace]

3 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

So no splashdowns or seaplanes? Also, the game is literally getting boat launches now so apparently parts surviving water is implied as intended by design now.

Who says you're making those with spaceship parts? We have regular plane parts, and if we're getting sea launches it stands to reason we'll have boat parts too. I'm not saying no splashdowns, just that trying to use a once-splashed down rocket as a rocket probably isn't a good idea unless you rebuild the rocket first. (like spawn a new one, not actually rebuild it in VAB) A seadragon type engine specifically designed to be used like that would be cool, otherwise, maybe design your rocket boats so that the engines stay above the water line.

4 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Never seen this happen b4 but that sounds like a collision detection or rigid body bug that should be fixed, not have a gameplay mechanic added to it. When I flip a rover at 8 or 10 m/s it normally disintegrates

MK2/3 spaceplane parts have a 50m/s impact tolerance so they can encounter anything at any speed less than that and be perfectly fine. other parts have lower impact tolerances, but really even 10m/s is nothing to sneeze at when we're talking about something made out of the minimum amount of lightweight material required to hold it's shape. If I crashed my car at that speed I'd be in trouble, and my car's made of steel. Not that it needs to be completely realistic or anything, we don't really have autopilot, so some tolerance of pilot error should be a thing.

7 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

RNG on useful parts that can randomly ruin a mission for using them as intended.

those parts are absolutely not meant to be used as landing struts. We have actual landing struts, more of them than ever in KSP2. These parts are so fragile and complicated it's ridiculous that we can bang them around and expect everything to be fine after. Besides, if losing the part would end your mission, don't expose it to RNG.

25 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Sorry, overall I'm just not seeing where the fun is in this.

I think you're actually arguing with me against the random part failures mod being made stock. The mod that I also don't use because it just doesn't seem fun. The mod I'm not arguing for the inclusion of.

34 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Maybe instead of RNG give parts health bars instead

Health bars don't model how things break. Ever drop your phone and the screen shattered? Ever drop it and it was fine? What was the phone's health at each time? The phone's screen has a complicated molecular structure with internal stresses that give it strength. You don't know anything about it until it hits the ground in just the right way and shatters. It's effectively random, but you can control for it by not dropping your phone. It's pretty much the way actual space agencies control risk and maintain safety, and something you do in KSP already. It's just that right now your consequence for improperly assessing the risk is either nothing, or you completely explode.

[MKI]

20 hours ago, Zacspace said:

Also crashing spaceships into each other goes completely unpunished in KSP unless you're REALLY moving when you do it. Challenger was brought down by colliding with some foam, and they rolled for it in real life! Not the first time they did either, just the first time they lost.

Challenger broke apart due to mechanical insulation failure with the SRB which ignited the External Tank creating an explosion that destroyed the orbiter. This was more of an design problem with the overall idea of the Space Shuttle, and an organizational safety oversight due to the pressure's of flying the shuttle anywhere near the originally promised turnaround time.

If your actually talking about the Columbia disaster, a foam strike took out too much of the heat shield which later melted the aluminum structure of the wing during re-entry, resulting in the orbiter breaking up. This again was more in line with organization safety oversight for the same reason. There also was talk about possible repair measures in orbit, but they were deemed too risky to undertake due to the possibility of making the problem worse and the limited possibilities of actual success. 

The Shuttle was a death machine due to its design, no amount of flying skills could change the fact the design put the massive heat shield, with the integrity of Styrofoam, right next to SRB's that can't turn off, with huge portions of the flight having no possible survivable abort modes. 

 

Crashing stuff into each other in KSP almost never happens, the same way it almost never happens in real life. The few times my SRB's crash into my main stack, I abort/restart the launch, which is the same reaction we have in real life. 

 

23 hours ago, Zacspace said:

One of the things about spaceflight that KSP doesn't really capture well is on the spot problem solving and it's one of the things that makes for some of the most exciting stories in both sci-fi  and real life spaceflight. in KSP as it stands, if you encounter a serious problem it's because you engineered it into the vehicle before launch, and the only thing to do about it is either lose the vehicle or save scum and maybe pull off some kind of ace pilot move to save the day. if you don't encounter a mission-ending problem, you probably won't encounter any problems at all.

Technically all mission failures in real life are also engineered into the vehicle before launch, and the end result is exactly the same, except there is no quick save. On the spot problem solving usually occurs with technical glitches and random part failures. There are very very few "ace pilot moves" that save the day in real space flight as most kinds of failures are either shrugged off and the mission continues accordingly, or the mission is totally aborted/lost. Even a real life "successful failure" such as Apollo 13 leaned on the fact the LEM was always designed as a secondary lifeboat, which is one reason for the 2 craft design rather than a single craft design. 

