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When on an EVA does stopping improve fatigue?

wrongwayjerry 7 years ago updated by Mr. Fusion 7 years ago 4

I was on a really long EVA 10k round trip and i got to the point of dangerous fatigue and i tried stopping for an hour between each hour of walking for the last 2k just to see if that improved anything. I don't think it did. It was hard to tell. It would be nice if stopping would help fatigue - it would allow me to stay out longer.

I don't think it ever does, nor that it should be. Even factoring the lower gravity in, carrying the EVA suit, whatever you have with you, plus the difficulties associated with doing physical activity in a fully enclosed suit which only can do so much in terms of managing internal temperature, humidity and atmospheric conditions, even standing still isn't really effortless so you don't get much rest.


10-12k per trip is about as far as you can get anyway, at that point you are very low / ran out of calories already, and from there organ integrity starts dropping like a rock and you'll die in another 6-8 hours tops if you can't get back to a habitat in that time.

Answered

Fatigue/Exhaustion is different from Stamina. Stamina "recharges" so that you can run/jump again after a cooldown. Fatigue can only be regained by sleeping.

Thanks. (I am just thinking out loud on this one.) I imagine it can be difficult to find a balance between boredom, tension and absurdity when designing a game like this. When I am doing something like walking it consumes oxygen, electricity, calories, etc. and then there is an impact on my body: exhaustion vs rested, healthy vs organ failure. I tend to think in real world terms for some activities. I was a Marine and a 10k with a full pack was nothing - you could do that with a good lunch and a water bottle. I used to run long distance, scuba dive and play Ultimate Frisbee. So when i die from walking 11k it sort of brings me out of the experience and then i have to remind myself that the death is a necessary element of the tension of the game otherwise i would just be walking around and the worst thing that might happen is it gets dark. On the other hand the things I don't have to worry about is falling off a cliff or tearing a hole in my suit. Ok - I will take death from too much walking - seems like a reasonable way to have tension/danger when doing an EVA. :-)


Please don't take any of this as criticism - it is not mean to be. You have a difficult task - pleasing everyone all the time. :-)


Keep up the good work!!

Games are, to a differing degree, and need to be, abstractions to make them functioning and challenging within their own world and its rules and limits, even if based on reality. For games, this is part of the "suspension of disbelief" most works of fiction ask from the audience to be able to be entertaining: the rules may (and usually do) deviate from the "real world" but should be consistent and making sense within the boundaries of the fictional world. Finding the right level of this "suspension" needed is the tricky part, and I'd say Lacuna Passage in on the right track in general, with some adjustments needed here and there.


From what I've seen, with the current balance you die from about 40 hours of constant walking with sparse periods of running, with the main contributing factor being your calories count dropping to 0 (that's where organ integrity starts to drop rapidly from an until then relatively stable and high level, which I don't particularily agree with). It's obviously nowere near "realistic" and feels very off compared to your experiences even just as an average person who's not used to high levels of physical activity (like me :). But if the player character could go on, say, a week without food intake, then the lack of food wouldn't be much of a threatening condition. Likewise, if you could cover even just 20-30 kilometers (which, I believe, still would be much less than what a well trained long distance hiker can do in a day) before your vitals start getting really bad, that would again significantly lessen the need to periodically return to a hab to rest and eat, reducing the importance of hab discovery and manintenance. It would also mean that you could cover a fourth, maybe even a third of the map in a single trip, since the entire area is only about 5 by 5 kilometers, which in turn would make the world feel much smaller than intended (closer to the size it actually is, which needs to be artificially enlarged by limitations like this to feel big enough to get lost in, and threatened by, its perceived size; again, abstraction of a large world that needs to be made to fit within the constraints of software and hardware capabilities).