Mission with a casualty or partial failure doesn't give credit for what the mission did accomplish

[peyre]

I had a Joint Earth Orbital LM Test which completed the test, but then docking failed and the astronaut had to spacewalk to the capsule - but died in the attempt. The game didn't give me an LM Point for the mission even though the LM Test itself was a success.

[peyre]

I've also seen it stiff you of a milestone when you actually achieved the milestone, but a mishap on the mission got it declared a failure or partial failure. Today I flew a Lunar Orbital. While in orbit, my crew experienced a loss of cabin pressure. No one was killed, but the whole crew was injured. Still, they did the orbit successfully, but I didn't get credit for it (and had to delay my lunar landing as a result) because people got hurt. (Sort of reminds me how the floppy version used to deny you credit for the lunar landing because someone got hurt a little on the way home, even though everyone in fact came home safe.)

[peyre]

Also, if a Lunar Orbital LM Test fails without fatality, it marks it as Duration A! (In this case the docking failed, so there was no LM test, even though we did orbit the Moon.)

[peyre]

Another example: I flew a Duration D mission, which went successfully until the Recovery step. Because my astronauts were injured on landing, I didn't get credit for Duration D.

[peyre]

I think #332 is another example of this issue.

[peyre]

I think #322 is also related to this issue, or is a different instance of the same underlying problem.

[hweimer]

I'm not sure whether this is a bug. The game thinks that a mission injury/death is a violation of the "and returning him safely to Earth" clause and therefore doesn't award any milestones in this case. #332 is different, though.

[peyre]

I suppose it might be a matter of interpretation. Still, it seems like if you achieved the objective but someone got hurt on the way back, you'd still get credit for the achievement. Like if you did a successful docking test but the astronauts were hurt during recovery of the capsule, you'd still get 10% Safety to your docking module. I think the game does that, but things like lunar orbital are handled differently.

[hweimer]

Sure, it's a matter of interpretation. But it might help to look at the most extreme case. Suppose the same deadly EVA happens during the actual lunar landing. Should this be sufficient to win the game? Certainly not, I guess. What if there is just an injury? That's trickier, but I'd still argue that a lunar landing that sends the crew to the hospital for a year or so still isn't the real thing. If you buy that it's not okay for the lunar landing to have injuries, why should it be different for something like manned docking?

[peyre]

My thinking on that is that if your lunar landing succeeds and people are injured on the way home, the Moon landing should be considered a success. Mission death(s) on an otherwise successful landing mission would not be. It seems to me that even if Aldrin and/or Armstrong were injured on the Moon itself, if they made it home in one piece the world would have considered Apollo 11 a great (if qualified) success.

No, I think the game does give you Safety on the DM if you perform a docking test but get hurt/killed later in the mission. I assume that it assigns the Safety immediately after the test rather than during the final mission assessment. I haven't done a specific test to make sure of that, though.

I don't know. We might want to see how the other two feel about these. I could also sound out Michael, and Erik Anderson, who was a muse to Fritz on this game.

[hweimer]

Well, I think that both interpretations are perfectly valid. However, my impression is that a mission injury during Apollo 11 that put someone off-duty for a year or so wouldn't have qualified as "returning him safely to the earth" as promised by JFK (and thereby, for instance, triggering the accelerated launch schedule that would have seen both Apollo 12 and 13 fly in 1969).

I don't have strong feelings about this one, reaching out to the original team would probably be a good idea. I'm also not aware of a historic case of such an injury, so that one could use the public reaction at that time as a guide what the prestige should be.

[rnyoakum]

I'll throw out a hypothetical situation:

Suppose the first manned mission (for either player) is a Duration B Orbital w/ EVA that goes flawlessly until the final step of recovery, where the parachute doesn't deploy fully and Deke Slayton breaks his leg on landing. From a game perspective, there was an injury on the mission, but from an in-universe perspective there's no way NASA isn't going to give him some medical attention and then parade him around the country ("you don't need two good legs to sit in the back seat of a Cadillac"). It's hard to assert that the astronaut wasn't the first person in space, in orbit, to walk in space, because they were injured in the landing. The accomplishments were real.

Plus, the hospital time doesn't mean the astronaut/cosmonaut is stuck in the hospital the whole time; it includes recovery and being unavailable for missions. Professional athletes will be able to walk after an ACL injury well before they're allowed to return to play, and I imagine NASA wanted their astronauts to be at peak fitness before clearing them for a mission.

Yet a duration 'D' mission that includes an injury on landing could go either way. Arguably, the space person achieved the feat and valuable data was gained, so it should satisfy the milestone. Alternately, the injury might compromise any scientific understanding gained. That's a far less clear-cut situation.

A few ideas:

• Whatever the injury policy is, I think a strict no-deaths policy is best. Kennedy's speech is the gold standard for the space race, and that means no one-way trips. Also, no parade, no prestige.
• I can also see holding lunar landings to a higher standard, with a special no-injury requirement for them.
• As I recall, any injury on a step marks it a failure. An injury on an EVA - or a Lunar Landing - wouldn't award the relevant prestige goal. That should mitigate some of the concerns.
• The "game_style" config option (options.classic) could enforce the older injury policy for those who prefer the traditional experience.

