Feature Request: Realistic Engine aging

[pjf]

Background:

• Many real engines can't be ignited. The EngineIgnitor mod, along with RealismOverhaul, puts restrictions on many engines. Once they're lit, they can't be re-lit.
• Many real engines cannot be throttled. They can run at 100% thrust, or 0%. Some can be moderately throttled, they might run at 70-100% thrust.
• Some engines are designed to be re-ignited, but the number of re-ignitions isn't exactly fixed; each successful reignition is more risky than the last. An engine designed for five ignitions may fail after only three, or you may be able to squeeze as many as seven.

With this in mind, DangIt is well placed to offer a "realistic engine failure" mode. Actual failures during a burn would be relatively rare (throttle would make little difference to aging), but trying to re-ignite an engine may be risky business.

Engines could use the same failure model that already exists in DangIt, but count the number of ignitions to contribute towards part decay; we may need to provide a IgnitionsLifetime to help facilitate this.

This could happen independently to EngineIgnitor (which would continue to provide a hard limit on the number of starts), allowing both mods to be installed at once.

CC'ing @NathanKell and @Felger in here too, in case I've got my engine science wrong :)

[602p]

:scream: The RO guys are here!

If I understand what you mean, you want the ignition system to be able to fail because of time since launch, and because of ignitions that have happened so far. Perhaps the best way to implement that would be to just set up a new failure module that is always active (but has a really long lifetime) that can cause the engine to fail to ignite, and give the age of the part a significant bump at each ignition.

This would, of course necessitate a set of IgnitorReliability parameters for all real engines. Perhaps we need a RealFailures mod for this, or we could (with ModuleManager or an external tool) base the reliability parameters for IgnitorReliability on the settings for the RO EngineIgnitor settings.

I would like to know what you mean in more specific terms :smile:

[Ippo343]

The RO guys are here!

Quick, hide our math! :P

Sure, I'd like DangIt to be more RO-friendly (it was one of my goals at the beginning): it would be definitely cool to have more realistic models. However, I also understand that an ignition failure should cause an explosion, right? Maybe we can leave the explosion out from the "stock" version :)