How to make escape pods on stations useful

[Szkeptik]

I thought there could be randomly appearing dangers in the star system that could impact your intruments and even damage your ships/stations. Of course not instant damage, but things you can prepare for. For instance, a micro meteor swarm could be detected moving through the solar system. In map mode you could see it as a cloud, slowly inching across the void. You could detect it with ships depending on how good active antennas they have. The path of this cloud would be a straight line through the system, and it may or may not intersect a planetary orbit at some point. If your ship or station gets caught in the storm, parts can take damage. Pods couldn't be destroyed by them, but structural elements could. So a space station caught in the storm MIGHT experience damage that you could later repair with EVA missions. Planetary bases on zero atmosphere worlds could also be damaged by the shower.

Fire: I though you could be facing on board fires after such a shower if your space station gets damaged too much. The fire could be put out with an eva mission or by jettisoning the affected module, but if it got out of hand the only solution might be to run for the escape pods.

This is only one example, but you get the idea.

[Tex_NL]

Random events are on the What not to suggest list.

But back to your idea, it would lead to problems. Something moving slowly through the system would still move pretty fast while you are at max time warp. By the time you realize what's coming it's already upon your unsuspecting station. Same goes for a fire, I'm not paying much attention to my LKO station while I explore the Joolian system. I would be pretty P-ed off to find my station and crew burned to a crisp on my return. And if this kind of 'accident' would only occur when focused on the 'ship' it would trigger quite a few rage-quits.

My apologies, but I don't see a future for this.

[Szkeptik]

Of course a fire wouldn't be random, but a result of damage and the game would come out of time warp if such a thing happened somewhere, so you would always have time to respond. My problem is that once you put up that station there's nothing to do with it unless you use it as a refueling point or something. At least this was you would have to revisit old craft sometimes.

[Sirrobert]

The devs have said that there will never be random events in the game. Launch 1 of a craft has to be identical to launch 2-9001 of the same craft, same thing with orbit, landing, and everything else

[UbioZur]

At the moment the dev have said they are not looking for failure/malfunction that are not produced by a mistake in the construction or piloting. Anything random have also be declined by the dev and Asteroid/cometes etc... (any celestial body, for any reason) is also on the what not to suggest list, so thread close.

I do agree with you that the current reasons to have a space station are low (refueling or aestetics), but I am sure the dev will give them a reason as they advance with the career mode development.