Mission step success chance?

[FriendlyFRPL]

Hi all,

Pretty basic question here. I'm a BARIS veteran, so I'm used to the likelihood of a mission step succeeding simply being the reliability of the component involved. From what I can tell, that's how things are supposed to work here, and that the flight controllers' skills are what come into play when trying to recover from a failed check. I've looked through the manual and I don't see anything to the contrary. But even after getting my mission components up to at least 90% and launching a mission with no safety downgrades for any missed pre-requisites, the "component reliability" bar on the right tends to sit around 80% or so, and it seems like once every three or four mission steps I'm getting asked whether I want to gouge my funds for "tiger teams" to have a slightly lower chance of turning my spacecraft into a flying coffin. I'd say about 60-70% of my mission steps pass without problems, which seems ridiculous with supposedly 90%+ reliable hardware components. Can anybody tell me what I'm missing here? :\

[Nacho84]

Hello FriendlyFRPL,

Apologies for my late reply and welcome to the forums!

Notice that the value shown by the gauge indicator in the right panel is computed differently depending on whether you're launching a robotic or a crewed mission. For robotic missions, it's the combined weighted reliability of all the mission components used in the current mission step (let's call this value avgMsnCmps). For crewed missions, the value in the gauge indicator is computed as:

0.75 * avgMsnCmps + 0.25 * flightCrewSum,

where flightCrewSum is the combined value of the relevant skills being used by the astronauts/cosmonauts that are involved in the mission step.

Cheers,

[jgf1123]

FYI, even though the flight crew UI displays the Leadership skill (looks like a crown), that is not the only skill the crew will need. I dug into the XML files, and at least for Mercury and Gemini, Piloting and Fitness are as important if not more so. The Pilot crew in Gemini doesn't even use Leadership.