Re: Silly Cars
I did introduce a rule in my game that any damaged component had a chance to not work each time it was stressed (underwent a state change). So plants would fail to accelerate, weapons wouldn't fire etc. You could try again next phase and they would continue to operate in their current state until then. In order to reduce overhead we checked the first time it was used in combat. After a failure, once you got it going it would continue working for the rest of the combat.
In a single battle with low damage it probably wouldn't affect the outcome (and so would reflect the baseline game) but over time it would have a descernable negative effect (not being able to fire for a phase could be critical).
Jury-rigged components would be checked every time they were used but if they failed you needed to perform a jury-rig mech task to get them working again. Having a plant that could not accelerate or a gun that could not fire until you reached somewhere you could work on it would be a real disadvantage.
To clarify I make the cost of a Jury-Rigged component half the cost of the component if it had been damaged down to a single 1 DP (or that hs lost 5 DPs if it has more than 6 DPs undamaged). A jury rigged rocket would cost 45% of it's undamaged cost (1 DP damage is 90% of undamaged cost). A jury rigged Thundercat plant would cost 5% (14 DP damage is the minimum 10% and jury-rig is half that.
If you perform a successful check on each damaged component before combat (mechanics repair or jury rig roll for of that component as appropriate) you can gaurantee that it will work in the next combat it is used (but the next one suffers the ususal chance of failure). In campaigns this extra maintenance will become a pain very quickly.
For dregs, a jury-rigged rocket isn't that much of a problem as it only needs to work once. You may have to fire a MG in more than one combat before you get a chance to fix it.
Alternatively draft in some rule from GURPS or Traveller as this sort of thing is out of scope for CW.
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