Editing Ship Maintenance (section)

==Maintenance Clock and Overhaul==
Each ship has a maintenance clock, which counts the time since the ship has left port (its last time in a dockyard with sufficient [[Maintenance Facility|maintenance facilities]]). As the ship's deployment clock increases, the probability of a breakdown increases, and it starts costing more MSP to maintain. In other words, if you keep a ship that wasn't intended for extremely long operations in space, it will literally fall apart. Ships in orbit of a colony with sufficient maintenance facilities do not run their clocks. Thus, keeping your ships at a fleet base is a good way to keep them well-maintained.

:TIP:If your clock is going up while at colony, it means your maintenance facilities are not large enough to accommodate that ship. Expand your maintenance facilities and it'll stop going up.

If a ship is on a long deployment and runs up its maintenance clock, you can put it into overhaul on a base with maintenance facilities (dockyard) large enough for the ship's tonnage. Overhauls unwind this clock. One month in overhaul reverses four months of age. While in overhaul, a ship consumes MSP at an annual rate equal to the BP cost of the ship. Abandoning overhaul before the maintenance clock is reduced to zero causes a severe performance penalty that reduces linearly to zero over 30 days. The maintenance clock is also reduced when ships are repaired, based on the percentage of their build cost that is involved in new components provided by the repair.

Once your maintenance clock is brought back to 0 the ship can get going again as if new. 

In lore, overhaul represents maintenance things that can't be done while a ship is in service, such as scrubbing out the engine manifolds, re calibrating the sensors, replacing the worn hinges on bulkheads, replacing the floor panels as feet have scuffed them up, and whatever else wouldn't be normal maintenance.