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You're touching upon a heated discussion we had in the ALIEN forum about the nature of "hit points" in games that use them in one form or another -- that it isn't really appropriate, or realistic, to interpret each point lost as a certain discrete amount of concrete, physical damage. Any number of single-point nicks and scratches isn't really likely to kill a person.
Rather, they could be read as an abstraction; an amalgamate of physical and mental fatigue, exhaustion, lactic acid, stress, minor wounds and bruises that compound these effects, loss of blood or shock perhaps; this, that, the other ... adverse conditions that accumulate with each lost HP to the point where, when it comes, you no longer have the reflexes, focus, physical speed, sisu, or sheer luck to avoid or otherwise mitigate the effect of that last hit, that brings you from 1HP to 0 -- and that last point is the only one that represents an actual major injury.

From that perspective, even "hits" as per the game system that deplete a character's HP's might be interpreted as near misses that build the character's total fatigue level, rather than actual flesh wounds. A system where low HP levels increase the difficulty of morale checks might then nicely represent the kind of mechanic you describe.

Such an improvised seat-of-the-pants narrative approach -- and simply excluding the munchkins and others who don't "get it" from the table -- sounds really great for people like you and me; who have been playing RPG's for some time ... perhaps since the GDW editions, or even earlier.

But I'm assuming that Fria Ligan would prefer not to print the advisory "recommended for experienced role-players only" on their box. So, with respect for the fact that we've all been beginners at some point, some type of formalised system to also "ease" beginning players (and GM's!) into some kind of at least semi-narrative approach to handling ammo consumption during firefights would probably be beneficial.

As resource management in general -- and ammo very much in particular -- is a critical component in the Twilight setting, I feel that part ought not to just be left blank in the rules, as seems to be done in most other YZE games (where it isn't handled with a random binary full/empty system). Especially bearing in mind the reality of, and expectations stemming from, the property's 30-year history of appealing to rivet counters.

Didn't like what I came up with? That's completely fine with me! I just wrote down the first thing I came up with, as I came up with it (hence the back-and-forth rambling wall of text) just to get something down as a starting point, so it wasn't meant as a serious proposal for actual rules anyway.

Which begs the question however -- bearing in mind that this thread is about what we'd actually like to see (or not) in the published YZE edition of Twilight, rather than what house rules we're going to use for it -- what would you propose? Or would you just go with only having decent players, and leave it at that?

For starters, I wasn't attacking the system you outlined and didn't mean it personally. It's a bit more clear now with your edits. I still think it's a bit too complicated to achieve the core goal of optimization. My opinion is that abstraction is good -- but each and every abstraction has to be worth it, and clearly explained, as it must be justified and justifiable to a player who expects realism. The core problem is that "realism" is often, in actual implementation, neither fun nor actually realistic!

However, I want to strongly strongly strongly disagree with the take that systems like this are for "experienced" players only! I think it's very, very much the opposite! Crunchy, heavy systems are the legacy of gaming. That means they may feel more familiar to old school gamers, but the state of the art is very much not that these days, and I think newer games are much more approachable to people new to the hobby! Storytelling comes naturally to people, and systems built first and foremost around supporting storytelling are very quick to pick up. I've played very successful games of Mouse Guard or Numenera, for instance, with people who have very limited or zero RPG experience. They are both very good, unique systems for what they do, and certainly not harder to learn than D&D, etc. for someone new to gaming! There's a big difference between being good at roleplaying and being good at a roleplaying system, is what I am getting at.

But to answer your question, I definitely only roleplay with "decent" players these days, but I mean that word in the moral sense. I do not care if you are good or experienced at the game or at roleplaying. I care that you are there to have fun with everyone, willing to learn, and invested, and not there to undermine the other players, act as a constant rules-lawyer, bicker and min-max all the time, and otherwise act selfishly in a social setting. Choice of friends? Sure. Unapologetically. I've had to ask people not to come back to games before and I would do it again. But system design also definitely influences behavior at the table, to some degree.

I can also talk about things I like from the systems I mentioned, and others, specifically as they pertain to "hit points" and to tracking of resources.

