Ok, question no.5: I played yesterday for several hours slowly testing certain aspects of the game and implementing your advice. But then I encountered another interesting thing - overhauls/crew assigment time. I checked the wiki and the FAQ already but I don't seem to find out coherent answer that would give me enough information so that I could feel that I properly understand everything.
What I know is:
- there is the maintenance clock at the fuel panel
- the ship gets older and older and needs to be checked from time to time
- when in overhaul each month of maintenance rewinds the clock by 3 months.
- the estimated mission time is the time until which the morale of the ship remains at 100%, then it slowly starts to fall
Now what I need to know is how the maintenance is calculated? The wiki/FAQ gives the information that the maintenance is carried by dockyard. Is that the shipyard? I guess not - despite having 2 slipway 5000 ton shipyard the overhaul did no go through. So I suppose it it the maintenance facilities? I need enough of them while each one gives about 200 ton maintenance? Is the amount of maintenance dedicated to overhaul „blocked“ so that the rest of the ships on orbit can start getting system fails?
And regarding the crew - the estimated time of mission is ok, I understand that. Also I understand that the morale goes down the more time the ship spends spacebound over the estimated mission time. But is it enough to just send the ship to a colony (Earth) and then immediately can go back to space again (crew rotates the moment the ship comes to a colony)? And also is there some automated system (like refueling) that could check this for me and send the ship back home when the time comes? Aurora doesn't consider this a huge problem (does not stop automated turns) so it must be really hard to keep an eye on everything in later stages of the game (especially when I can't find any more info about the last crew rotation - only the overhaul time). One thing that might fix this would be set the mission time and overhaul time equal so that the ship always goes out to space with 0 time on it's back. How do you deal with this?
Last but not least – morale of the ship does what? Is there a chance of mutiny or it just lowers the performance of the ship so at 0% it is effectively lost?