In the game most of the problems players encounter will be their own either thru engineering,  flying or a mix of both. You don't need part integrity to break your landing gear on landing or strand your Kerbals on the moon because you didn't bring enough delta-v or you simply screw up your staging. And in all cases there aren't really anyways to "fix" these sorts of significant problems for the same reasons as in real life failures.

 

18 hours ago, Zacspace said:

just that trying to use a once-splashed down rocket as a rocket probably isn't a good idea unless you rebuild the rocket first.

KSP "re-usability" isn't clear if Kerbal refurbish the same craft, or just re-build a new one from scratch. Regardless you pay for the fact your craft is recovered in the ocean/away from the KSC. 

 

18 hours ago, Zacspace said:

those parts are absolutely not meant to be used as landing struts. We have actual landing struts, more of them than ever in KSP2. These parts are so fragile and complicated it's ridiculous that we can bang them around and expect everything to be fine after. Besides, if losing the part would end your mission, don't expose it to RNG.

Making these parts not work if they were used as landing struts is solving a problem that doesn't really exist. No one is trying to use thermometers as landing legs when there are perfectly fine landing legs in the game. Sure you could add the game mechanic that these stop working if they "break", but it would be a feature not many people would see, and functionally would be the same as the part just straight up going "poof".

 

18 hours ago, Zacspace said:

It's pretty much the way actual space agencies control risk and maintain safety, and something you do in KSP already. It's just that right now your consequence for improperly assessing the risk is either nothing, or you completely explode.

I don't actually think this is far from real life, which is part of the challenge and fun, without getting into the nitty gritty details of partial failures/manufacturing failures/random failures. 

 

18 hours ago, Zacspace said:

Who says you're making those with spaceship parts? We have regular plane parts, and if we're getting sea launches it stands to reason we'll have boat parts too.

The game development is ending, we will never get stock boat parts. Plane/rocket parts will double as boat parts. 

KSP 1 development ended, KSP 2 could have boats for all I know, I kinda doubt it because it seems really niche but who knows. Might be a DLC. 

 

 

Maybe just nerfing most part integrity (sorry boat builders) is all you'd want? Right now part integrity is very forgiving because Kerbals engineer using adamantium (not really but you get the idea) that could easily be nerfed and you'd end up with a similar situation. Land on engines = broken engine/exploded engine.

Edited July 14, 2021 by MKI

[Jack Mcslay]

11 minutes ago, Zacspace said:

Health bars don't model how things break. Ever drop your phone and the screen shattered? Ever drop it and it was fine? What was the phone's health at each time? The phone's screen has a complicated molecular structure with internal stresses that give it strength. You don't know anything about it until it hits the ground in just the right way and shatters. It's effectively random, but you can control for it by not dropping your phone. It's pretty much the way actual space agencies control risk and maintain safety, and something you do in KSP already. It's just that right now your consequence for improperly assessing the risk is either nothing, or you completely explode.

Although, this is very close to how engines work. if they're fresh out of the hangar they work great, but if they run for a long time without inspection then they start malfunctioning, if running for even longer they may explode. It would be perfectly reasonable to add a durability meter to parts.

A phone's screen shattering isn't random, all objects can either have elastic deformation or plastic deformation. Applied force up to a certain point causes elastic deformation meaning if the force is removed the object returns to it's original form, if the force exceeds the elastic limit, it creates plastic deformation, causing a permanent deformation. Whether the phone screen cracks or not it depends on the speed it hits the floor, what the floor is made of and how it hits the floor (if it hits perpendicular to the floor it gives much greater impact than if it hits at an angle or parallel)

KSP1's joint system is well on the ballpark of how that works as excessive stress causes the ship to bend at part connections, greater stress can cause it to bend permanently, even greater stress causes it to separate altogether.

[Zacspace]

7 minutes ago, MKI said:

f your actually talking about the Columbia disaster, a foam strike took out too much of the heat shield which later melted the aluminum structure of the wing during re-entry, resulting in the orbiter breaking up. This again was more in line with organization safety oversight for the same reason. There also was talk about possible repair measures in orbit, but they were deemed too risky to undertake due to the possibility of making the problem worse and the limited possibilities of actual success. 

Yeah, T got my shuttles mixed up there. This is pretty much an argument for what I'm talking about though. NASA had to decide if it was worth it to try and fix it. They also, if I recall, considered either sending up another shuttle or having the Russians give the crew a lift home (this was also a contingency planned from the start of ISS) but they ultimately decided to YOLO because it worked for some classified flights that had similar problems. You're right that it caused organizational changes at NASA, In KSP you play as NASA. My suggestion is basically to give you decisions like this one to make about your missions and how you design future missions.

Also, if they add a mechanic for repairing things in-situ it should be pretty bulletproof. it would be super dumb to have a player try and fix their craft only to discover they made it worse.

12 minutes ago, MKI said:

Crashing stuff into each other in KSP almost never happens

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty lazy about docking, I bonk into stuff sometimes. So yeah, adding these kinds of failures would inconvenience me specifically, but it would also incentivize me to play like an actual spaceship pilot. if the incentive was total destruction of vehicle, that would be kind of annoying. Something I can fix or work around would be better. One of the coolest experiences I ever had in this game was trying to re-acquire an asteroid during an aerobraking pass.  It suddenly came at me and sheared off an engine and some control thrusters. Having to suddenly switch gears and try to reconfigure the ship to save itself was pretty exciting and notably the only time a I've ever had anything like an emergency in space.

21 minutes ago, MKI said:

KSP "re-usability" isn't clear if Kerbal refurbish the same craft

I'm assuming they do. I'm talking about literally the same instance of a rocket without recovering it. Spawn your rocket on the launchpad, that's a new one. Doesn't make sense on Kerbin, but I feel like we should be incentivized to protect sensitive aerospace parts from saline environments on, say, Laythe, But the incentive probably shouldn't be instant explosion.

30 minutes ago, MKI said:

without getting into the nitty gritty details of partial failures/manufacturing failures/random failures. 

I'm really not interested in modeling manufactuing defects, that's just random failures. Those suck. Defects introduced after launch due to my own carelessness? Model the heck out of those.

42 minutes ago, MKI said:

No one is trying to use thermometers as landing legs

I mean, lots of people play this game, don't say nobody. But I was really mostly talking about engines. I don't think it's unreasonable for an engine to survive being used to hold up a lander, I think it's unreasonable to be completely certain you didn't mess anything up when you did it though. or propping up a lander with solar panels? Bend them a bit or something, make them track the sun more poorly or unable to fully extend.

5 minutes ago, Jack Mcslay said:

all objects can either have elastic deformation or plastic deformation. Applied force up to a certain point causes elastic deformation meaning if the force is removed the object returns to it's original form, if the force exceeds the elastic limit,

That's literally true. But tempered glass isn't really a simple homogeneous material. It has stresses induced which make it resist certain forces better than others, and there's variation across a pane in how those stresses distribute themselves, like the grain of a piece of wood. it's literally deterministic if/how a phone breaks when you drop it, since it's not a quantum scale thing, but it's effectively random to you because you can't reasonably know enough about the starting conditions of the system to make a prediction.

Maybe having a consumable durability bar on an engine is realistic, but from a game design perspective, we already have consumable fuel. It's kind of a hat on a hat in my opinion. I guess it could incentivize having your ships serviced regularly, or influence the players choice of engine for really long missions. Who knows!

[mcwaffles2003]

3 hours ago, Zacspace said:

Who says you're making those with spaceship parts? We have regular plane parts, and if we're getting sea launches it stands to reason we'll have boat parts too. I'm not saying no splashdowns, just that trying to use a once-splashed down rocket as a rocket probably isn't a good idea unless you rebuild the rocket first. (like spawn a new one, not actually rebuild it in VAB) A seadragon type engine specifically designed to be used like that would be cool, otherwise, maybe design your rocket boats so that the engines stay above the water line.

How would the player designate then whether a part is sea worthy? Idk, this seems overly nuanced in a way that playing baulders gate doesn't work when you want a genuine game of DnD. Programmers cant account for every scenario a player will put themselves in but I don't think attaching random dice roll to a list of a million conditional statements is the solution.

3 hours ago, Zacspace said:

MK2/3 spaceplane parts have a 50m/s impact tolerance so they can encounter anything at any speed less than that and be perfectly fine. other parts have lower impact tolerances, but really even 10m/s is nothing to sneeze at when we're talking about something made out of the minimum amount of lightweight material required to hold it's shape. If I crashed my car at that speed I'd be in trouble, and my car's made of steel. Not that it needs to be completely realistic or anything, we don't really have autopilot, so some tolerance of pilot error should be a thing.

I looked up the impact tolerance table for parts and wow, that is broken, and those numbers should be reduced. 

3 hours ago, Zacspace said:

those parts are absolutely not meant to be used as landing struts. We have actual landing struts, more of them than ever in KSP2. These parts are so fragile and complicated it's ridiculous that we can bang them around and expect everything to be fine after. Besides, if losing the part would end your mission, don't expose it to RNG.

Once again, from a programming perspective, this just seems a bit overly nuanced and I don't think making a bunch of conditional dice rolls will be a good solution.

3 hours ago, Zacspace said:

I think you're actually arguing with me against the random part failures mod being made stock. The mod that I also don't use because it just doesn't seem fun. The mod I'm not arguing for the inclusion of.