Hit points? Silly. Hate them. Sometimes they are justifiable (I dunno, Battletech?), but in a roleplaying game... nah. If I think about the games I like, they all pretty much assign wounds by degree of severity. For instance you might receive a wound that is just a scrape, and only momentarily impairs your character. Or you might receive a mild wound, which impairs you for as long as it takes to heal, maybe a few days. Or a serious wound that is a serious impairment for some time. Or a critical wound that all but knocks you out of the fight and will require bed rest with a doctor to heal right. And they stack. Get enough mild wounds and it becomes the same as a serious wound. Leave a serious wound untreated, it becomes critical. Get a couple critical wounds, and you die.

Easy. Sensible. Narrative. Dramatic. Straightforward. No gaminess. Everything I like in games.

As for tracking resources. I'd say this is season-to-taste for your player group, and I'd honestly recommend having two sets of rules. One in which players are free to track every resource, perhaps through the group's quartermaster as mentioned. Two syrettes of morphine, ten tourniquets, three first aid kits, five days of antibiotics, five fuel jugs, 23 MREs, etc etc etc. If this is what your players all want, then great. That's the part of the game they enjoy and it should be embraced. It will take a good amount of time at the table, but I wouldn't be against it with the right group.

On the other hand, it's all once again easily abstracted. I'd steal this from the way Numenera does characters... you have traits and you can drain those traits to attempt harder actions. Give them a general Resource Pool. Call it Medical, Transportation, Parts. Treat it like an attribute. The party needs morphine? Roll against their Medical Resource Pool to see if they have it. Kinda hard to come by so give it a high difficulty. If they do have it, drain the pool by a point or two. Driving across Poland? Roll and reduce the Transport Resource level the same way to reflect the spare parts, tires, etc they're using. If they fail a roll, well hey, now you have an adventure hook. "You blew out the last spare tire and can't fix it. Truck's not going anywhere until you replace it..."

Saying "no" to players is usually the wrong move. It kills momentum and makes the game adversarial. Instead, I always go with "yes, but at this cost..."

Finally, you can probably guess by now that I am a big fan of suppression, morale, psychological effects. Warfare really is not and never has been about killing all the bad guys. It has always been about breaking their will to fight. It's how battles are won and it's how wars are won. With pretty few exceptions (ie, the Empire of Japan) battles do not feature wiping them out to the last man. Many, many forces throughout history have retreated with 5% casualties! Real people tend to want to live and real commanders tend to want to retain their commands.

In a roleplaying game I don't know that this is best answered with game mechanics. it's hard to enforce on PCs. Who am I to tell Johann Rambone how brave he is and that he refuses to charge a battle line of 50 angry Vietcong? Again, playing with good roleplayers helps... but there are some systemic ideas that help too. Something like "Luck" that takes the place of morale. Take enough near misses and your luck goes down and down and down. If the player wants to keep pressing their luck, fine, but they do so with the knowledge that they're getting closer and closer to their luck running out.

For NPCs, you as the GM can just exercise common sense. If the gang of bandits watches their charismatic leader die, they probably run for the hills. If the Soviet conscripts take 50% casualties charging up a hill, they probably stop doing that. If the PCs get the jump on three baddies at point-blank range, they probably surrender maybe even before a shot is fired. Do your pla-- murder hobos gun them down anyway? Do they kill all the Soviets as they flee with psychopathic delight? That behavior, if you don't want it, is very easy to punish with the inevitable response when the vengeance party comes calling.

Maybe you want or need a rule for how much suppressive fire it takes to force an NPC to take cover, so there's mechanical cover for GM decisions. Ok, Easy enough to come up with.

You have a lot of good ideas. Generally, I, too, am in favour of games that offer a choice of abstraction levels. Common sense is something people develop with experience; I'd therefore like for games to provide gaming groups with a deeper, more detailed systematic framework to guide them should feel they need - or want - one, but also allow dialling to a higher level of abstraction for those who prefer it. Season to taste, as you say.
A group might prefer to have a less abstract system e.g. for handling specifically ammo and vehicle supplies, but a higher level of abstraction for handling other resources. Or a high or low level for all resources. Or some other mix. If the game properly caters for mixing and matching as per individual preference out-of-the box, I'd say it's very well done.

