Why did my survey ship break down

[wessel (OP)]

Hello, I am new to Aurora.   I've played for about 25 years in game time.   Both of my sensor ships have broken down and I can't seem to figure out why. 

These two sensor ships were the basic first ships, so each has a conventional engine, a sensor, extra fuel for range, and a 120 month deployment time.   So yea I am sure they are classed as a commercial ship for maintenance purposes, I just checked.   In both ships suddenly all of the crew quarters broke down, causing all of the people on board one ship to die since I had no other ships nearby; the other ship is parked on an asteroid and no personel has died yet. 

So at the time they broke down the crew(mnth) timer in the taskgroup window was over the 120 months deployment time of the ship and my morale was very low.   As far as I could find out this only affects survey speed and does not influence ship breakdown.   Also, my ship with a still living crew is not able to get of the asteroid since the max speed has been reduced to 1.   Arguably, since the lifesupport of the crew quarters does not work anymore all engine power is rerouted to life support, but I do not know if it works like this ingame. 

Also I'd like to repair the ships and take them home.  How would I go about doing that (without a tractor beam).  Can I transport new crew and maintenance supplies to the stranded ship to get it back to earth and like refit or scrap it there?

[Garfunkel]

Could you post the design of your ships here?

[wessel (OP)]

It´s really weird, but I just noticed this, in the ship class design it used to have an engine and a scanner but it no longer has these components.       Somehow the ships have deleted these kind of essential parts.       My guess is that i accidentally changed the hull type of my ship´s class to one that is incompatible with scanners/engines (does that even make any sense) when I tried to copy the design over for the next generation of geosurvey ship.       Or I selected PDC as class or something.       And that deleted the components on the ship?



As you can see in the second picture the ship no longer has an engine.       Also the casualty rate is minus 39 (wtf)



[Captain, we seem to have come to a standstill]
[Officer report! What is the issue]
[Sir. .  it seems that we do no longer have. .  an engine]

[rorror]

Make it a conscript (in the right corner)

[Vandermeer]

Everything in the 0-500t range is judged as a fighter. The window there claiming it to be commercial is false in this regard, so this is a display bug/error. (probably Steve didn't factor in that someone would design such a small ship completely without engines) As a fighter they will always tend to break down, as the still displayed failure rate suggests.(..would normally be hidden on true commercial vessels)

[wessel (OP)]

Thanks for the reply.   The thing is, I did not design it without an engine.   First it had one, it could go 69 km/s (and was >500t).   Then suddenly it had no engine (and no sensor).   I think this might be the bug.   

I'll just write it off as a freak incident.   If I can confirm the bug when it happens again I'll post in the appropriate forum. 

[83athom]

Question. Did you do back and add sensors and engines via SM mode or changed the design in anyway with SM?

[wessel (OP)]

No, I´m sure I did not turn on SM. 

It´s likely one of those thing that just happen when you are messing around in newbie mode like `what does this button do´.  Turns out it deletes your engine, but you cannot remember all the buttons you tried.

[MarcAFK]

I'm not sure what caused it, but you can fix this with SM. Turn on SM mode then go into class design and use the unlock vessel button, simply add the components that seem to be missing. Now close the ships window and reopen it again to refresh the database and ensure all the SM buttons are unlocked, Now when you select the survey ship The game should refresh the screen and show the new design, it might have errors because it was damaged so use the SM repair all button.
As a new player it's generally considered fine to fix minor design errors this way too, such as putting the wrong engines in or forgetting magazines.
On last thing, I got the impression that you think deployment time affects breakdowns, it actually affects crew morale in non commercial vessels, engineering and maintenence supplies are what prevents breakdowns.

[Father Tim]

To answe your original question, somehow you deleted the engine and sensor from your original ship design, the software recalculated your required crew quarters to a smaller amount, and that brought your ship under 10 Hull spaces (500 tons), which (due to a bug or a feature, can't remember which) made it no longer a Commercial vessel.  So it began to suffer maintenance failures, one of which took out your life support, and everyone died.

[Nathan_]

To answe your original question, somehow you deleted the engine and sensor from your original ship design, the software recalculated your required crew quarters to a smaller amount, and that brought your ship under 10 Hull spaces (500 tons), which (due to a bug or a feature, can't remember which) made it no longer a Commercial vessel.  So it began to suffer maintenance failures, one of which took out your life support, and everyone died.

sounds like a feature, the 500 ton limit is for fighters I believe.

[Starmantle]

Is the design significantly different under the class display tab?  There's basically nothing here.  Not even survey sensors.