Just a little suggestion.
So the abort button is basically a red warning symbol that shows up when there is a problem.
STEPS:
1. The Problem screen shows up.
2. The player can choose to press the red button if they think the chance of success is too low.
3. Once the player has pressed the button the box where the animation is shown will come up with a yellow screen saying PROBLEM AVERTED there is no consequence by that I mean No prestige will be lost nor added.
Just a little suggestion unless your thinking of that. Oh well BYE!
That is a bit unrealistic. Like jumping off a plane, parachutes won't open and you just say, ok, I better abort... Would be a little late for that.
But shortening the mission (skipping stuff like shortening duration. NOT skipping crucial parts like reentry...) if it gets bad for the guys, why not. Prestige lost, definitely, but the guys might make it back home safe and sound.
Oh... yeah I didn't think of that... OK but what if you can only abort at certain times like launch and ascent because you have the launch escape tower (for manned Missions)
But for probes I did not think of that... But it was an idea right?
It is a nice idea but would need a lot of work to say when you can and cant abort and you probably would not really get many opportunities to abort that you would want to take so potentially a lot of work for not much gain?
In fact, the real question is: May we suffer a massive capsule safety drop and still be able to continue the mission ?
(In BARIS, I manage to survive to a -25% safety with Gemini to died the next step because I decide to continue the mission...).
If each massive safety drop down lead to death, no problem, no need to abort.
If not, it's like sending guys to suicide and that day, you'll regret the choices made by others for not much gain...
Spending time to adapt the game to all resolutions is from my point of view a real "lot of work for not much gain".
To abort has it own risks and times you can't abort. Like you can't abort at boosters stage where rockets can't be shut off. Also you can't abort in reentry to Earth.
Only places you could abort is before launch, docking, burn to moon, landing on moon, and when in orbit that will send you to reentry stage.
It would be realistic to have some limited ability to change the mission sequence (not in the middle of launch or re-entry since there's no time). See Apollo 13 scrapping the moon landing and turning it into a lunar flyby. I believe shuttle missions had some flexibility depending on astronaut health and weather conditions. Such changes should be limited to emergency measures, cutting short whole sections of the mission and jumping straight to the get-the-astronauts-home steps.
I agree, we should have an option to abort, and I realize that some steps can't have that, such as Earth re-entry. But for instance, my spacecraft successfully was performing a duration flight, level 2 went fine, then when it went on to a level 3 duration, there was a catastrophic failure, and everyone died. Well, possibly it blew up or something, but you would think that if there was a problem getting to a level 3 duration, there would be lots of time where we could have aborted, and came home?
Where I see the abort would be in duration missions. However, since either you fix the problem or your dead in the current implementation....there is no real need. I do believe that you should have the option to execute an alternate mission in the event that certain phases fail. Example. If you fail in assent, you fall back to a suborbital mission depending on the degree of the failure. If you have a problem on a duration mission then you abort to re-entry. NASA in the moon program had a series of fall back missions. If you cant land on the moon then you would get to orbit it. If you could not orbit it then you would at least get to go around it. If SHTF they had the direct abort which was to dump the LEM turn the CM/SM around that burn the living daylights out of the STS on the SM and using alot of delta V return to earth. If for some reason they could not leave orbit or dock with the LEM then the crew fell back to an earth orbital mission. If they could not make orbit then they aborted to a sub-orbital mission. They had the LAS that would pull the CM free of the stack during launch up until they reach a sufficient altitude where the SM engine could do it. Apollo could abort the mission at any point in the flight up except re-entry, some phases of TLI and EOI. It was by downgrading to an alternate mission. There was always the possibility of something blowing the ship to kingdom come but my point is that just because the step fails, if there is an alternate then it should be tried before your crew dies. I would also suggest that that penalties to reliability be applied at the end of the mission attempt and not during the mission. I believe this was how it was done in Race Into Space so as not to penalize you in case it went down the alternative path. Though I will say that you can correct most problems if you have a crack team working Mission control.
I think it could work on certain missions, maybe when there is a problem they could give you two choices 1, A high risk, high reward option (50% chance to fix the problem and land on the moon,but a fail will destroy the shuttle) or 2, A low risk, low reward option (Abort the landing and return to earth with out attempting the landing with the shuttle still intact)
Yes I think it would be a very interesting feature that could work alongside the present system of fixing minor problems in missions.
The three buttons could be changed to reflect the chance of that present stage's/missions positive outcome (possibly two sets of buttons one set for the present stage and one set for the whole mission) - green ok, amber getting dicey, red very dicey! If the amber light comes on then the issues are such that another failure is becoming more likely, red should indicate a very likely failure. You should be able to press the abort to attempt to skip any future high risk stages/or the rest of the mission. This could work during stages like launch, in orbit, enroute to moon landing etc where risky follow on stages could be cancelled just like they did in Apollo 13. Some missions, like the extended orbital missions, might reduce the risk by ending the mission more quickly.
So if you press the abort, maybe it slightly reduces the chance of more failures happening overall and as such you might be more likely to get the rocket and crew back, and the mission may end with less reliability loss as well (depending on the mission type and what stage the abort was pressed), but obviously you wont get any prestige at all and have wasted the money. In fact you might even get negative prestige for aborting the mission - espeically if it is later decided that it was done unnecessarily (could be an event).
It would add a lovely choice for players when you have to watch out for failures and watch the lights and make decisions whether to scrap the mission or not based on those. I think that could be great.
It would need some extra coding to add an abort button (minor stuff surely) and code the use of the amber/green/red buttons to represent the present stage's chance of successful outcome (rather than having no practical use, it seems, as is the case at the moment), and code to affect the reliability based on the abort timing and which sections of the mission would be skipped. Admittedly there is a fair amount of work there overall but the most intensive work would probably be the coding to say what stages of the missions the abort would affect and how that would affect reliability. But for all I know the mission stage variables might already be capable of being used in such a manner. Surely those buttons where meant to be used for something right?
It would add loads to the mission mechanics and would make them player interactive (which they arent at the moment). Got to be a very good thing from a game playability point of view, as the mission are really the only thing where the player doesnt have anything to do (other than watch and prey).
Thinking about this further you could have the abort button just visually end the mission video straight away thereby avoiding the need to recognise & skip certain tages and jump to the reentry stages. That would avoid a lot of coding for each mission. You could code the lights to reflect the 'likely' chances of success of the mission as a whole instead of just that particular stage as that would be more realistic. The lights wouldnt take into account your staff though so if you had very good people on the mission you might choose to ignore the lights knowing any further complication could be dealt with well. Then finally at the end assuming the mission had been aborted it would just be a matter of dealing with the results which would probably be reduced negative prestige (and maybe some reduced reduction in reliability). So by aborting you could avoid some of the negative affects of a failed mission and possible loss of astronauts. But a random event later on might find you were in error and cause more prestige loss later, or alternatively might find you made the right call resulting in prestige gain (alternatively this could be checked at the end of the mission). You could use a special abort screen to report all this on at the end of the mission.
I think that would be really neat and would adds loads to the mission dynamics as well. And theres not a massive amount of work there I think if you end the mission immediately on abort and just use some calcs to work out the results of the abort based on when it was done rather than changing the videos to reflect the abort.
Hope something like this will get into the game at some point, or perhaps the next one!
The abort screen could even be used for the failures as well as I have often thought the end of the missions need a better summary screen. then you could either show a celebrations screen, a failure screen, a critical failure screen (astronaut deaths), or an abort screen at the end of each mission, each with the results shown, that would be very neat and would be a nice way to end each mission.
(
