The thread about drop ships got me thinking about the civilian/military classification system, and how to overcome it with something that is still convenient. While I am aware this is a big idea, and unlikely to make it into the first release, I would like to get this idea out never the less.
Maintenance Size
Each component gets two new attributes, that is the maintenance size, and maintenance cost. It is based as before on cost and size of the component, times a modifier.
For weapons and sensors, this will usually be 1. For something easy to maintain as cargo holds, these would be much smaller, 100 000t of cargo holds might only take 1000t of maintenance capacity, and cost only 10% of their BP.
Armor on the other hand might be cheap to maintain, but take up more than its weight in maintenance capacity, since armor makes any other system on a ship less accessible.
The general trend of civilian versions of magazines/hangars will be less space efficient and/or less able to take damage, but more efficient and affordable in maintenance.
Similarly, large engines/shields/reactors might have lower maintenance than smaller engines, as 20 5HS engines have a lot more parts that can fail than 2 50 HS engines.
Lower power modifier will also result in easier to maintain engines due to lower stresses.
Engineering spaces will work on their percentage relative to effective maintenance size, so a single engineering space on a freighter will be much more effective than on a battleship
A special case would be work platforms. These are orbital habitats, miners, fuel extractors, terraformers, maintenance facilities, these will be considered as having maintenance facilities for themselves built in. Given enough supplies, they can maintain themselves infinitely, plus perhaps a bit spare to also cover some fuel tanks/small engines to make self propelled versions of them.
Overhauls
Every ship would now eventually need to undergo overhaul. Except for work platforms, which should be self maintaining, every ship will eventually return to a port anyway.
A standing order "Overhaul if arriving at a port with high maintenance clock" should automate most of that requirement.
Maintenance Supplies
C# already uses only maintenance supplies for all maintenance purposes, so all that is really needed is a way to automatically supply them. If you can set a tender to 'resupply nearest maintenance location' and have maintenance locations able to either request or supply the needed maintenance supplies, again a few ships should be able to distribute the needed supplies.
Shipyards
Shipyards will get a second property, a complexity limit. This is the maximum maintenance cost of a ship that can be built in a shipyard, representing the yards capability to handle high-tech components.
Increasing complexity costs additional resources, thus a yard that can build freighters will be a lot cheaper than one for supercarries. Thus you still get a variety in either complex, smaller yards for military craft, simpler large yards for tankers and such, and expensive, large complex yards for true capital ships.
Jump Drives
Jump Drives would need a change, as now there is no clear cut difference between military and commercial engine. However this is not the best anyway, since you can also jump towed ships, so the engine does not seem strictly required for a jump.
A replacement to still allow civilian jump drives would be to add a property "Jump Delay," which controls how long a ship is frozen after a jump. For a commercial tender, a full hour will still be acceptable, but a combat ship will want something faster.
This overall would allow for some more flexibility in ship design, as maintenance is now determined by all components, not the presence of a single one. If you want 2HS sensors on all your freighters, you can do it now. Similarly, Q-ships would be possible now, or equipping a 100kton freighter with some ELINT as a spy ship.
It would also allow to go for true mixed designs, putting some AMM systems on your colliers and tankers if you want, or channel the 18th century completely (or any of a number of ScFi franchises with armed merchantmen) and arm all your ships if you want. While I doubt that is optimal, it would certainly be a fun read.
