Longer Maint Life

[Rich.h (OP)]

Is there anyway other than adding more engineering spaces or maintenance storage bays to increase a ships maint.life figure?

[Theodidactus]

not really.

The maintenance clock of a ship will only count up if it's "in space" and away from a planet with enough maintenance facilities to support it. Also, you can "overhaul" a ship to reverse the clock.

When I started, an early mistake I made was assuming that "maintenance life" was the total lifetime of my ship. So for example a maintenance life of 5.24 years meant that after that point the ship would be useless and I'd have to build a new one. Not so.


more appropriately, a ship with a maintenance life of 5.24 years means "This ship can fly around in deep space for 5 years without much breaking on it, but after that it will have to sail home for repairs."

most of my ships have a maintenance life of 2.0 years and that's even pretty long by some people's standards. My ships orbit inhabited worlds with large maintenance facilities and put into space to fight aliens a few months away at most. Every 3-5 years, I overhaul a starfleet.

[Starmantle]

Well, you could also just remove features of the ship prone to breakdown.

Fancy engines, weapons, hangars, etc, all decrease maintenance life.

You can add and delete things to get a feel for the tradeoffs. 

[Prince of Space]

Adding maintenance storage bays is a bad way of extending maintenance life. That tonnage is better spent on engineering spaces if you want a longer maintenance life.

This was brought up recently in another thread, but you can increase your ship's maintenance life by replacing larger fuel tanks with the equivalent tonnage of smaller fuel tanks. This works because each maintenance failure that hits, say, a tiny fuel tank rather than a large fuel tank costs fewer maintenance supply points to fix. Also, the ship's maintenance supply capacity is determined not only by the proportion of engineering spaces, but also by the ship's total build cost. The smaller fuel tanks cost more to build on a per-ton basis, so this artificially increases the cost of the vessel, and thus the ship's MSP capacity.

Here is the thread I got the basic math from, if you're interested:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,1192.0.html

[Rich.h (OP)]

Many thanks for that link about using smaller parts, by swapping out my fuel and engineering spaces for the smallest types I've added on 0.6 years maint life and just over 1bkm range.

[Prince of Space]

Swapping out the engineering spaces worked, too? I never tried that because unlike fuel tanks, engineering spaces have crew requirements, and the smaller ones require more crew per ton if I recall correctly.

[Rich.h (OP)]

There was only around a 0.8 gain from engineering spaces, and it did add nearly 100% to the failure rate but the design in question has enough supplies to compensate. For this design the utmost priority was maint life time.

[Prince of Space]

I don't have access to my game right now, so I'll have to leave the tinkering to you for the moment.

I would have thought that the optimal solution would be keeping engineering personnel to a minimum by using the larger engineering components, and taking the tonnage you save from having fewer crew quarters and dumping that savings into even more engineering spaces. Until I can build multiple designs and see how the numbers turn out in game, I'm left with some sort of multivariable algebra problem involving ship cost, intended deployment time, and the proportion of engineering space to total tonnage.

[NihilRex]

Ive never seen smaller engineering spaces increase maint life compared to the same tonnage of larger ones.  What smaller engineering does is add more targets for DAMAGE and easier\faster inflight repairs.  The crew requirements are higher as well.  For ships with large MSP storage and good armor\shields, the larger ones can be a good space saver crew-wise.

Code: [Select]

Eng Space    Size 50   Crew 5
Small        Size 25   Crew 3
Tiny         Size 12.5 Crew 2
Fighter      Size 5    Crew 1