Health points system

[Idobox]

Like everybody, I want to do stuff in space, and like everybody, my rockets are often on the verge of total destruction. And I think we can greatly improve the game experience by a relatively simple addition: Health points on parts.

If your engine rocket has a maximal temperature of 3000K, and you run it at say 3100K, it would do say 10 damage per second, from a total of 1000. When you reach zero, it fails. If you burn at 3200K, you get 20damage/s etc...

So now, you can't run your mainsail at 90% of the limit temperature for ever, but you have a tradeoff between running it for long, or running it strongly.

The same principle could apply for impacts and tension. Instead of your tank being perfectly fine when hitting stuff at 11.9m/s but exploding at 12.1, it could fail after lots of small abuse, or a big hit.

That way, the success or failure of a mission would feel less random (especially if like me your rockets are very close to resistance limits), and you could feel dread as the struts keeping your payload attached to your lifter slowly deteriorate.

It would also give something to do to Kerbals in EVA.

A more complex system could make the experience even richer.

For example, damage could also lower the max hp. That way, the abused engine you repaired in space would be more fragile than a brand new one.

It could also be possible to require specific tools and replacement parts to do certain repairs. Like patches for wheels, an arc welder and junk metal to repair engines, duct tape to repair tanks and pipes, etc...

Of course that would require parts, and a lot more work for the devs, but could create lots of fun gameplay.

Like an automated patch delivery probe sent to eve because you underestimated the ruggedness of the terrain and ran out of parts, or fly back from the Mun executed with extreme care because you botched the landing, and now the thing is holding mostly through duct tape and faith.

This kind of system could be used for the kerbals themselves. Many people want meteorites, radiation, life support, etc...

With kerbal HP, you could either spend precious science point to devellop shielding and build slow heavy vehicles, or strap a mainsail to a lander can so that Jeb can get tosafety of Jool's magnetosphere before being totally fried.

[Crush]

I think there already is a health-point mechanic in place. Note the "partX damaged by engine exhaust from engineY" messages in the mission log even when partX wasn't destroyed. Those messages would only make sense when there were a HP mechanic.

[notfruit]

And there should also be numbers that float out of the damaged part, so in a crash you see:

-10, -1000, -9001, KO, -12

And when kerbals fall over there's a loud noise like if you just made a combo in a fighting game (that one with the trumpet) and they increase in pitch as the kerbal loses more HP.

jk I support this idea