There are actually two problems with the wear and breakdown rules as
presented in T:TNE. The first, as someone on the TML noticed, is that even
a wear 1 starship has an extremely high chance of generating a fatal
breakdown at some point during a week-long jump.
The following entries from my T:TNE errata file should help the situation:
NIT: pp.241, Potential Breakdowns
The wear and potential breakdown rules are presumably to be applied to
starships as well as other types of equipment. However, there is a rather
sticky problem: consider a starship in jump space. If the ship's power
plant fails, life support will stop, and everybody aboard the ship will die
in a number of hours.
Fix: Unlike vehicles, starship systems are be designed for 24 hour a
day, 7 day a week performance. Roll for potential breakdowns twice per
week (once on leaving orbit, and once on exit from jump space) instead of
once per 8 hours.
Alternate fix: Assume the starships vital systems (power plant and life
support as a minimum) have integral multiply-redundant internal backups, so
that breakdowns are not life-threatening unless ignored for more than a
week.
Commentary: There are 21 8-hour periods in a typical 7 day jump; for a
power plant with a wear value of 1, this is a 74.5% chance that a potential
breakdown will occur within the first 4 days of the jump. Assuming that
the engineer has a relevant asset of 10, there is an 87.5% chance that
there will be an actual breakdown sometime during the next day. Overall
about a 65.2% chance of a power failure sometime during the jump.
--- GG
NIT: pp.242, Increasing Wear; last paragraph in the section suggests
generating wear values for individual components of a vehicle. When
keeping separate track of the wear value individual components separately,
care must be taken to keep the combination under control.
Fix: When tracking the wear value of components separately, the referee
should assign wear values that are no greater than the overall wear value
of the vehicle. Each period, only one die roll is made. It the number
rolled is greater than the overall wear value of the vehicle, no potential
breakdown occurs. If a potential breakdown does occur, the referee must
randomly choose one component from all those components with a wear value
less than or equal to the number rolled. As component wear values change,
the vehicle's overall wear value is the same as the highest wear value of
any of the components.
Commentary: For example, a vehicle with wear value of 5 is broken down into
4 components, each of which are given a wear value of 5. If 4 rolls, one
for each of the components, are made each period, there is a 93.75% chance
that at least one of the components will have a potential breakdown each
period; effectively a wear value of 10. With the fixed rules, potential
breakdowns still occur only 50% of the time.
--- GG
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Science-Fiction Adventure
In the Far Future