Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ship Wear and Tear

Wear&Tear, Servicing, Maintenance, whatever one wants to call it, could be added as a decent ISK Sink.

Plainly stated it any ship being flown for a period of time, say for each hour of usage, would be subject to a certain percentage of wear and tear and each percentage to be serviced to reach 100% again would cost ISK at a Repair Facility (NPC) or Maintenance Crew (PC). The ISK cost would be completely depending on the amount of minerals the ship is made up of so Frigates would have a negligible cost to service while Titans would be somewhat expensive to fly around in.

Over time any vehicle in use experiences a reduction in optimal performance as circuits, cords, links, couplings, and so on get worn down slowly. The normal repair only repairs damage, it doesn't fix this kind of wear and tear.

In High-Sec this is easily set up by having Repair Facilities have an extra tab for Servicing/Maintaining a ship.
In 0.0, and in POS situations, either a new POS type could be added that houses a Maintenance Crew or a Maintenance Crew can be added to any existing POS that already takes care of repairs. The crew of course consists of planet side personnel that get paid for performing the service. For this crew the job would be somewhat like the Oil Rig jobs of today, very lucrative and high pay with period employment for half a year at a time or so.

With this, and to make it so players will want to service their ships regularly, a slight drop in performance levels could be set on various things that are tied to the ship's systems: Shields, Velocity, Targeting Range, Drone Bandwidth, Inertia Modifier, Capacitor Capacity and Recharge, Sensor Strength, Warp Speed.
I'm thinking that every 4% Wear and tear could drop those things with 1% performance, capping wear and tear performance drop at 25%. In most cases not enough to notice until getting closer to 20% wear and tear but enough that one will want to keep the ship serviced.

If setting the cost per mineral per % wear and tear to 0.001 ISK (roughly one hours usage) then hourly costs would look roughly like:
Frigate, Tristan, 30 ISK/h
Destroyer, Cormorant, 52 ISK/h
Cruiser, Maller, 874 ISK/h
Mining Barge, Covetor, 2706 ISK/h
Balltecruiser, Tornado, 5244 ISK/h
Battleship, Dominix, 5738 ISK/h

Not a lot but a constant source for ISK sink and increasing when newer players get into bigger ships. It might be more for T2 and Capital ships, but how much I don't know.

For T2 and the capital ships the minerals used for the various parts needed to build them would have to be included in the total minerals the ship is made up of, something I am not fully versed in and so have no clue as to how much minerals they consist of in total. Someone that does might want to post an estimated ISK7h cost for maintaining those?

Cheers