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Well, I don't think you really can 100% reliably protect electric circuits against environment effects.  In real life I lose power occasionally, and I certainly don't live in a seat-of-the-pants space colony.

However, I have a suggestion that might make things more interesting:
- power-lines have durability that degrades over time (faster or slower depending on exposure of lines)
- as durability decreases, chance of Zzzzt increases; when durability is at 100% chance of Zzzzt is very small if not zero.
- durability can be repaired (and perhaps require additional resources if it decreases below some threshhold)

So, as long as colonists keep circuits in good repair, chance of Zzzzt becomes very small.

It's by no means perfect, but I just increase the value of X until I have a surplus of untattered apparel on reserve.  I've found it works for me reasonably well midgame if X is approximately the size of my colony (I also burn clothes < 25% durability, and restrict my colonists to wear untattered clothes -- everything in between gets sold).

I should probably note that optimizing impressiveness was not really my goal in that colony, and that I try to balance game mechanics with my own personal aesthetics when I play (e.g. I would never put a stove in my freezer, even though I've seen that work well for other players).  And yeah, after I turned on the beauty meter for that screenshot it became clear that that bedroom could use some tweaking, especially now that my artists have improved so much.

Anyway, I certainly appreciate the suggestions.

There are also statues with negative beauty value, as such saying "I placed 5-6" doesnt really mean much when they might all be shoddy.

Good point -- I should have mentioned they were all at least "good" quality -- and as you can see from screenshot, they still vary in beauty by an order of magnitude (depending, on size, quality, and I think materials.  I believe that lighter-coloured statue (+438) is one I unintentionally made out of silver.)

For greedy colonists, "a little bit impressive" is enough to get a mood buff (+3 IIRC).

Here is screenshot of my "a little bit impressive" bedroom -- in fact it has 8 statues of varying good+ quality, and a royal bed:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=791199203

If you have a stone floor anyway (building into a mountain), a smoothed floor has +3 beauty, and costs 0 resources beyond construction time (and that has side benefit of helping to improve skills).

I'm not entirely clear how "impressiveness" and "beauty" are related in the game.

I had to install 5 or 6 statues in one greedy colonist's room before it reached "a little bit impressive" status for the mood buff.
(IIRC this was a 5x6 room with polished marble floor -- if your floors are stone I think it's a better idea to smooth the floor rather than to tile it)

I think if destroyed it should just revert to blueprint, whereas deconstructing should just remove it entirely.

(If you really do NOT want to rebuild, at that point you could micromanage and cancel it, but personally I'd prefer my colonists to rebuild it most of the time, so I think this is good suggestion and a better default behaviour)

Eliminate the random Zzzzt.

Seriously, things shouldn't happen for random, there needs be a reason.

I presume there are reasons, just not controllable by the player (erosion, insects eating through powerlines, construction mistakes, etc.) 

I don't think it's unreasonable that we can't build an "infallible" electrical system in a space colony, and I personally like that there are *some* random events we can't totally prevent.

Agreed.  There should probably be a penalty to the effectiveness of self-treatment, depending on nature/severity of injury.

So, this happened in one of my colonies:

- siege event began, enemies started constructing sandbags
- colonists killed all enemies before construction completed -- planned work remained for one sandbag.
- I had colonists deconstruct completed sandbags, but they would not interact with the one planned sandbag
- a while later, I built geothermal generator right next to the planned sandbag
- eventually (not sure when and by whom, but I presume by one of my colonists) the planned sandbag was actually completed
- I am now unable to deconstruct the sandbag

Not a major problem for me, the sandbag is not really impeding anything, but I thought it might be worth reporting.  I can upload save file at a later time if anyone would find it helpful.

I mean, you COULD pave with reinforced concrete, but why would you?

It also strikes me as somewhat odd that sandbags require steel.

I assumed it was more of a "flavour"/role-play detail rather than actual game mechanic.

Even if you tell Steam NOT to auto-update, it still updates when you start the game up if you're in online mode.

2. Replace blight (which is just your crops disappearing) with a herd of something maniacally eating your crops

And/or different types of blights that only affect some crops -- I think this would be both more interesting AND more realistic (think Dutch Elm Disease or Irish Potato Famine).

Yes, projectiles (whether you rolled a hit or a miss) can be randomly intercepted by things in the path with at least a .2 fill percent, which includes rock chunks.

However, I would expect it to be symmetrical for two shooters targeting each other.

I would expect it to be weighted to benefit whichever person the obstacle was closest to.

In the extreme case, consider a waist-high sandbag, with the protagonist standing directly behind the sandbag, and the enemy at a distance.  In that case the protagonist should hit the sandbag with 0% probability, and the enemy should hit it closer to 50% of the time the bullet would have otherwise hit the protagonist.

[edit, more mathyness:  For horizontal shot I believe the angle between target and obstacle is arctan(h/d), where h is height of gun relative to height of obstacle, and d is horizontal distance from gun to obstacle.

As d approaches zero this goes to 90 degrees (shooting straight down); as d gets large it approaches zero. ]

[edit2: oh!, if you meant that's what you expect to happen the way game is currently coded, you may well be right ]