Survival Instincts

We ran the math on hauler survivability and found they were dying 1,800 units from base. That's 36 seconds in a dense asteroid field. Losing a hauler also destroyed three docked miners — 40% of your starting fleet, gone. v0.9.7 gives haulers the self-preservation instincts they should have had from the start, and filters out contracts that were physically impossible to complete.

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Hauler Self-Preservation

Haulers now run a pre-flight damage estimate before accepting any task. If the round-trip transit damage would exceed 50% of their current hull, they skip it. When hull drops below 40%, haulers abandon their current task and head home. And if a hauler does die, its docked miners are ejected at the death position instead of being destroyed — they'll sit idle until another hauler picks them up.

Contract Validation

Earth and Luna contracts had deadlines of 30-120 game-days, but transit alone takes 180 days. Every one of these contracts was guaranteed to fail, costing -15 reputation each. After three failures you'd be permanently locked out of the contract system. The contract generator now filters destinations by transit feasibility — if you can't physically get there in time, the contract never appears.

Hauler Stat Rebalance

Under the old stats, haulers took 0.27 DPS from transit plus 8.0 effective DPS from collisions — combined lethality of 8.3 DPS against a 300 HP hull. The numbers now support viable deep-belt operations. Fuel range, speed, and cross-section values have been retuned so haulers can actually reach the asteroids they're sent to mine.