It comes off to me you want something akin to this mod but just for non-critical parts 

3 hours ago, Zacspace said:

Health bars don't model how things break. Ever drop your phone and the screen shattered? Ever drop it and it was fine? What was the phone's health at each time? The phone's screen has a complicated molecular structure with internal stresses that give it strength. You don't know anything about it until it hits the ground in just the right way and shatters. It's effectively random, but you can control for it by not dropping your phone. It's pretty much the way actual space agencies control risk and maintain safety, and something you do in KSP already. It's just that right now your consequence for improperly assessing the risk is either nothing, or you completely explode.

I feel like this is moving towards sophistry a bit but that kind of random stress breaking is akin to asking which part of your ship broke, was it a key structural component  whose destruction lead to completely severing your ship or was it a non critical accessory.

[Bej Kerman]

Alright, I'm not reading all this, I just want to emphasize that RNG is a half-thought way of trying to introduce depth to a game where RNG would destroy the player consequence aspect of KSP. It's almost just like how the answer to milk runs is to just slap an autopilot into the game - instead, KSP 2 has gone down a path that won't involve the player being hands-off, still requiring the player to develop and intuition for orbital mechanics. In other words, you have to do the milk run first before the game can take it from there. My point being, you have to think harder than just 'let rolls be the consequence'. Rolls destroy the consequence part of KSP - more to the point, they would just be there to ruin the player's day and would not add anything interesting to the game.

13 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Maybe instead of RNG give parts health bars instead and make conditions that cause damage over time or in chunks upon impact/overstress and when significant damage has been taken on there is either a malfunction or the part is destroyed? This would get rid of the boolean part is at 100% health or part is destroyed problem while also not introducing random chance into the game. Part health could be inspected with alerts or an overlay like the heat stress overlay.

This is a far more thought out answer than just 'RNG it'. It's an interesting mechanic, although I expect that for such a feature to be very practical the game would need an overview UI that lets the player create a part health heatmap for their ship (similar to KSP 1's thermal overlays) so that searching for a damaged part wouldn't be as tedious as carefully moving the camera around searching for damage. Besides that, it'd be a good option as I'd see why others would rather use classic part physics.

Edited July 14, 2021 by Bej Kerman

[MKI]

17 hours ago, Zacspace said:

Yeah, T got my shuttles mixed up there. This is pretty much an argument for what I'm talking about though. NASA had to decide if it was worth it to try and fix it. They also, if I recall, considered either sending up another shuttle or having the Russians give the crew a lift home (this was also a contingency planned from the start of ISS) but they ultimately decided to YOLO because it worked for some classified flights that had similar problems. You're right that it caused organizational changes at NASA, In KSP you play as NASA. My suggestion is basically to give you decisions like this one to make about your missions and how you design future missions.

The crew rescue scenario was considered to be the most practical, which is why after the Colombia disaster there was always a secondary shuttle ready to launch at the same time. Russian Soyuz can't dock/interact with the Shuttle directly as the don't have an airlock and can't hold the entire crew (you could maybe squeeze in everyone in 2 Soyuz)

An inflight repair procedure was thought of but never executed because it is basically insane. Such a procedure consisted of using the arm to hoist 2 astronauts to the edge of the wing to inspect the damage, with one astronaut literally holding onto the feet of the other one. This is also right next to the leading edge of the wing's, which is the most critical part of the heat shield. If you didn't screw up and smash into the most critical part of the aircraft, or float off into the void of space while inspecting the heat shield, you'd have to somehow reach the damage, not screw up the rest of the heat shield, and stuff in random frozen stuff (probably ice) into the damage and pray it actually holds long enough during re-entry, as any "repair" solution didn't exist because getting to the part of the heat shield was deemed to be even more risky than whatever damage could of been there.

So an inflight repair isn't really a decision, its more of a pure fantasy as the astronauts didn't have enough contingencies to really do anything about any possible heat shield problems. Which all goes back to the Shuttles underlying design failures rather than anything anyone could do as an "ace pilot" on the fly. 

17 hours ago, Zacspace said:

I mean, lots of people play this game, don't say nobody. But I was really mostly talking about engines. I don't think it's unreasonable for an engine to survive being used to hold up a lander, I think it's unreasonable to be completely certain you didn't mess anything up when you did it though. or propping up a lander with solar panels? Bend them a bit or something, make them track the sun more poorly or unable to fully extend.

This almost answers the same concern, lots of people play this game different. I for one have used rocket engines as "legs" at the pad for when I don't have launch towers or just forget them. Punishing them by breaking their engines because they are now fragile would just ruin the experience for too many, just so they can't land on the moon on their engine. Which will probably result in them falling over anyways. Now if they design their lander with multiple engines and just want them to be "legs" for landing... why stop them? Its rather absurd, but it does make the game more interesting and opens more doors to more interesting designs. 

 

If the game is too forgiving in regards to taking damage/collisions, having a mod that reduces part integrity across the board would result in more or less what it seems like you want. Smash during docking = catastrophic failure. Such changes would come at a price though, like no more boats, so it should stay a mod. (or a configurable setting within the game itself)