@severedsolo I've been thinking about this too
I really like the idea of new tech being less reliable than the tried-and-true older tech, but the way its implemented I find myself just cheesing it. A reliability level 1 item is going to fail, so it's not worth trying to use it. That's easy to solve though - just make a "ship" with a bunch of random items, head out to the launch pad, and then recover the vessel. This, of course, completely defeats the purpose, but it's almost necessary when dealing with uncommonly used, but long-lifetime items, such as space station components.
What's interesting about tracking the reliability of each part is that you open up a new sink for different resources that the base game is somewhat lacking. Some ideas that might or might not be interesting:
Repairing:
- Parts should be repairable, but based on the skill level of the engineer. If you divided the tech tree up into tiers based on the science cost to research, a 5 star engineer should be able to repair any part, but a 0 star engineer could only repair the lowest-tech items. As others previously mentioned, this gives a reason to bring engineers along. Since any part can fail, it also makes the higher-tech items permanently have a higher cost - if you're taking a 1 year trek out into space with the top level nuclear reactors, you better bring along the best-of-the-best in technicians.
- The above could be tweaked so lower-level engineers have a chance to fix higher level tech, but at risk of making things worse / permanently breaking them
- There should always be a way to fix a part. I launched a reliability 1 station core, and it immediately short-circuited once it was set up. I could undock everything, replace this one core with a new one, and effectively rebuild the station. It'd be neat, though, if instead I could send a repair mission. Send an appropriately-leveled engineer with some spare parts, and replace its internals.
- Retrofitting older hardware. You launch a ship with a reliability level 2 item in it. Later, you progress that engine to level 3 - it'd be neat to send an engineer to retrofit the existing engine to level 3 reliability.
Failures:
- What about critical failures, fore when things go -really- wrong? (like a low level engineer tinkering with something outside their expertise). Batteries short out and drain charge - but I wonder if you could simulate a fire by causing that short to also generate heat, which might eventually destroy the part?
Reliability:
- Maybe rather than "number of launches", reliability works more like experience levels for parts, with different actions providing different xp contributions. The xp needed for reliability levels might depend on mass (complexity?) or science level.
- Parts could "level up" after being in use for X hours - it would provide a real purpose to the engine test platform shown in the OP, rather than immediately recovering the vessel. Make some weird test platform and part it off of the launchpad for a day.The time needed to level up might be based on mass (complexity?) or science level.
- Successfully repairing a part, or recovering a failed one, should level up the part faster. Just like in real life, it's hard to fix bugs that haven't happened, and easier when you have something to investigate after the failure
- Not sure how practical this is, but you could use the above as a sink for excess funds/science. Use your R&D labs (science), or use your funds to outsource testing on specific parts, with a chance to level them up. This could even take X days, if that's possible to do. This might be tough to balance, but if done right it might provide a reason to risk using lower reliability parts, or eliminate some of the grind in leveling up the parts
Loving the mod so far! It's so much more interesting to think of ships as things that can fail outside of pilot error, and ensuring there's redundancy and an actual use for the abort button!