In my mind, "realism" is impossible to achieve in a TTRPG. It is foolish to even try to.
What I like to shoot for however is a sense of realism: mechanics that describe the game world in a way that caters for immersion and suspension of disbelief; that provides results that intuitively feel like they make sense (without necessarily actually doing so); that puts emphasis on elements that are important for the setting; that allows you to do the things you expect to be able to do in that world, with consequences you feel are relevant and recognisable -- in-world.
And the "in-world" is important. To me, "realism" in a Roger Moore-era James Bond 007 RPG needs to be something very different from "realism" in a Jack Ryan RPG, even though both nominally depict identical milieus. And both need a "realism" very different from an Avengers RPG.
The system should thus not aim to simulate reality ... Phoenix Command tried. It didn't end well.
But a system that succeeds in simulating realism - as in, the feel of realism - is, in my mind, a successful one.
N.B. that this includes optimising gameplay - to me, it's a question of what you're optimising towards. A system that depicts a fast-moving, dynamic story like e.g. the Ghost in the Shell property's, but forces a gameplay that moves forward at a snail's pace doesn't successfully convey the "feel" of the game's setting. While on the other hand, an RPG based e.g. on the Last Of Us property doesn't need to be - indeed shouldn't be - all that fast flowing; instead, it probably needs to put a lot more systematic focus on every individual action.

The question is how much depth does the system provide to the game vs. how much depth do the GM and players get to/need to provide themselves. A very abstract system is almost by definition also shallow - it allows the players to provide their own depth by improv, but OTOH it also requires them to do so. This will suit some, but far from all... Among many of my friends, YZE is considered a rather too lacking in depth (not to mention, much too geared towards one-shots) to really be a good fit for the Twilight setting... I am trying to figure out if and how this might be remedied.

About morale; as a general rule of thumb, military units can be expected to break beginning after having suffered about 25-30% losses. Depending on what type of unit we're talking about, this will differ; an SAS unit will of course be able to withstand higher losses than your ordinary rifle platoon. A militia unit may break sooner, or later, depending on their personal stake in what they're defending. Other circumstances will also affect this number - your morale will break quicker if many of the comrades in your personal field of view go down, irrespective of how the rest of the unit fares. Conversely, if you are unaware that everyone else in your unit is out of action, you may well go on fighting with unaffected morale.
But the general rule of thumb is 25-30%.
And I agree; the mechanics should primarily govern NPC's, not PC's ... except perhaps in circumstances where the player is wanting the character to do something common sense would dictate the character at a gut level would really prefer not to, in which case a roll against some appropriate attribute at some appropriate difficulty might be called for to let will overcome instinct.

As a side note regarding something you mentioned in your post about morale - interestingly enough, just about all historical instances I can think of where battles have featured a prominent "wipe them out. All of them!" ideology have occurred in conflicts where the people being wiped out have had a different colour of skin than the people doing the wiping. I am inherently mistrustful of histories where the victors get away with justifying atrocities on the battlefield or against civilian populations by stereotyping people of some particular ethnicity or culture and labelling them as fanatics with a deathwish "who just don't think, or feel, or react the same way we do".
And just so there is no ambiguity: yes, that perspective specifically includes Imperial Japan.

A very abstract system is almost by definition also shallow - it allows the players to provide their own depth by improv, but OTOH it also requires them to do so.

This is a very good point. I guess the true ideal of a roleplaying game is one which gives you exactly what you need to create rewarding stories, but not so much that you don't have any ownership over the world. Almost every RPG book will have some line in it about "all of this is just suggestions, it's your world!" but in many of them this seems like just lip service.

It's also true that some people prefer to run pre-packaged, published adventures. And that is totally fine, if you can make them work well. I've never had much luck with that sort of thing other than as a conceptual starting point.

