Going over ship OP
well I was thinking that accidents that come from going over a ship's OP would affect you during combat (with risk being related to how high you go over). So if you want to do gamble on this alot you would be running a huge risk in the short and long term Short term you run the risk of having your ship becoming useless in the middle of battle (because of using too big a weapon that destroys the ship, crew deaths, becomes overloaded too quickly or the ship runs out of power). Long term you can lose ships and weapons. It may also require repairs to make the ship usable again.
Ah, I see. So you could say, then, there's a "Malfunction" chance for every weapon (and the engines) if the ship is over OP - would be the same as being disabled, but random. Which sounds reasonable, but I suspect it'd be more annoying/frustrating than not - I can see reloads over a loss caused by an untimely engine malfunction. Might work, of course, just saying what my reservations are.
Besides, there's no driving force to do this, other than copying the accidents mechanic (which exists for different reasons!). Still, I have to admit it's an intriguing idea.
A different tack to take for going over your OP budget would be to make repairs take a lot longer, make it take longer for disabled systems to be restored in combat, and make systems
more likely to be disabled. You're basically cramming in more things than the ship was designed for.
Sure, you've stuck all these big, power intensive weapons on your ship, and you've got these big, beefy engines, but you've also got power mains running along the deck in the crew quarters (or even outside the armor!), the power plant is being stressed keeping up with all the demands, and god help you if you take a shot that hits one of the jury-rigged capacitors that you had to put right up against the life support systems.
As an off-the-cuff thought, have it so you can install up to half-again the OP of a ship, but if you do that, you'll be hideously vulnerable to system disruption, and the overall maintenance cost of your ship goes up by, say, an order of magnitude, and your ship is much much more accident-prone.
It'd give it a real trade-off, while making it a flexible cap. Do you install that bigger gun, when it'll make everything cost more and make you more vulnerable? Are the extra flux capacitors worth the added chance of losing your weapons or engines and for longer? Do you beef up your engines knowing that it'll make for more frequent disasters that'll kill off your carefully husbanded crew of elites? That's the sort of trade-offs in decision making that makes games like this one so
awesome.