Galactic travel - hyperdrive maintenance problem

[WKFO]

When you leave the inhabited bubble and try to travel to the far out unexplored systems, you run into a problem: there are no stations to perform hyperdrive maintenance, so your hyperdrive inevitably gets destroyed since the best maintenance can give you only about 2 years (iirc) of guarantee. For my last journey it was about 1200ly away from Sol I think.

I can cheat my way around by editing the code but I would rather have it solved in a user-friendly way. I don't have any good proposals myself though, but the supermassive black hole Sag A* for example looks like it is nowhere near reachable with our hyperdrive breakdown code.

...and finally, can someone get me a bulk ship or something to pick me up? My location is -140, 10, 5; and I'm willing to pay up to 3500 credits.

[impaktor]

I think the solution is to have crew that can repair. Already now the crew can do that, but I'm not sure if it can fail at repairing. I don't remember (and am too lazy to look at the code atm)

[WKFO]

Oh, crew... Didn't even cross my mind.
Well, let me see how that goes.

[WKFO]

Got myself a crew member who scored 80% on engineering. Managed to save the hyperdrive once, the second time it broke down again.

[CMDR ARGHouse]

Hmmm yeah I see that's gonna be a problem in the future for explorers, maybe creating a consumable maintainance kit, an Auto Field Maintainance Unit, repair droids perhaps?

[impaktor]

Sounds like something easy to add as an if-statement in breakdownandservice script. (anyone?)

[The-EG]

The breakdown stuff is pretty simple...I dug into that when I was figuring out the whole start date vs Jan 1 3200 thing a while back.

It looks like it's a random chance based on the engineering skill, that can also include the player. It makes a roll for each crew member with the skill, so the more crew with the skill you have, the more likely they are to fix the drive. Also, an interesting note...each TestRoll has a chance to increment or decrement the skill being rolled against (engineering in this case).

What's the current thinking? Should there be a skill threshold where you can always repair the drive? I would think if you had a skilled engineer, they would be servicing the drive every now and then anyway, so it shouldn't break down at all (that would also be possible, I think).

[impaktor]

Maybe if player has more than X crew members, there's 100% of successful repair. Basically, give the player an incentive to have more than +1 person in crew. So maybe 2 crew members? I don't know which ships that includes/excludes.

We could then add to the in-game advice module: "Listen kid, take my advice, and never venture into unknown territory without at least X in crew, and you'll just might be able to make it back here and thank me, considering repairing jump-drives is a complicated thing"

[The-EG]

Maybe if player has more than X crew members, there's 100% of successful repair.

Now that you say that, it could be based on the class of the drive too. A bigger, more complicated drive would likely be easier to fix with more people working on it.

I'm not real familiar with crews...I guess you could have crew members with one of the starting ships (by buying cabins for them?), but I'm guessing the intent wasn't for this to be doable right away.

[impaktor]

you only need cabins for passengers.

I say no to added complexity with hyperdrive engine class. It just makes it even harder for the player to understand how to "play the game", and giving a hint about it, like I suggested using the advice module becomes harder / ugly.

data/ships/*json have fields:

"max_crew" : 3,
"min_crew" : 2,