Comment by PunchyHamster

I imagined a space game based on a bit similar approach but the caveat is "technology to make stuff deep space radiation resistant also limited the available compute", and the player has capability to

So your airlocks, space station and ship subsystems and similar devices would run just on small microcontroller sized chips (8-64kB sized ones, with slow clocks) and player that invested in that given skillset could essentially hack them and modify or replace the programming, and have access to a bunch of languages, from assembler, thru rust to something more high level/easier to use like BASIC/MicroPython.

They could also acquire disassemblers, the basic ones would just give them assembly code (which might be enough if they want to just re-program a lock), the advanced ones would also get actual high level source code (just a bit of smoke and mirrors so player doesn't have to stare at assembler or build code from scratch every time). And basically play hacker but on actually running systems, OR re-tune their ship's engines (it could even go to fun stuff like "there are 5 models of this engine, all just software locked into given power level", akin to real life car ECU tuning).

There would be bigger systems, but they would be bulky from shielding so it would be often mainframe-like system of station having one big core computer with a bunch of dumb terminals, that player could also fuck around with, like installing a password sniffer. Or having it trigger something when certain character accessess it.