Engineering Spaces

Engineering Spaces are components that decrease the ship's malfunction rate and increase its maintenance supplies carry capacity, to affect the repair of those malfunctions that still happen. In VB6 they are known as "Engineering Sections" instead, but the mechanics are identical.

Usage

Engineering spaces are essential to keep your ships from falling apart. Malfunction rate is dependent on the percentage of engineering spaces of the total of the ship. Without any engineering spaces at all, the AFR (annual failure rate) of a ship is 0.2 * tonnage percent. For example, a 10,000 ton ship without engineering would have AFR of 2000%. Very small ships and ships that do not plan to leave their hangar or maintenance facility for long can get away with it, however.

With engineering spaces the AFR becomes 0.04 / engineering tonnage percentage * total tonnage percent. Just adding one engineering space to the example 10,000 ton ship would reduce AFR to 800%, with further additions improving the odds even more.

At least 50 tons of engineering spaces is required for any commercial ship. Additional engineering after this point has no benefit for commercial ships.

Maintenance Supplies Storage

Engineering spaces also store MSP, in addition to their breakdown-reduction function. Their storage capacity is not fixed, however - it depends on the ship's size and cost, and the amount of engineering space on the ship.

MSP Stored = 12.5 * Ship build cost * Engineering tons / Total tons

If this produces a fractional value, round that value down.

Any MSP stored by Maintenance Storage Bays are added on top of this value. Note that those dedicated storage areas store a flat 10 per ton, so engineering spaces are going to store much less on any practical ship. (They would theoretically be equal at a ship cost of 0.8 BP per ton, which is impossibly high for any plausible design)

Source

Variants

Engineering Spaces

Space	Standard	Small	Tiny	Fighter
Size (tons)	50	25	12.5	5
Size (HS)	1	0.5	0.25	0.1
Cost	10	5	2.5	1