And my point is that a ship parked in orbit with a standby crew isn't/shouldn't be wearing out parts when the ship isn't doing anything except sitting in a vacuum. [SNIP] "Evaporation" is just my derisive way of putting it.
Thanks for the clarification. I was trying to make sure that everyone was aware that "evaporation" was being used as a derisive term for an abstraction of the overhaul process on ships that are not mothballed, rather than a "physical" effect that is part of current game mechanics for mothballed ships. My point was that the latter (a physical effect) cannot be the case because mothballing was removed from Aurora years ago (hence the "bring back" in the title of the thread). I had seen at least one post where people were trying to ascribe weird evaporative properties to TN materials because of what I perceived as a misunderstanding of the usage of evaporation.
I'm not advocating one way or another as to whether Steve should or should not bring back mothballing; from my point of view the logic rationale (that you're espousing) makes sense, so it's a question of the feature's effect on gameplay (including micromanagement issues), coding effort on the part of Steve, and how much Steve cares about doing it. What I was trying to head off is a spurious argument about TN properties based on a misunderstanding of the current maintenance mechanisms.
Thanks,
John
PS - Because of the potential for confusion and misunderstanding on the part of people not familiar with the nuances of this discussion (which I think has already happened), I would also be happier if people stopped using this term to describe the current mechanics, or at least say something like "the evaporation abstraction" when describing the current mechanism. Maybe "consumption" instead of "evaporation"?