Questions regarding engeniering mantainance

[mobotium (OP)]

So, till now Ive been playing with ship mantainance off (ever since i started having my ships slow down to a crawl in the middle of nowere, literaly).  So im asking, what exactly do I need to do play with it on?

I understand the engeniering spaces, as well as AFR and IFR.  But I cant seem to understand what the Maint Life is supposed to be or how it works.  I have also seen people talking about overhauls and stuf, what are those?

Basicaly, any information about how this part of the game works would probably be usefull.

[shadenight123]

firstly, only military ships have that problem. (which means that if you manage to build commercial ships, with commercial engines, you will NEVER face maintenance)
concerning thus only the military:
1)maintenance modules increase the maintenance parts you can have on a ship
2)engineering bays increase the life "span" of ships.
when years passes, military ships will start "losing pieces" (activate events-log to see) and start being repaired on board, losing maintenance parts. if they lose the engines, and have NO spare part, they "go to a crawl" because their engines are broken.
so, basically, you select a ship and order her:
1) resupply at colony (if maintenance parts are low)
2) Overhaul at colony (if X years have passed, were X stands for the time when they start to break up exponentially)
you can keep from overhaulign them for a while, even when they break, but at a certain point they will  break once per month or more, and remain without parts FAST...so, overhaul them at colony. >.>

[Brian Neumann]

Civilian ships do not suffer from maintenance problems.  To qualify as a valid design however they do need to have 1 engineering space on the ship.  This is mostly to abstract the commercial ships maintenance away from the players headeaches. 

For military ships the maintenance supplies on board are used as parts breakdown.  Different parts use a different amount of supplies.  Design a 50 hull space sensor and put it on a very basic ship and you will notice the largest repair cost goes way up.  When you have enough parts on board and something breaks it is automatically repaired using the parts.  If you instead try to repair something damaged in combat it uses twice as many maintenance supplies.  The way that the game is set up the base rate of failure is for the first year.  As more years go by then the base chance of failure increases.  To reverse this a ship needs to be given the overhaul command when it is at a colony that can support the size ship with the maintenance modules/facilities present.  The colony summary screen will show what the largest size ship it can support is.  Anything this size or smaller can be overhauled.  Overhauling reverses the clock at a rate of 4 to 1.  In other words if you have had a ship out for 4 years before ordering it to go into overhaul it will have 4 times the chance for parts to break down.  Once it is in overhaul it will need 1 year to finish reversing the time on the clock to zero.  If after 6 months you order your ship back out then you will have removed 2 of the 4 years and it will start adding from that point. 

Hope this explanation helps to understand a fairly complicated part of the game.

Brian

[mobotium (OP)]

Thanks for the help!

[Ashery]

Just a minor correction to Brian's post:

Ships age over time and overhauling reverses this at a rate of 1 month in overhaul reverses 3 months of age.

Assuming that the wiki is fully up to date, heh.

[Brian Neumann]

Just a minor correction to Brian's post:

Assuming that the wiki is fully up to date, heh.

Thanks I was going on memory as the game was not available when I posted.

Brian