Tech to reduce damage to weapon systems

[QuakeIV]

I personally like the idea of the potential for really severe failures due to use and the need for constant maintenance.  Heavy fighting should beat up your fleet quite badly even if you dont take direct hits, because fighting is hard work.  Bear in mind you are shooting beams and such with comparable yield to nuclear weapons...

However I do think that we are missing out on the possibility of having totally new and untested tech be a lot less reliable than well established designs.  I think putting time and research into making your current-gen weapons more reliable might be a fun tradeoff against always going for newer and shinier weapons.  Particularly if you then for instance had orbital bombardment ships intentionally using older technology for the reliability aspect.

I guess another note, beams should probably have a failure chance based partly on how much wear and tear is placed on them.  Its certainly odd that an unfired laser has the exact same chance of failing as one that has fired 100 shots.  Only mentioning that bit off-handedly rather than as something that would be in any way necessary for the game to work.  It does seem like usually you'd expect a battle to be going great at first, and for there to then be a lot more breakdowns as the fighting drags on for a while.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I think the mechanic is sort of an abstraction mechanic and can be a combination of depleteable ammunition or power consumption as well as mechanical failure to the equipment itself. It is basically a mechanic to keep weapons from firing forever as MSP storage deplete to symbolise this fact.

There should not be too much focus on the pure maintenance and weapon failure aspect of why this mechanic is there or what it really represents.

It might seem strange that a brand new laser fails in its first shot... but it is an abstraction mechanic. We also know that new equipment actually fail quite often in reality as new equipment and installation often are untested under real stress and there can be child sicknesses that have all kinds of bad effects, so it is really not that uncommon in real life, even for well established designs but especially on brand new technology or designs.

If you compare the cost if using beam weapons in the field with missiles for example then missiles are extremely expensive as they always cost their entire cost every time you fire them, 100% of the time. Even an early missile often have a cost of roughly the same as their size in MSP. One size 8 ASM cost 8 BP that is what... 32 MSP you burn per missile at minimum. An Ultra Violet 15cm laser will on average cost you 0.3 MSP every-time it fires.

Would people instead be OK with weapons automatically draw 1% of their MSP cost of MSP stores as sometimes I think it is the random nature of things people are upset with not the actual cost. I thin that the random is better as that give a more realistic feel or simulation to the whole thing.

In the spirit of this I also want the Overhaul order to a new choice that do all of the following in one order for standing orders... refuel, resupply and then start Overhaul. Otherwise ships will overhauls and then after a while return home to fuel which make very little sense. These orders should be combined for standing order... there should also be a refuel & resupply order too. There are no reason for a ship not to do both whenever the are at port.