Can we get a more organic 'let it overheat and the system slowly starts breaking', instead of the current 'hold two seconds and then get an overheat timeout'?
TL;DRThrusters currently shut off when too hot, and they've discussed an optional mode without that safety where thrusters take damage and misfire; they're also continuing to tweak overheat tunings per ship.
So we chatted about this some time ago. Right now the thrusters have this safety feature where they'll turn off when they start to get uncomfortably hot, in the same way that a CPU turns off when it gets too hot. But we had discussed the idea that you could optionally just not have that safety feature and push the thrusters to be hot. And they'll be damaged, they'll be worn, they'll take physical damage, and maybe they'll start to fail and misfire. But if you wanted that, you'd get it.
The sort of byproduct of the quite short amounts that we have at the moment is you don't really notice the granularity of that. Quite often if you're trying to afterburn out of atmosphere, you just go straight through the warnings of thruster overheating, straight into overheated, start falling back, you're still holding afterburn, you get caught in that, it cools down enough to let you afterburn again, then you go straight back into overheating. On top of all that stuff that Dave mentioned, we're always looking at the tunings of these things. Maybe they're a bit too aggressive on some ships, and we're always going to look and tweak them. They're not all just two seconds, but maybe they need to be a little bit more on some ships.