Safety Rating

Safety Ratings are a property of Void Engines. In-game, this is represented as a value such as 8, 12, or 15 depending on the kind of engine installed and potentially modifiers from other components. This value represents a potential multiple applied to the deep space skill checks faced when operating your ship in the void. This includes landing checks. A higher safety rating is better. The math works out as follows:

Compare the quadrant, planet/orbital, or zone danger level displayed against your engine's safety rating. If your Engine Safety is higher than or equal to the danger level, there will be no multiple applied against you. This is good! However, for every point the danger level exceeds your ship's safety rating, a multiplier of about 5% is added onto the size of the opposing dice pool to overcome. Thus, if you were in a danger 12 quadrant with a safety 11 ship, and the opposing dice pool were 20 strong and 20 standard, they would become 21 strong and 21 standard due to the +5% multiplier penalty. This penalty grows slightly more extreme per point in situations where danger exceeds your engine by a larger difference. Finally, once the penalty multiplier reaches +50% at a maximum difference of 9 safety/danger, it will not grow further. While the checks are still harder due to extreme danger, the engine safety bonus no longer plays an additional penalty beyond +50%.

Having a high safety rating not only makes space exploration require fewer Skill Test Save Talents to prevent ship damage, morale loss, injury, wasted time, and fuel expenditures, but can also effectively increase your experience gained by making the skill checks passed more often. Remember that using a skill save talent to pass a check will not award experience. If you are able to overcome these skill checks naturally due to particularly large skill pools and avoiding dangers like Radiation Storms, you might not need a high engine safety rating and can instead select an engine with other benefits such as better fuel economy, better agility, or extra Reactor Points.

Quadrant Danger is displayed in this image:



Example Engines with their base safety rating displayed. Note that lower mass engines have a superior base safety rating in most cases: