Maintenance Clock

[Bryan Swartz (OP)]

I'm trying to understand how rewinding maintenance clock works. 

I have ships in overhaul.  There is 150k Maintenance Capacity and less than 5k Shipping Tonnage Maintained.  If I understand this properly, I should be proceeding at full speed because of that. 

Both the deployment clock and the maintenance clock are rewinding, but the maintenance clock is going down at about a third of the speed.  What factors, if any, influence this?  Is there anything I can do with ship design, commanders assigned, training, conducting a ritual, or otherwhise to improve how quickly the maintenance clock rewinds? 

[Bryan Swartz (OP)]

It appears the maintenance clock is working at the right speed from the info I can find;  one month of overhaul eliminates three months of maintenance clock.  I guess the remaining question is, why does shore leave/deployment clock rewind work so much faster? 

[nuclearslurpee]

It appears the maintenance clock is working at the right speed from the info I can find;  one month of overhaul eliminates three months of maintenance clock.  I guess the remaining question is, why does shore leave/deployment clock rewind work so much faster?

I think this was an undocumented change at some point, so it is WAI as far as I know just not working "as documented".

[kyonkundenwa]

why does shore leave/deployment clock rewind work so much faster?

It's always been that way, since the final VB6 releases at least. Presumably to make the distinction between maintenance clock and crew deployment greater.

[Bryan Swartz (OP)]

It just seems weird to me to intentionally make that gap and not have anything you can do about it.  Maybe it'll grow on me after a while. 

[nuclearslurpee]

Having different times for each gives you the option of returning to a population or barracks station for shore leave without an overhaul, which is often a valuable capability in cases where you need ships to be ready to go at a moment's notice (or at least within a few days or weeks, basically less time than the overhaul period). You can also keep a ship running way past its listed maint life by resupplying its MSP stores, while crew deployment is a harder stop as once you tick over the limit you immediately get penalties. So it makes sense that the relatively harsher limit is easier to address, even if in most cases you address everything at the same time in one go.

[Demonides]

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg101959#msg101959

[bankshot]

as nuclearslurpee observed - you can bring a ship in for shore leave in between overhauls.  It is a bit easier to drop some infrastructure on a good-looking rock in system and station 10K population there to provide enough local bars to provide shore leave than it is to set up and supply a maintenance depot.

[Serina]

As a result, it's not inconceivable to create a vessel with a significantly longer maintenance life than it's deployment time, especially if it's being sent out for a "Tour" or some kind of longer patrol, or even planetary defense. Longer deployment times have steep internal costs in terms of needing extra crew space etc, and for some vessels, that might be a substantial source of maintenance costs. Thus by having shorter deployments but without doing overhauls, you could theoretically reduce overall maintenance cost and perhaps more importantly ship size.