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 three months of age. Overhauling requires MSP(C#)/minerals(VB6) based on the ship size, components, and the maintenance clock. Note there's a time penalty if you want to abort the overhaul early. 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 deployment is brought back to 0 and you're able to get going again as if new. In lore, these are maintenance things that couldn't be done on-ship, 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.