I was watching the Doctor Who Christmas special The Voyage of the Damned, in which The Titanic, currently in orbit high above Earth has had it's engines sabotaged by an evil billionaire and is about to crash (it's a long story). The Doctor - who lets face it, probably has all the skill trees bought to maximum - pilots the Titanic and uses the atmosphere to compression start the engines and keep the ship from crashing and killing everyone in London. And as I'm watching, I'm thinking - okay, that's kind of Bad Motivator-y, but in reverse. The Doctor uses his crazy skill to bring a device back from the dead instead of rendering a device inoperable.

Now I know how I'd react if one of my players said "I want to use Bad Motovator to jumpstart the engines and save everyone on the cruise liner and in London" (the answer would probably be "Sure! That sounds cool!") but I thought I'd ask you guys what you thought. Obviously it's not RAW, but too abusive? Thematically appropreate? I mean a skilled Engineer of any note has enough tools in their Bag Of Tricks that they could probably get the same result another way - either an outright mechanics roll or the Inventive Creation sig ability, but it seemed an easy solution to a question nobody asked.

So what do you think?

Sounds great to me. It also sounds like there could be a potential talent for that later. So my caveat would be "Sure.. but if eventually a talent comes out that does this, we will have re-evaluate my ruling"

I've always thought of Contraption as kind of the positive counterpart to Bad Motivator. It's probably a bit of a stretch to use the atmosphere to jump start the engines per the RAW of Contraption, but narratively it's close enough.

Hm, can a failure fail to fail? That's the nitty gritty here. With proper narrative I'd definitely allow it.

Roll enough Triumphs, and anything is possible.

To me it just sounds like a Mechanics check. A check doesn't need to be wrench on nut I don't think. Honestly if someone narrated that as a Pilot check I'd allow it, like roll starting a manual transmission.