Posted by: Prince of Space
« on: May 14, 2014, 03:08:13 PM »Don't get too discouraged by dead ends in your jump network. If the luck of the dice is against you, then you can fix it in spacemaster mode.
Your freighters still have 12 months of intended deployment. As I said before, it's not wrong, just unnecessary.
Your gravitational survey vessel has way too much maintenance life compared to its intended deployment. You can afford to cut that down to two or three years instead of 15 if you want it to keep an intended deployment time of 1 year. I try to match the two on my ships, with a little wiggle room left over on maintenance life since that side of the equation is more up to chance.
Regarding NihilRex's suggestion to use tiny fuel storage: this works, in part, because a maintenance failure or internal hit on a ship with fewer but larger fuel storage components is more likely to take out a huge chunk of your fuel tank tonnage, thus costing more maintenance supply points per breakdown or per hit. Smaller fuel tanks effectively compartmentalize the damage. The trade off is that smaller fuel tanks cost more build points per ton than larger ones, so the ship costs more overall. It's a good suggestion to keep in mind when you need to squeeze a longer maintenance life out of a ship and you don't have room for more engineering space. However I wouldn't take it as a must have strategy in all ship design.
I suspect the remarkable increase in maintenance life is due to you using this trick, and in my opinion you could afford to do without it. You probably don't need 15 years of maintenance life, and in terms of combat survivability, if the Apollo gets hit at all, it's probably not going to survive.
Your freighters still have 12 months of intended deployment. As I said before, it's not wrong, just unnecessary.
Your gravitational survey vessel has way too much maintenance life compared to its intended deployment. You can afford to cut that down to two or three years instead of 15 if you want it to keep an intended deployment time of 1 year. I try to match the two on my ships, with a little wiggle room left over on maintenance life since that side of the equation is more up to chance.
Regarding NihilRex's suggestion to use tiny fuel storage: this works, in part, because a maintenance failure or internal hit on a ship with fewer but larger fuel storage components is more likely to take out a huge chunk of your fuel tank tonnage, thus costing more maintenance supply points per breakdown or per hit. Smaller fuel tanks effectively compartmentalize the damage. The trade off is that smaller fuel tanks cost more build points per ton than larger ones, so the ship costs more overall. It's a good suggestion to keep in mind when you need to squeeze a longer maintenance life out of a ship and you don't have room for more engineering space. However I wouldn't take it as a must have strategy in all ship design.
I suspect the remarkable increase in maintenance life is due to you using this trick, and in my opinion you could afford to do without it. You probably don't need 15 years of maintenance life, and in terms of combat survivability, if the Apollo gets hit at all, it's probably not going to survive.