Old Ships

Hans Rancke-Madsen [email removed] writes:

> I've been toying with making the price of yearly maintenance higher the
> older the ship is while making the risks of an inadequately maintained
> ships less. The result should be that established corporations would
> get rid of their ships after 30 or 40 years because they became too
> expensive to maintain. Thus lots of cheap but old ships on the market.

This is an idea that keeps coming back to me, too.  Has anyone tried putting
some rules together yet?  It makes good sense, and I really think that some
such rule ought to be part of the core for TNE, especially considering that
their background will be full of wretched flying wrecks, judging from the
way that they have described it so far.  Something like a a doubling of
of maintenance cost each ten years maybe?  With extra age "awarded" to a
ship repaired after extensive battle damage?  (Rather like old Twilight:
2000 in that regard).

> The problem with fleet sizes I still can't quite see how to overcome.
> More star systems and less high-population planets is what's needed here.

Given that transportation is not free, the tendency is going to be for most
good systems to eventually end up as high population worlds.  I always have
a hard time explaining why a world that has been settled for a thousand years
isn't full....

Rob Dean