Ships and insufficient maint supplies.

[xeryon (OP)]

Ships that suffer maintenance failures and do not have enough maintenance supplies on hand to fix the ship are giving me fits.

Two scenarios where I ran into problems and didn't have an easy solution:

Cheap grav ship was surveying an outlying system and it's single engine suffered a failure and it no longer had enough maintenance supplies to repair itself and it dropped to 1km/s speed.  I had another ship transit in and rendezvous with the stricken ship and share maintenance supplies so it could complete it's self repairs and limp on back home for resupply and servicing.  Seemed like a good plan but for the ship would not fix it's broken engine even though it now had enough supplies to do so.  I did not have a tug, and the ship wasn't worth the effort to research and build a tug at this time.  My fix was to transfer off my captain, delete the ship and create a new one and reassign my captain.

Several years later I built some FAC missile squadrons with an unarmed sensor FAC escort with a powerful active sensor.  Total maintenance capacity for the ship was less then the cost to repair the sensor should it fail.  When the sensor did break during TF training it could not be repaired and I expected this.  The specialized roll the ship was built for was really for last ditch system defense and the failure/repair risk was an acceptable trade off since the ships rarely leave orbit and generally wouldn't age.  What I was expecting, and didn't happen is that when the ship went in for an overhaul the sensor would be repaired as part of rolling back the clock.  It did not get fixed.  Of course I didn't find this out until I was pursuing a hostile in my home system.    Work around for this was to update the ship to a somewhat sub-optimal configuration that provided exactly enough maintenance supplies to fix the sensor if it breaks again.  The modification cost was close enough to the original design and I was able to refit my existing fleet to the new style without retooling the shipyard and saved my TF training too.

Seems to me there should be easier ways to correct these two problems.  The second issue might just be the way it works and tough luck for not designing my ship correctly, but it seems counter-intuitive that an overhaul wouldn't fix broken systems.  And the first issue seems like something that would happen all the time with battles and such where ships get damaged and need more repairs then they have supplies for and other ships of the fleet share supplies with them.  What did I miss there?

[Theokrat]

Ships that suffer maintenance failures and do not have enough maintenance supplies on hand to fix the ship are giving me fits.

Two scenarios where I ran into problems and didn't have an easy solution:

Cheap grav ship was surveying an outlying system and it's single engine suffered a failure and it no longer had enough maintenance supplies to repair itself and it dropped to 1km/s speed.  I had another ship transit in and rendezvous with the stricken ship and share maintenance supplies so it could complete it's self repairs and limp on back home for resupply and servicing.  Seemed like a good plan but for the ship would not fix it's broken engine even though it now had enough supplies to do so.  I did not have a tug, and the ship wasn't worth the effort to research and build a tug at this time.  My fix was to transfer off my captain, delete the ship and create a new one and reassign my captain.

Several years later I built some FAC missile squadrons with an unarmed sensor FAC escort with a powerful active sensor.  Total maintenance capacity for the ship was less then the cost to repair the sensor should it fail.  When the sensor did break during TF training it could not be repaired and I expected this.  The specialized roll the ship was built for was really for last ditch system defense and the failure/repair risk was an acceptable trade off since the ships rarely leave orbit and generally wouldn't age.  What I was expecting, and didn't happen is that when the ship went in for an overhaul the sensor would be repaired as part of rolling back the clock.  It did not get fixed.  Of course I didn't find this out until I was pursuing a hostile in my home system.    Work around for this was to update the ship to a somewhat sub-optimal configuration that provided exactly enough maintenance supplies to fix the sensor if it breaks again.  The modification cost was close enough to the original design and I was able to refit my existing fleet to the new style without retooling the shipyard and saved my TF training too.

Seems to me there should be easier ways to correct these two problems.  The second issue might just be the way it works and tough luck for not designing my ship correctly, but it seems counter-intuitive that an overhaul wouldn't fix broken systems.  And the first issue seems like something that would happen all the time with battles and such where ships get damaged and need more repairs then they have supplies for and other ships of the fleet share supplies with them.  What did I miss there?

1. The grav survey ship could repaired the engine on its own. You need to give it the order to conduct emergency repairs in the "damage control" tab of the ship window. As you would do for battle damage.

2. Any shipyard of sufficient size with a free slipway can be ordered to “repair” damaged ships, so this would have fixed your FAC. “Overhaul” on the other hand just carries our regular maintenance.

[xeryon (OP)]

I'll check on the repair option in the shipyard.  Now that you mention that I recall seeing it.

I tried the damage control assignments and it errorred and told me the supplies were insufficient.  I scrolled through the log page and found the error update and confirmed there were enough supplies on board to complete the engine repair.  The engine repair was the only failure item so it wasn't as though other items broken in the interim. 
Seems as though I might have been taking the right step but maybe it really was just a bug?

[Hawkeye]

Emergency repairs via the damage control take twice the amount of supplies than the automatic repairs, when the damage occures.
This is one reason my survey ships get a "go back home and do an overhaul RIGHT NOW!" when they get below enough maint-supplies to insta-repair the largest system aboard.

