Annual Failure how do you roll?

[Shininglight (OP)]

Hello i've been wondering about how everyone handles the failure rate on ships i tend to try and keep the afr on all my ships down to about 40% but i pay alot in tonnage and combat systems.  Enough about me how do YOU handle afr?

[blue emu]

I ignore it, and look at maintenance lifetime instead, while making sure that I carry enough spares to repair the maximum-risk  point-failure component twice.

[xeryon]

Depends on the ship.  Warships I follow blue emu's rough plan.  Try to have enough to fix the largest system twice and a maintenance life of about 2 years (which is usually how long it takes to train a crew in the early years).  Due to the limited tour's a warship is on the AFR % makes little difference.  The ships are generally not deployed longer then a couple months at a time and otherwise in orbit.

non-commercial military class ships, in particular grav ships I try and have the AFR in the 10-20% range with a maintenance life of around 15+ years.  I load them up with enough fuel for 200b+ clicks and send them off.  At that interval I generally don't overhaul them.  It's faster and cheaper to scrap and replace.

[sloanjh]

As Blue Emu implied, the annual failure rate is a VERY misleading number.  A much better number to look at is the expected time to consume all maintenance supplies.

The reason for this is that the annual failure rate is proportional to the tonnage in your ship (or your navy).  Imagine 10x10KTon ships, each of which has an annual failure rate of 10%, and a 2 year expected time until it runs out of supplies.  The annual failure rate of the squadron is 100% (10 ships at 10% each), but the squadron as a whole is still has a 2 year expected time until it runs out of supplies.  Components are failing 10x as fast in the squadron as a whole, but there's also 10x the maintenance supplies.  Now consider a (approximately) 1x100KTon ship designed by taking the ship design above and multiplying the quantity of all the components by 10x.  This ship will have a failure rate of ~100%, but will have an expected supply time of 2 years.

In other words, the annual failure rate will be proportional to the mass of the ship, and should be ignored.  The expected time to consume all maintenance supplies tells you when you'll actually get into trouble with supplies.

John

[Nathan_]

30% or below for 10k ships, 80% for 20k ships. I have yet to build anything larger than that.