And yes, the feel of realism is what I meant. You talk about a range of world types, I guess in place of "realism" I'd use something like "fidelity"... the world feels coherent and "right," even if it is far from realistic. Paranoia does this well, for instance. Most games tend to feature a more "cinematic" realism. We expect 007 to take some knocks along the way and for the rules of known Earth physics to apply, but we also expect him to escape certain doom with a car that turns into a jet submarine at the flick of a switch, useful only in the exact moment it's needed.

It just so happens that Twilight: 2000 is a game that lives fully in the "real" world. There is no miracle science. No one can fly. You can get malaria and it can kill you. If you get shot in the head, the expectation is that you are simply gone. It is gritty realism and it doesn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room, to most people, when it comes to creating superheroic characters. I haven't actually seen the ALIENS book ever, but it would seem very similar to me in perspective. It's people we all might know, thrown into a very dangerous and grim situation. It's heroic just to survive, but no spell is gonna help you get there. That all means that, if the universe is to maintain credibility -- "fidelity" -- then the players simply can't make many mistakes. That makes it a harder, or at least more painful, world to play around in.

Again, a host of excellent points.

I'll highlight two where I do disagree somewhat - and I'm afraid these may come across as a bit nit-picky, for which I apologise, but I'll persist anyway, since they also serve very well to highlight the point I'm making:
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A very abstract system is almost by definition also shallow - it allows the players to provide their own depth by improv, but OTOH it also requires them to do so.

This is a very good point. I guess the true ideal of a roleplaying game is one which gives you exactly what you need to create rewarding stories, but not so much that you don't have any ownership over the world.

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Actually, I'd want the game to retain solid ownership of the world. It shouldn't interfere with the GM's and players' ownership of the stories they tell within it, true, but the world should be the game's.
That's what I mean with a game system's in-world realism - or indeed, fidelity: a good system, to me, should serve to represent the world the game takes place in from the mechanistic perspective.

If it is so generic or abstract you can use it to represent any world, then you might as well go the GURPS route and just publish a base rules compendium and a bunch of separate world modules for it. Why should I pay for the same basic rules package several times?

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It just so happens that Twilight: 2000 is a game that lives fully in the "real" world.

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Well ... yes and no. Twilight: 2000 doesn't live fully in the real world ... or, yes, fully in, perhaps, but not in the full, rather. It lives in a very specific and narrow niche of the real world; solidly ensconced in it for certain, but still just in a very small part of the real world, shown from a certain point of view.
And to my mind, the rules should show us what that little slice-of-life is, by the selection of mechanisms it contains, and how those mechanisms operate in play.

Twilight probably won't have deep rules for trying to pass yourself off as someone who belongs somewhere you don't, or hacking into big data or CCTV systems, or character development through academic studies, or tracking intercontinental transactions, or installing or defeating bugs, as an ever-so-gritty and realistic contemporary espionage game might have.
But if it does have rules for e.g. foraging, camouflage - or, as we've discussed here, resource management, ammo expenditure, and fuel alchemy, with resolution enough to distinguish different 5.56x45 assault rifles from one another - then these rules would tell us something about what world this game takes place in, i.e. which subset of our real world is this game’s setting, and what we believe to be important elements in the stories told within its specific confines. And of course, as aforementioned: represented with mechanics that yield consequences we feel are in keeping with our sense of realism (where the likelihood of surviving a shot to the head is, indeed, slim, albeit, perhaps, not non-existent).
The game should not hinder you from exploring outside of that box if you so like, but it should definitely give you what you need to play inside it.

To put it a different way: even if it's "just" the real world, the rules still define where we, as it were, in regarding it, place the camera. Different perspectives will yield different views of the same landscape.

And in this sense, the Twilight: 2000 property does have a fair bit of history that many now are expecting Fria Ligan's edition to live up to. To me, the Twilight setting requires quite a lot of depth from the system supporting it, so it remains to be seen if YZE is the right framework for that. Judging from what I've seen of it, it seems at its core a remarkably shallow and abstract system ... making it work for Twilight would require some heavy adaptations. Which, coincidentally, is precisely what Fria Ligan has said they will be doing, so ... I’m still hoping it can be.