[sloanjh]

What did I miss there?

Building a ship with enough on-board maintenance supplies to fix it.

In other words, both of your cases are working as intended.  Think about a wet-navy ship that uses a single jet-turbine engine as its power source.  If the turbine breaks and you don't have a spare on board, you're in trouble.  There are two broad categories of reason the turbine might break:

1)  Poor preventive maintenance, e.g. you didn't replace an oil pipe when you should have, the pipe broke and spewed oil into the engine, which caused an engine fire.
2)  Combat damage, e.g. it got hit by a bomb.

The idea behind maintenance costs is that it's cheaper to prevent a failure than to fix one that's already happened.  So the 1xfailure cost represents the overhead of keeping all those spare pipes around.  The 2x cost represents the cost of keeping the whole turbine around (i.e. fixing it after it broke).  A fundamental principle of Aurora is that ships require on-board support systems; they aren't just guns on engines.  In your "cheap grav ship", you chose to trade capability/cost off against the risk that if the ship breaks you won't be able to fix it.  The scenario you describe (right up until you SM'd in a new ship) is exactly the sort of situation that occurs in real navies - you didn't have the on-board resources to fix it, so you had to choose between getting it home some other way and scuttling it.

In the second case, repairs need to be done at a SY - the overhaul is a lower level of refit that is done at maintenance facilities (think of the engine replacement case again - you don't get an engine job for your car at jiffy lube).  You can put a suggestion in that Steve somehow provide a warning that X didn't get fixed in the overhaul, but other than that I think it's unlikely the mechanics will change.  Aurora went through a LOT of gyrations trying to balance micromanagement burden and "reality" in the early days, you can probably find some of the threads if you search 4-5 years back.  And now that you've discovered that overhauls don't do repairs, you won't run into that issue again

As a general rule, it's a good idea to keep supplies for the most expensive component on board for non-combatants (who aren't expected to need to fix combat damage) and 2x the most expensive for combatants.

John

[xeryon (OP)]

All of your comments are appreciated.  The rub of it is less that "this is how it works" and more "why didn't it say that somewhere?" kind of thing which is what you get with a indie game such as this.

The repair in the shipyard was just my ignorance and I forgot that I had seen it in the pull-down menu.  Now that I know it is there the mechanics of my FAC arrangement work as intended without needing to build new ships.  I just couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B.

The Grav ship was my ignorance as well, but this is the first I had heard of damage control requiring 2x materials.  In addition to that I kind of wonder how my ship has a damage control option and my research queue has a damage control project in it.  Seems to be two different things but they have the exact same name.  When the damage control action didn't work as intended I half-surmised it was because the damage control window was there but I hadn't researched the tech yet.  In any case I fully understand and support the logic. 

And for those of you snickering in the background and laughing at my inability to build a ship the design on this was to limit this situation from happening.  I just had a run of bad rolls on this one ship.  My design was a single engine, single grav sensor jump capable ship with a maintenance cycle over 10 years and several hundred maintenance supplies.  It worked well until I had a failure in different systems several weeks in a row.  I probably would have deduced this in myself had the situation been slightly different.  The ship that came to the rescue was a commercial geo ship which only had the default 40 or so supplies on it.  When I hit the equalize maint button it provided me exactly enough supplies to fit my expected need of a 1x repair.  Had the rescue vessel been almost anything else it would have had enough supplies for the damage control 2x requirements. 

Live and learn.

[Theokrat]

In addition to that I kind of wonder how my ship has a damage control option and my research queue has a damage control project in it.  Seems to be two different things but they have the exact same name.  When the damage control action didn't work as intended I half-surmised it was because the damage control window was there but I hadn't researched the tech yet.  In any case I fully understand and support the logic. 

There is the damage control action in the ships tab, which lets you repair broken systems as described.

There is also the damage control research project, which gives access to the damage control ship component.

If I am not entirely mistaken this ship component allows to repair damage more quickly than you otherwise could. While ordinary engineering spaces add 1 point of damage control, the designated module adds 10.

[Garfunkel]

Yes, adding "Damage Control" the ship component speeds up the emergency repairs quite a bit so it is an useful addition, though only for combat vessels, of course.

[quarague]

This is one reason my survey ships get a "go back home and do an overhaul RIGHT NOW!" when they get below enough maint-supplies to insta-repair the largest system aboard.

howo do you do that? The only conditional options I saw say if supply is below 10% or 20%, my small surveys have 117 maintenance supply and need 50- 60 for engine failures and 100 for sensors, I would like them to go home after they made the first repair, the maintenance supply will never reach below a point below 10%

[xeryon (OP)]

You could do it manually or add more maintenance storage to the vessel.  10% of 100 is 10, 10% of 1000 is 100.  In which case the 10 or 20% conditional will happen before I get below the largest repair threshhold.  I put a maintenance storage unit on my grav ships so they carry 1000-1200 supplies with a 20% return to base thresh-hold.