As time to kill increases, will it become a choice between knowing what your ship can do without an engineer and when you have to cut and run, or having an engineer or becoming an engineer yourself so you can extend your time to live?
TL;DRYes, drastically: time to kill is being discussed, with multi-crew ships dying too fast now, and the goal is also letting players repair in a soft death state, though the future look is untested.
Yeah, drastically. It was even just a discussion that I had today with Yogi, where we were briefly talking about the time to kill right now and where we should be going. We were especially talking about the multi-crew ships, because right now a Hammerhead, for example, dies too fast. So there's definitely something that we have to do. How it will look in the future, I cannot tell, because we have to try it out. But one of our goals, in addition to increasing the time to kill, is also that if you are in a soft death state, you are able to repair to a degree. So you might even be able to repair the pieces you are still in. And if the engine is still attached, you might be lucky to make an escape because you pulled your quantum drive out of the piece that is floating around and then attached it back into a socket that might be fitting, and then you somehow boot up the engine and then you fly away and you've made the escape.