Will there be any kind of danger to the engineer in case of bad component manipulation, like the component blowing up in your face?
TL;DREngineers can make things worse, for example through overheating causing surges or fires, but they won't be instantly killed, and with item-focused damage ships mostly lose items first rather than exploding, except in cases like a quantum drive explosion.
Well, I mean, the obvious one is if something overheats; it's part of the things that drive into the malfunctions or the dangers popping up. So, yeah, bad heat management, for example, could suddenly lead to a power surge going through the ship and killing components, or a fire starting in front of you, maybe setting you on fire if you're unfortunate. So yeah, to some degree, you can make things worse. You can always make things worse. But obviously we're not going to insta-kill you just because you punched a component to fix it.
Actually, that's the good part of the entire change that will come, which is we are more item-focused. So it is less like a dramatic death with the entire ship directly exploding. No, you will start losing items first, and then you might be dead in the water for a long time, until someone picks you up. And that is all the consequence. So you're just dead in the water if the right components break at the right time. If the wrong component breaks at the wrong time, so if your quantum drive, for example, explodes because of a malfunction, that might have a consequence that is very similar to what we have right now, that the entire ship explodes.
Yeah, the power plant specifically. Soft death really, what it sort of models is either the power plant died in a peaceful way, so to speak, or you lost your relays, something like that, which, you just lost power. What we currently have for big explosions is more like the reactor took a critical hit, it went into its critical load, nobody did anything about it, it exploded.