The idea I came up with is to create a new chrome piece: mangled limb.
In short, it does absolutely nothing, and still transmits sensations at maximum pain signals so you're still suffering pain penalties the entire time it's "installed".
The idea is that when an appropriate blunt object is used to sever, instead of severing and applying bleeding from limb loss, it would sever, and install the mangled limb with zero bleeding.
The trade-off to suddenly not having a limb fly away in combat is that the limb is still GONE. As in, damaged enough it will never be used in the current clone. To regain any functionality, and stop the constant agony and pain penalties, you'd need to eventually remove the arm and go chrome, just like as if it had been cut off.
Thoughts? I know at one time you could get limbs hacked off in combat, so should that be brought back if crushing did limb removal too?
Fights just being over because of hand or head destruction when how long a fight lasted was previously/now balanced around condition and the hits being taken/avoided kind of felt to me like two different systems working at the same time and one (limb destruction) being a lot more random and instrumental.
So it's not really that as a concept it doesn't make sense to me, so much as it doesn't feel quite right just added directly on top of what is there now.
However I do now wish we could out-of-combat sever in more ways, this is surprisingly constrained as far as what weapons are flagged as valid for this purpose from what I've seen.
Even a sever on a non-head @naked can pretty much instantly end a fight, and it happened surprisingly often. While the idea of lopping limbs off or pulverizing people's shins into burger meat mid-combat is cool in concept, it just makes everything way too swingy and too quick where the length of Sindome's combat engagements are usually a balancing factor, not to mention the sidestepping of high endurance UE spending in favor of glass cannons.
There are some additionally some cool past suggested ideas about non-loss penalties after healing where you'd see a debuff in your @stats like 'you have damage to your right arm' that don't rise to the level of dismemberment but have stat maluses akin to something you'd see in Fallout.
Another approach to the combat severing system we had might also be to just crank the health of limbs and lower the limb damage per attack so its more like armour destruction in that you're not losing a hand randomly in the first three attacks but if after many different instances of combat without restorative treatment you might start to see failure on worn-down limbs.