Failure modes

This page contains a quick overview of the types of failures that have been implemented so far. The plan is to make this list as varied as possible over time.

Part type	Failure effect
Engines (excluding SRBs)	The engine shuts down, cannot be reignited.
Engine gimbal	Thrust vectoring is disabled.
Engine alternator	The engine stops producing electricity.
Engine coolant line	The engine produces more heat, forcing you to throttle down
Intakes	Intake does not collect IntakeAir until repaired
Batteries	Charge drained, cannot recharge.
Lights	The bulb burns out.
Reaction wheels	The wheel stops producing torque.
RCS	The thruster block shuts down.
Control surfaces	Remains stuck in position until fixed. (Disabled if FAR is installed)

Tanks

Tanks deserve a section on their own (since they are single-handedly responsible for half of my problems in coding this mod...).

A "tank" is any resource container, regardless of what resource it is holding. The failure mode for tanks is to start leaking one of the resources it contains: the resource is lost forever and cannot be recovered.

The leak follows an exponential profile, where the rate of the leak is proportional to the amount of resource left in the tank: the sooner you fix the leak, the more you have to gain.

You can shut the valves of a tank (the little green icons in the tank's context menu): this will isolate the leak and prevent it from consuming the same resource from the rest of the ship. For this reason, you may want to use several smaller tanks instead of a single big tank, to isolate the leak and save some resources.

Not every resource is supposed to leak, of course: you can edit which resources are blacklisted. See Customization.