All true. The good news is that it is almost always easier (and more appropriate) to add complexity to a design than to try to take it away.

By "ownership" I just meant that, mostly in terms of narratives, the best RPGs in my opinion aren't too strict about what you do with them. Twilight has a core concept that says you're probably a bunch of US service members stuck in post-war Poland where you're fighting remnants of a Soviet army, marauders, etc... but if your group wants to use that same system to play as German farmers trying to rebuild your village, or Soviet soldiers who are living in Algeria, or any number of other things, it shouldn't say no. The original sourcebooks did all of this, in addition to stuff like Mercs which adapted the rules to a totally different setting. The whole GDW universe was a single timeline, really -- Traveller 2300 assumed that the events of Twilight 2000 occurred, etc. It might be cool to run a "Twilight" game set in the year 2100 where society has been rebuilt but is still tangling with the ongoing effects of the war as technological development resumes, etc.

Oh, I'd love to see a new take on Traveller: 2300 / 2300AD...

Traveller ( and MegaTraveller etc) however didn't occupy that same timeline ... they were their own continuity.

I agree with what Vader says about 'in game realism' (assuming I'm getting his point correctly) - if this was a star wars game, you'd want to run around shooting blasters one handed, shrugging of hits and doing all the things the heroes do in the Star Wars movies; if it were Cthulhu, you'd expect to have the game tools to let you investigate things, deal with the sanity implications of the terrors that you meet, etc. But most Cthulhu games don't need detailed rules on different forms of Anti-armour weapons, or the effects of lack of food, disease or radiation exposure.
In a T:2k game the expectation is that it is a military or militarised game, and that there will therefore be greater emphasis on that area (and I think that is actually an important point: T:2k is not a post-apocalyptic game, at least it wasn't in 1st edition; it was a military game in a devastated setting - a 'current-apocalypse' game, perhaps, though that's not quite right either... more of a 'the apocalypse is winding down').
The 2nd ed brought in more options for civilian characters - clearly necessary to give the game wider replayability (how many times can you escape from Poland as part of a small group of 5th Div survivors?), but changing it's nature somewhat.
The weakness I thought was present (at least in 1st and 2nd ed, never ran 2013, so not familiar enough with it), was the lack of guidance on rebuilding. There was a limited amount of notes under some skills, which effectively seemed to be, if you pass a skill roll, you've achieved what actually would require a season's worth of hard work. While most players will 'know' what a combat looks like (even if it's Hollywood combat bearing no resemblance to reality), and so can game it in a way that seems real to them, I suspect most don't have any idea what you need to do to build a bridge, or set up a functional antibiotic production facility, or operate a quarry or a mine (most if not all of which I think 1st Ed addressed with a 'to do this, it's skill roll'). Some guidance, even if quite broad, on time and resources required to keep things functioning or repair/restore them would seem to me to be useful, and would ground the rules firmly in it's background. They wouldn't need to be complex and prescriptive - here, very much something quite abstract would be ideal, since the reality would be way too complex to deal with any other way. However, something that involved multiple steps, gathering resources, etc would both help model the activity, and provide adventure hooks (which I think is similar to something that was mentioned earlier): so you want to build a new bridge - well, you have to investigate the ground and the river, which takes a week, and means you need a boat and a drilling rig. Then you need to do the design - that's you engineer with her pen and paper, quicker and easier (and more efficient in materials) if she could find a computer. The you need to gather the building materials and that means travelling out and about, and arranging transport for some big and heavy objects. Only then you can actually build it, and that needs labour and perhaps machinery. All in an insecure environment, of course.
So that becomes an abstract rebuild project in 4 steps: Investigate -plan - gather resources -implement. Set skills and resources needed for each step, skills and resources beneficial for each step (and how that benefit materialises - might make this step easier, or help with a later step), and some idea of a baseline time for each step (which may go quicker or slower depending on how successful the skill roll was, and perhaps can be deliberately hurried, or time taken)

Also, they would tie in nicely with that idea of T:2100...