I am relatively new and my forum searches have not pulled up exactly what I am after. I was wondering is anyone else can help.
Q1.
Can you mothball a spaceships or fighters etc, in turns of parking it and not have any maintainence concerns.
No. Mothballing used to be in the game, but was removed in one of the maintenance rule gyrations :-)
What you can do is build enough maintenance facilities on a planet to handle the tonnage of a particular ship (200 tons/facility, e.g. 25 facilities for ships up to 5000 ton). If you park a ship at such a planet, then its maintenance clock will stop - it will still cost you minerals at a constant rate (displayed at the bottom of the mining tab on the F2 screen).
Q2.
In laymen terms I thought the current maintainence clock meant the time I should overhaul it, but I just created some fighters and they already say 7 years. Overhaul set it back to 0 but not sure I understand how they can get so old so fast.
This sounds a bit odd. Are you sure you weren't looking at the time it would take to run out of spares?
Q3.
Dipolmacy, I cannot seem to speak to any alien race I have now encountered 3 and have got the best people I can on the job in diplomacy, but they always end up hostile.
Have you opened communications? Every 5-day you should get a message telling you how communication is progressing. Have you found any of their planets, or just their ships? Also if you look in mechanics there should be a post from Steve from a few years back describing the diplomacy rules. You have to be careful not to do things that upset them (to keep thrm from going hostile even if you can communicate with them). For example, parking a ship where they can see it in a system where they have a colony is usually a bad idea. :-)
Q4.
I really do not understand the sensor tab in the system map section. I don't understand what number to put in the slider bar for passive and sensor.
These are either the search strength or the signal strength that the computer should use to assume for the bad guys. You can get an idea of these by looking at your own ships - for example look at the thermal signature to get an idea of where to put the thermal slider bar.
John
