Editing Ship Maintenance (section)

==Maintenance Failure==
Military ships require a lot of regular maintenance to stay ready for action. The more complex your ship, the more chance it will suffer from maintenance failures. When a ship suffers a maintenance failure, it will use up maintenance supplies (MSP) equal to the cost of the affected [[component|system]] in order to prevent the failure. If insufficient MSP are available the affected system will be destroyed and cease operation. If this is something vital such as a jump engine, the ship could be stuck a long way from home. Once destroyed, a system can be fixed by [[Damage Control|damage control]] but the cost in MSP is doubled. Damaged systems can also be repaired by a [[shipyard]].

Accounting for maintenance failures is important part of ship design, especially for ships intended for extremely long operations in space. A [[Class Design]] includes a line like: 

 Maint Life 3.62 Years     MSP 637    AFR 108%    IFR 1.5%    1YR 75    5YR 1128    Max Repair 120 MSP

Maint Life is an estimate of how long the ship's stock of maintenance supplies is likely to last. You can extend that by adding [[Engineering Sections]] to the ship class during ship design to reduce malfunctions, and/or [[Maintenance Storage Bay]] to carry more supplies. You'll see drop in the Annual Failure Rate (AFR) which is the annual chance of a system failure, and the Incremental Failure Rate (IFR), which is the chance of a system failure in any given [[5-day increment]] (which is when maintenance checks take place). These values shown on a class summary assume a ship has one year on its maintenance clock. On individual Ship Summaries ({{key|F4}} in [[CSharp|C#]], {{key|F6}} in [[VB6]]), the Annual Failure Rate and IFR will be based on the ship's actual maintenance clock.

If you want to know exactly how it's calculated, see [[Ship Maintenance Details]].