Brainstorming from scratch Sci Fi CARP

[ablair]

Living in South Korea where DIY games are not a thing. I'm looking to make a highly crunchy Sci Fi simulator for a group to role play a ship's crew. It's educational in intent, and the numbers are meant to be handled quickly and evenly by a computer. TLDR: the crew is aboard the finest ship that Earth has ever built. Unfortunately Earth is Cosmic Guam, and the ship is too much too soon. The crew has to make the vessel work while highly competent and unapologetically sinister aliens are gliding around hyperspace in perfectly operating, oversized dreadnoughts.

The ship is meant to be handled by computer and I want it to be as ruthlessly byzantine as possible. I want it to be a simulation of the most impossibly complex, money-is-no-object bloated, bleeding edge project constructed modularly by every nation on Earth. The modules were taken into orbit and assembled, then promptly launched.

The mechanics are meant to be simple: handle the error readouts. Fix and improve what you can, and based on how well you handle the crises, that will give you bonuses for the weekend scenario, which is meant to be a table top scenario like pirates, cops, slavers, monsters, or trade missions.

I have no one here to bounce ideas off of, so I'm looking for advice, pointers, and questions from folks who have built games from scratch.