Drop Ships Exploding in the Hangar

[Borealis4x (OP)]

So I made a company sized dropship to act as ferry's for my marine companies and while they were awaiting assignment they started to explode. Now, I know that I didn't give them an on board engineering spaces, but I thought that since they were just chilling on Earth which has 70,000 ton maintenance facilities they would be fine. It seems they aren't. They also don't seem to want to repair themselves either.

I assumed that once they were actually inside the ships they would leach off its maintence supplies for repair. But then why aren't they benefiting from planetary installations?

[iceball3]

I'm not exactly sure how making hangar repair occur works.
That said, what size is it? For whatever reason, fighters aren't tended to by maintenance facilities at all, so it's gotta be above 500 tons to get maintained, or just kept inside hangars in the first place.

But yeah, if you didn't put them inside a hangar immediately as soon as  they were built, then the destruction was likely to happen. If that's not the case, however, then something else is going on.
As it is, if you can't find a way to repair fighters using shipyards or hangars, then it's best to just scrap them and replace them with a new batch.

[ty55101]

Make sure the event log says that it exploded because of a maintenance failure.  It happens to me quite a bit and in this latest game I am playing I realized I hadn't built my PDC with hangers before I constructed my fighters so I ended up just wasting resources since they blew up before I could finish my PDC.

[83athom]

Fighters (designs under 500 tons) cannot be maintained by planetary maintenance facilities. And repair in hangars happen automatically but randomly.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Fighters (designs under 500 tons) cannot be maintained by planetary maintenance facilities. And repair in hangars happen automatically but randomly.

...why?

[Garfunkel]

Both shipyard repair and hangar repair is random in its order of repairing components. Only way to ensure that a specific component gets fixed first is to use Damage Control in the Unit Window.

And fighters cannot be maintained by MF because otherwise you would not need PDC-Hangars at all, creating a cheap way to have unlimited numbers of fighters on any planet. Think of the maintenance facilities like a dockyard/dry dock facility - it can't repair jet planes or speed boats either.

[Paul M]

How does PDC hanger repair work?  PDCs don't have engineering facilities and hence no MSPs for the repair.

The NCCs pinnaces and other small craft have engineering facilities so can do self repair in the hanger but I'm rather curious how the PDC hangers work in general.   Do they automatically overhaul docked small craft?

At least in my current game version (6.10) I'm seeing odd behaviour where the crew time increases even if the small craft is docked.  It doesn't reset to 0 on launch so I was seeing imediate morale losses.  Not sure if this oddity has been fixed or not in later game versions.

[iceball3]

How does PDC hanger repair work?  PDCs don't have engineering facilities and hence no MSPs for the repair.

The NCCs pinnaces and other small craft have engineering facilities so can do self repair in the hanger but I'm rather curious how the PDC hangers work in general.   Do they automatically overhaul docked small craft?

At least in my current game version (6.10) I'm seeing odd behaviour where the crew time increases even if the small craft is docked.  It doesn't reset to 0 on launch so I was seeing imediate morale losses.  Not sure if this oddity has been fixed or not in later game versions.

1. The PDC with the hangar has to be equipped with maintenance storage bays, which are available for PDCs
2.I think so? I'll double check to test, but I think that's how that works.
3.Make sure your PDC has "Flight Crew Berths" You do this by checking off "Keep Excess Q" option in the top right of the class design window, and then manually adding crew quarters.

[Paul M]

Thanks.  I'll have to add the bays to the next refit...at the moment it isn't critical as the armed pinnaces aren't fighters so the issue is moot.

Flight Crew Breths I am aware of, the problem so far has happened on ships with more available space than the small craft crew requirement so I'm not sure why the crew of the small craft don't zero their timer on launch.  They seem to launch with the deployment timer set to the time the ships have been deployed.

So if the 5th Squadron has been on the wolver watch for 3 months and then I launch a pinnace the pinnace crew starts with a deployment 3 months (even though the pinnace has been sitting in it hanger bay the whole time) and immediately declares they have exceeded their deployment time and their morale drops.  As the SAR pinnace isn't armed this has no effect but it is still annoying.