Is there an RNG factor in this, though? Is it conceivable that somebody's just going to have a really bad string of luck?
TL;DRYes, there will be some randomness, but it depends on item wear and health, with dice rolled once players push their ships, and wear-based failures meant to be very rare.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, but it's dependent on the wear and tear and the health of the item. So we have parameters that give us more control over when these are happening, but sure, there will be some RNG.
Yeah, for some of them, the conditions are more like thresholds: you are overheating by this amount, you have the power throttle over this amount. So we know you're pushing your ship. At that point, we start rolling dice from time to time, where either nothing happens or maybe a minor malfunction happens or the moderate ones happen. For other cases, we just want to say, based on the wear and tear, even at that point it has to be very rare, in the sense that, yes, we do it randomly, but maybe the mean time is supposed to be days or something like that. Simply, it could happen, but we're more interested in the player choice aspect: overheating, running your ship at overclock all the time, stuff like that, which we think is more like the cost for that choice you made.