Martin Snow:
>Instead of raising the cost of the yearly overhaul for older ships, why
>not just require more frequent maintenance.
>0-20 years old -- 1 overhaul per year
>21-30 years 1 overhaul per 10 months
>31-40 years 1 per 9 months
>etc.
>That makes the "tune-up" fairly standard, but the older parts don't
>stay in tune as well. And the additional time wasted while the ship is
>"in the shop" will probably make older ships even less economical to
>run. (which may or may not be a good thing)
I like this one better than the first suggestion. Among other things,
it actually makes the increased cost of an older ship meaningful. It
also ties older ships fairly strongly to their homeports, since by the
time a ship is a century old, it'll need maintenance every three
months...
Rob Dean:
>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?
Cynthia and I have been playing with this one for several months now.
We are experimenting with variations on the T2K2 old age/maintenance
rules.
So far, the biggest difficulty is assigning a base amount of maintenance
to a starship: does the required engineering crew work full time
keeping it operating? If so, then an older ship would require more
engineering crew, else it might have to be quite beat up before that
occurs.
Right now, we assume that the absolute minimum maintenance can be
performed by the number of engineers computed in the required crew
formulas, without rounding. So most Free Trader types need less than
half an engineer, and the one engineer they carry can keep the ship
operating even after it gets quite old. But sooner or later, you'll
need extra engineers, or extra time planetside between jumps, or the
ship just doesn't go anymore.
So far, this has worked out fairly well, but we really haven't used it
long enough to see all the problems...
>> 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....
Likewise. Even if transportation were free, unless it were also
instantaneous, good systems WILL fill up. The only solution I've ever
seen is to get away from this umpteen-thousand year old civilization,
and play in places where people (ANY kind of people) are just now
arriving for the first time.
---Steve