To be honest this is a complete abuse of the machanic and you would be just easier to SM in orbital maintenance facilities and dump a few million MSP on a moon and call is a mothball station. Much simpler and you would not go insane from the maintenance failure messages.
I blocked those after the third dockyard, but yes, in C# you can't do this without maintenance spam, which is a new downside. (or you just have to build a single really big one)
By calling it cheese, I think I already expressed that I realize that this is mechanic abuse, but there is still a big difference in straightforward cheating and just using exploits that the system allows to get the game you want. I have seen some don't understand that difference emotionally, but that is ok. If you have ever seen Youtube channels like Spiffing Brit though, you will know that there is a special joy for many to be able to manipulate
within the rules, though I also don't claim to understand why that is so much more fun.
Hangars does not have maintenance failures the same as a few other components, so in this instance only the magazines do...
Actually, it is the sensors. The dockyard design doesn't even have any magazines.
You could probably get away with an armoured 50t magazine and get even less MSP cost. This magazine have the 1 HTK needed so maintenance failures does not cascade through the station as that is the only module that get failures... more or less.
I must say I have never noticed magazines breaking, not in VB nor C#, so I am not sure this works. It would be similarly troublesome to handle as hangars after all, since these are filled which causes a slew of follow up questions upon failure of what to do with the insides.
But maybe they do, I just can't recall any incident.
Anyway, installing magazines would not be an upgrade. Small sensors (could actually be smaller than the size-1 used here) are already the cheapest maintenance option, as proven by real practice in VB.
///Edit:I don't see abusing the mechanic is any better than just using SM and produce the same results in a different way just simpler. You could build those orbital maintenance facilities on the moon and just spawn all the MSP you would ever need to station ships there.... or build the hangar base and then spawn the maintenance needed to remove the failures... the MSP would be free anyway in this case. You then just role play that the station is free of maintenance.
Again on this, because I remembered a VB argument from 8 years ago about this: You can also see this as an alternative mode of maintenance payment, since contrary to cheating, all this dockyard setup by far doesn't come for free. You pay for the dockyards to be built and much more you pay for their huge shipyards to be built. The shipyards employ millions of workers constantly, even when they don't actually produce, which is 90+% of the time in this case.
So you could argue in RP this was just an investment in some sort of bigger recycling or sourcing facility that manages to work in near autarky. Perhaps they fish the little TN elements they need out of dust or crumpet sized asteroids that aren't viable for industrial mining or something.
Point is, this is an expensive setup, but the large front cost lead to an industry that doesn't need to consume much in the longer run. I think even in VB I once calculated that the break-even point was only decades into usage. Now we also have millions of population doing work to hold all this up.
Far from simply cheating it in as you suggest, even though this was clearly not intended.
