The point of this thread is to gauge community interest and to generate discussion around the concept of debilitating injuries - anyone on Aurora who has experienced serious injuries ingame and survived will know that the health system in Aurora is not quite as sensible as it could be. Critical injuries, once healed via surgery, chems, or other treatment option, are essentially non-concerns. Due to the way the health system works, a character who gets down to 1% brain activity after losing half of their blood and breaking all of their limbs will be perfectly fine once they've recovered, in spite of the severity of those injuries and the timeframe of treatment.
While some things ingame, such as bone repair and soft tissue regeneration can be explained by advanced futuristic technologies, this nonetheless is not very conducive to roleplay or gameplay in my opinion. It lowers the stakes of combat and encourages players to engage in risky behavior, as their wounds are meaningless so long as they don't die. Many people are familiar with playing security or other combat-facing roles and being treated for critical injuries multiple times, only to return to the fight immediately.
A potential solution to this problem would be to add permanent debuffs after suffering significant-enough injuries for the duration of the round. Examples of this would be bones that were broken and surgically repaired being twice as fragile for the rest of the round, organs losing some effectiveness (especially stamina regeneration and capacity for things like the heart and lungs), or traumatic brain injuries after suffering massive brain damage that cause confusion and decrease overall abilities. The idea here is to add consequences to severe wounds which individually are not crippling, but nonetheless make you less effective, especially as injuries add up. In general, I believe this system would be an overall boon for gameplay and roleplay.