Repair yards "repairing" mothballed ships back in to service would make the most sense, perhaps reset the training revel as well so they're not 100% ready for combat right out the yard.

ah, I knew I must be missing something, that makes sense, without the tidal lock it would be around 13

There are a number of mechanics that could be used for mothballing. However, the challenge is to make mothballing a ship a meaningful decision, rather than a way to simply reduce overall maintenance costs or a way to build a massive fleet ready for activation. For that decision to exist, there must be a scenario where mothballing a ship turns out to have been the wrong choice.

For example, lets say it takes a year to reactivate a ship. One scenario is alien attack and the ship is not available to fight for a year - but with the wrong mothballing rules you could have your regular navy (the same fleet you would have without mothball rules) plus a huge fleet in mothballs, so that situation is actually a lot better than before, not worse.

In principle, I think shipyards (maybe repair yards) would be needed to move ships in and out of mothballs, so that you have a meaningful decision regarding how you use that finite capacity. This would be relatively cheap in BP but costly in time. Even in the above scenario, you would then have to choose between building new ships or reviving old ships. Once ships are in mothballs, there would need to be some cost and perhaps facilities involved in maintaining them in that state to avoid a massive mothball fleet. I think the simplest mechanic would be to use existing maintenance rules/facilities, but treat the mothballed ships as smaller, perhaps 20% of their normal size/cost for maintenance purposes.

That way, you can establish a fairly sizeable mothball fleet, but by limiting to some extent your active fleet. Also because you can only store and revive at the cost of building new, you would tend to start mothballing when you are in a less active period - which makes sense - and then you are faced with another meaningful decision in terms of whether to reactivate or build new. Setting the right time/cost of reactivation would be key to making that a difficult choice.

Mothballing would only make sense if you planned to do it for a while, so that the cost of storing and reactivating would outweigh the long-term saving of 80% of MSP expenditure.

What if mothball traded MSP maint costs for wealth instead? Don't ships cost 25% of their mineral costs per year? Mothballing changes that to wealth so you're preserving minerals at the cost of a reactivation delay, plus a chance some ships will need longer to repair or have to be written off entirely.

Which you know you refuse to respond too. So I'm gonna bow out of this conversation. Mothballing would just give power gamers a way to exploit the maintenance system without adding anything to the actual game. It only makes sense if you want the semblance of reality without understanding why those things are done in reality

The discussion here is getting a bit tense so I suggest we chill the tone a little bit. Regardless of how "realistic" mothballing spaceships may or may not be, it is true that Aurora has the all-powerful trans-Newtonian element of handwavium at its disposal, indeed many would argue that Aurora while impressively detailed is anything but "realistic." Suffice to say, if Steve wanted to implement such a mechanic it would not be realism that stopped him.

However, the persistent big problem that prevents mothballing from making it into Aurora is that of (1) making mothballing only useful for old ships and infeasible for new ships while (2) not imposing arbitrary constraints to accomplish this - limits based on age, tech level, etc. lack justification and frankly will not work well given the huge array of game settings and house rules players like to use. Without a solution, we have the problem where the optimal approach in many cases is to build brand-new ships and mothball them immediately, a silly practice which was extremely common in Starfire and the prevalence of which is why we have no mothball mechanic in Aurora at present.

Once again, I will note that in real life the reason we cannot build directly into mothballs is because we do not build "extra" ships - every vessel must be approved in a budget and passed by the government which issues the funding. If the U.S. Navy were to procure an aircraft carrier, commission her, and immediately lock her up in a mothball yard "just in case, for the future", it wouldn't take a genius to guess how that will affect Congressional approval of their next fiscal year budget... so every ship is built with some purpose and once commissioned is deployed and sees service, usually these days on peacetime missions - showing the flag, escorting commercial shipping, diplomatic missions, and so on - and of course in wartime, well, the use cases are more obvious.

In Aurora, we lack anything like this. All governments are, aside from roleplay, effectively military dictatorships with unlimited authority to expand the military to the limit of economic supportability (or beyond). Meanwhile, we have no mechanics which create peacetime requirements for military deployments - this has shifted somewhat since 2.0 due to Raiders, but Raiders alone hardly require the majority of our fleets to be part of an active deployment rotation. So the principal motivation for military expansion remains preparation for present or future wars, and in that case there is little or no reason to use a mothballing mechanic for anything but bypassing economic limits to over-expand the fleet.

I've seen a lot of good proposals for a mothballing mechanic, in the sense that there's a lot of interesting and balanced ways to implement mothballing. However, I've yet to see a single proposal that can make mothballing useful without making building directly into mothballs an optimal strategy, or at least very strong in a broad range of situations, which it simply should not be. The exceptions have been arbitrary limits, e.g., "at least 20 years old", "at least two 'tech levels' out of date", and so on, and such arbitrary limits do not play well with Aurora, neither with its changing rates of growth and expansion over time nor with its very open-ended roleplay opportunities.

Anyways... given all of this, I'd like to suggest that we corral fruitless debates about "realism" here, the issue with whether or not mothballing can or should be done in Aurora is mechanical only as most of the prior discussion in this thread (and many others) shows.