Sorry guys, this is a long rambling post.
Another idea is some type of mobile maintenance facility for ships of up to a certain size. However, MF use minerals/weath so the mobile facility would have to have access to minerals as well (from a cargo hold perhaps) but then you would need to specify what minerals to reload on a regular basis and that could get messy.
There is nothing to prevent very large parasites being carried so anything I come up with that works for parasites would have to work for all ships. I am open to ideas.
Steve
I like the idea of mobile maintenance facilities.
Are all spaceships able to land on planets?
If so, you make the MMF land on a planet, take a week or so to "setup", become active and perform maintenance, and take a week or so to "tear down". If they have to "bug out" in an emergency, they can take off after ~24 hours. but they lose all the MMF specific capabilities until they get refitted back. You (Steve) create two tech items, that are the same size, one is MMF, the other is "broken MMF" (need a better name than that). If you bug out, the bugout code changes MMF to "Broken MMF" and the only way to fix it is to refit the tender.
If you cannot land spaceships on planets, you will need to code in some way of transferring cargo from ship to ship to keep the MMF resupplied with minerals.
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Another thing is size of the MMF. To transport 1 MF (200 Tons capability/4 hull spaces maintenance capability) it takes 50 Hull Spaces.
The Tender should be able to use the MMF to keep it's clock from rolling forward at too great of a pace even if the MMF does not have the hull space capacity to maintain the tender. (if the MMF is active the tender's clock should roll forward at a reduced pace since the MMF is able to produce parts to fix most tender issues)
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What do we want the MMF to be able to do? Should it do major refits, minor refits, Repairs?
Pete