Life Support. How much time is remaining?

[silenusta]

I tend to ignore people like that. In aviation they are know as sky gods (here I guess it would be space gods). You can spot them a mile away as they always will always try to point out how they are better than you in subtle ways. Although aviation is the only place I know where admitting your mistakes is a sign of a good pilot. It is the safety aspect and highly promoted.
The Internet is full of trolls and 'xxx' gods who don't really provide any help or empathy, eventually they find people just start ignoring everything they say as they don't provide anything useful to the conversation.

As for this 'feature', it I feel more annoyed and stupid now than when it happened, the nights sleep didn't help.
I can see how so many people fall for it. The other systems with a reserve works differently (energy, fuel) whereby you have a gauge and it gets refilled from the primary source. Yet the one where the reserve works differently and can kill you very quickly (seconds or almost instantly after a few routine repairs) has no visible gauge on the panel where you affect it.
Add to this fact that a lot of people will also on the modules screen while repairing may mean, like me, that you didn't even realize there was a countdown on the main screen if you go don't go back to it.
Most people will never even get to the point that they die this way as few will perform enough repairs to run the reserve out. It's only when you do something like DW2 where you might do multiple repairs in between docking that you might find out how this works differently. i.e. probably where you have weeks or months of data on board, so the worst possible time to die.
What made it even worse for me as I didn't really need to repair as I was only a couple of percent down, I had probably only taken 10% damage since last docking (some was the instancing damage when at WP's with other commanders, logging in while landed sometimes hit me for 2% damage, some was from me getting distracted by chat while streaming though so I'm happy to take full blame for those ).
I only repaired to improve my safety margin by a few percent should something go wrong so close to the hand in.

This needs either a way of seeing the reserve on the repair panel or a popup to say how much reserve you have when you attempt to repair/disable the module. In my experience the game play for this was equivalent to selecting the self destruct option.

After writing this I realize I have probably got too invested in the game to get this annoyed (I'll post anyway). Playing this for 600 hours since I got it at Christmas is probably too much and I should play something else for a while to detach (and hope my viewers don't leave).

 

[Deleted member 38366]

Hm, my sympathy for the loss.

Having an indicator in the Module line "Remaining xx:xx Minutes" would be handy indeed.

Still... (to keep it in aviator terms)
...feels like someone who - by flying hours - should have had more than sufficient experience went on a very long haul and made alot of mistakes damaging the Ship and its SubSystems.
Classic chain of events.
The last chain was... lack of DASH-1 knowledge. Basic Systems knowledge.
Leading to "damage and/or loss of equipment and/or loss of life", which always is a big red Warning in any DASH-1.

Tragic but that's how mistakes accumulate and valuable lessons are learned the hard way - even if they are basic ones.

PS.
I always thought the REMLOK helmet visuals and severely altered Audio under Emergency Oxygen Supply would be more than sufficient indication that "something is different", warranting investigation.
Since the Helmet is always on when under Emergency Oxygen, maybe the remaining O2 time could be always kept in focus, like a Helmet HUD, giving ample warning regardless of headlook position?

 

[silenusta]

Hm, my sympathy for the loss.

Having an indicator in the Module line "Remaining xx:xx Minutes" would be handy indeed.

Still... (to keep it in aviator terms)
...feels like someone who - by flying hours - should have had more than sufficient experience went on a very long haul and made alot of mistakes damaging the Ship and its SubSystems.
Classic chain of events.
The last chain was... lack of DASH-1 knowledge. Basic Systems knowledge.
Leading to "damage and/or loss of equipment and/or loss of life", which always is a big red Warning in any DASH-1.

Tragic but that's how mistakes accumulate and valuable lessons are learned the hard way - even if they are basic ones.

PS.
I always thought the REMLOK helmet visuals and severely altered Audio under Emergency Oxygen Supply would be more than sufficient indication that "something is different", warranting investigation.

Agreed, By sharing these mistakes is how things get changed to avoid it happening again. Bad designs that get 'lived with' in aviation are rare nowadays (Boing MAX not included), admitting your mistakes, finding the train of errors/items that lead up to the final outcome means that chain can be broken.
In this case I did noticed something was different in the sound of the breathing so re-activated my supply immediately. Problem was the the assumption that it worked like the fuel/power reserves mean I then disabled it again (thinking the reserves would now be reset, and after I had re-enabled everything else in case I needed shields up or something else caused the shorter than usual duration) to investigate the problem and died before I even got chance to work out what was going on. If this was real world then the Human Factors analysis would have caught this (probably getting the designer fired lol) before it got into production.

The mistake was mine. I had assumed it worked like the other reserves, I had performed something I had done many times (on shorter journeys so it wasn't an issue), it was a routine task (so not paying as much attention as the first time I did it) and I hadn't read the manual on the life support as I thought I knew how it worked (I probably did read how it works when I first got the game but have forgotten it since). In aviation terms this would be considered a design flaw from a human factors point of view (i.e. it works but is prone to catch out pilots due to the way it works).

We just have to remember that this is a game and we can't expect things to always work as it would in real life (haha did I really just say that about a space game DOH!).

 

[Deleted member 38366]

Yup, good old "habit patterns".

I'm sure alot of CMDRs could tell very similar stories. Maybe not resulting in loss of their Ship but close calls. That's how we all learned our stuff and "earned our Wings" so to speak

PS.
Last year I threw away a perfectly good Mil-Grade Python, while still carrying some 75+M Cr Exploration Data.
Reason : habit pattern, neglect and as a result : over-confidence

What happened? That Python was an interim Ship, entirely unengineered except FSD via Remote Workshop.
I however flew it like the Grade 5 Engineered Pythons I was used to. lol the result was inevitable and I remember I laughed hard after realizing my stupid mistake and dealing with the rebuy screen.
That day I learned just how spoiled I was from flying heavily Engineered Ships vs. moving an unengineered one