[hweimer]

@rnyoakum, I think we simply differ in our imagination on what kind of injuries the nauts are suffering. Given that an injury knocks someone out for a couple of seasons, I am not thinking in terms of broken legs here. I was also thinking a bit in the direction of comparing with professional athletes like what you just said. In soccer, broken legs are typically said to take three to four months until return to play. That would mean being available during the next season, depending on when the injury occurred. Consequently, I imagine the injuries in RIS being significantly more serious, like it being a mere matter of chance whether the naut survives or not. Which is literally what the game throws at you in many cases.

[peyre]

Bringing in a sports analogy is a good idea, since the threshold for recovery is "able to resume professional athletics". It may be that NASA's standards were even higher, though; remember they cut Deke Slayton from Mercury for an atrial fibrillation, which had never kept the Air Force from letting him fly, and Mattingly was dropped from Apollo 13 because he had been merely exposed to rubella.

I think a successful lunar landing that suffered some kind of injury (but not death!) on the way back should still count as a success. If the crew of Apollo 11 had been hospitalized on return, history would still consider it the first manned lunar landing (and they'd still be paraded around the country once out of the hospital). There should be some loss of prestige from the normal 40 points gained, though, not that it matters much at that stage of the game.

[rnyoakum]

The purpose of the hypothetical was more to suggest that the person did these things and survived: they should hold the title of first in space, etc. In my example, I was thinking of a particular landing result that has 0% chance of death. It has a 50% chance of injury with retirement, but I was crediting that largely to the psychological effect (because there's no chance of death and the text states "LANDING OTHERWISE STABLE").

Consequently, I imagine the injuries in RIS being significantly more serious, like it being a mere matter of chance whether the naut survives or not.

Often this is the case, but the game lacks granularity in dealing with injury: the two season hospitalization is the same as the duration assigned for a touch football injury in the news cards. My hypothetical considered that in including the possibility of a broken leg like NBA player Paul George suffered (cautiously out for 8 months). But yes, that's literally the least severe injury I could imagine.

From looking into #244, I think there are only two failure codes which result in injury on a mission, 16 & 17; all others appear to be death or nothing. For a code 17, there's a survival chance and then a separate chance of injury w/ retirement. There are no hospital times to consider. As for a code 16, those are injury with chance of death:

• Launch: MAJOR FIRE ON PAD, CAPSULE EJECTION SYSTEM SUCCESSFUL (50% injury)
• Launch: EXPLOSION ON PAD, EMERGENCY SYSTEM EJECTS CAPSULE. SUCCESSFUL EJECTION (20% injury)
• Launch: MAJOR FIRE ON PAD, CRAFT DESTROYED (40% injury)
• Hardware Power-On: FIRE IN THE SPACECRAFT! AN ELECTRICAL FIRE BREAKS OUT IMMEDIATELY UPON POWER-UP AND ENGULFS THE LM BEFORE THE HATCH CAN BE OPENED (80% injury, 80% death)
• Reentry: EXTREME HEAT CAUSES INSULATION AND CABIN COMPONENTS TO GIVE OFF TOXIC FUMES (50% injury)
• Landing/Recovery: MAJOR FIRE, SHUTTLE IS DESTROYED (50% injury, 100% death - see #244 for question about that)

For the first three cases, the mission fails. The Hardware power-on and Landing/Recovery are severe and usually fatal, and toxic fumes... are probably bad. But that's it. I haven't found anything that suggests there can be injury w/ recovery during most steps (including lunar activity).

I think the actual problem here is that Leon's examples result from a bug. Both the cabin depressurization and embankment issues are Code 17s. These particular cases should both be 80% survival, 0% injury situations. However, the game is using the wrong comparison operator and so they have 100% injury rates. I'm fixing that bug in conjunction with #244 (looking for input, @peyre), because the first scenario described in that issue is a Code 17. That should eliminate most of the "not as serious" injury possibilities.

[hweimer]

@rnyoakum, you have a point there with the touch football newscast, I wasn't thinking of this. So, in the end, I think both interpretations are perfectly reasonable. If one wants to change the behavior, one has to change the checks for other in AllotPrest to 4000 (lowest failure code for mission death) to 3000 (lowest failure code for mission injury). However, I think that would mean that the game would also award prestige even when the very mission step would lead to injury (e.g., injury during the first spacewalk). The only exception would be the Lunar EVA, which is covered by a different test.

[peyre]

Re. the lack of granularity, I expect it's due to BARIS's origin as a board game, plus time pressures during development of the computer game. We, of course, can do whatever we think best.

[rnyoakum]

However, I think that would mean that the game would also award prestige even when the very mission step would lead to injury (e.g., injury during the first spacewalk). The only exception would be the Lunar EVA, which is covered by a different test.

It shouldn't be possible to be injured during a spacewalk or lunar EVA but not killed. Only failure code 16s and 17s cause injury, and there are no EVA code 16s. It can happen currently with code 17 failures during an EVA, but only because code 17 failures are bugged - all of the EVA cases are intended to be death or nothing.

I think I'm in the "I could go either way" camp as well - I'll get some of the failure bugs fixed today, and that should prevent some of the "less severe" injury cases from ever appearing.

[peyre]

That's a good point, that any serious failure on an EVA would probably be fatal. I'm thinking about Leonov's spacewalk, where he almost died and came back in sweaty and exhausted - but in game terms he would probably have been considered OK, since he wasn't seriously injured. He was perfectly fine after an hour or two or resting, or something like that.