What's a 'good' failure rate for a ship? Also, how is my first design?

[C4lv1n (OP)]

Somehow the failure rate always ends up somewhere north of 25%, even after adding as man engineering spaces as possible, unless I cut down on what's in the ship.    So I guess I would want to know a few things:

1.    What's an acceptable failure rate?
2.    Is there any way to decrease the failure rate other than by using engineering spaces, without making the smallest ship possible?

And third, how is my design?

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Prick class Corvette    2,000 tons     198 Crew     209 BP      TCS 40  TH 200  EM 0
5000 km/s     Armour 2-14     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 3
Annual Failure Rate: 32%    IFR: 0.4%    Maint Capacity 65 MSP    Max Repair 20 MSP    Est Time: 4.03 Years

Military Nuclear Pulse Engine Standard (5)    Power 40    Fuel Use 100%    Signature 40    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 50,000 Litres    Range 45.0 billion km   (104 days at full power)

10cm Meson Cannon RoF-5 (1)    Range 30,000km     TS: 5000 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Beam Fire Control Sx2 32kR-3kS (1)    Max Range: 64,000 km   TS: 3000 km/s     84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
Pebble Bed Reactor Sx1 Pwr-3 (2)     Total Power Output 6    Armour 0    Exp 5%

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

It takes only 0.  75 years to put on out, which seems all right to me, and I like how mesons do so little damage, but ignore armor.   It's also damn fast, at least compared to my empire's max tracking speed of 3000.   It's also really small so it should be able to get pretty close before getting spotted. 

Though, now that I think about it I probably seriously messed up something really important.  .  . 

[sloanjh]

Somehow the failure rate always ends up somewhere north of 25%, even after adding as man engineering spaces as possible, unless I cut down on what's in the ship.   So I guess I would want to know a few things:

1.   What's an acceptable failure rate?
2.   Is there any way to decrease the failure rate other than by using engineering spaces, without making the smallest ship possible?

And third, how is my design?

From a failure rate point of view, it's fine.  The important number to look at is NOT the annual rate (which will be proportional to the size of the ship; something probably breaks on an aircraft carrier every few minutes).  Instead you should look at the "Est. Time", which is how long your maintenance supplies can be expected to last.  In your case, this is 4 years, which might even be a bit high (I usually aim for ~3).

John

[mavikfelna]

I think it looks pretty good.

I'd recommend dropping the 2nd reactor and adding more fuel. Also, if you can do a 2x tracking speed for your fire control you'll have better results.

--Mav

[Brian Neumann]

This looks like a nice ship.  There are a few problems with it.  One is the extra mainenance as previously mentioned.  The second is that it has no way of seeing it's target on it's own.  You want a small active sensor, probably set for size 1 targets so it will see incomming missiles.  Without this you are dependant on another ship with an active sensor to be able to fire at your target.  No active sensor = no chance to fire beam weapons at all.  You could also change your fire control to make full use of the ships speed.  This will let you have a better chance against missiles.  If you have any left over hull spaces see if you can get one more level of armour.  Armour that is 3 levels deep will keep a lot of medium sized missiles from penetrating on the first hit, as well as some of the beam weapons.

Brian

[UnLimiTeD]

Damn, this looks close to my first ship, back in the day 
Ok, it's just a year back.
It looks good so far.
Once you get the next level of engine tech and meson focus, I recommend going for a 6k ton ship with atleast 2 mesons.
A single Meson canon is just not a real armament, as a comparison without spoilers, in Aurora you might occasionally encounter ships of 800-1000 tons well above your speed that also have one meson.
Your maintenance is fine.

As for size, Aurora has this weird notion of treating 100 as the "standard" resolution for sensors despite all decent ships being bigger.
So your ship will be just as visible as any.
Don't worry, if you go for it, you'll have decent cloaking technology in a few years.