Spaceships: Wearing Out
In theory, if you maintain a spaceship, nothing should break, which is why they're still around decades and centuries after being launched.
In practice, going by the Core Book, there's a twenty eight in thirty six chance that it starts to deteriorate anyway, every decade.
Now, you can a have a Free Trader, whose granny captain only transitioned it every second Sunday, and never made it enter any atmosphere, and there's still a good chance that something starts to breakdown every ten years.
And then you have warships, whose commanders tend to push them to the limits of their capabilities, and sometimes beyond, and have a good chance of getting their hulls holed and their interiors turned inside out a couple of times per decade.
The Royal Navy seems to be prepared to dispose of their commercial specced warships after twenty years have passed, since trying to refurbish them probably would cost nearly as much as getting a new ship, which they'd want in any event, and then with a personnel crunch, couldn't crew them anyway.
I'm told that some other navies are less discriminating when it comes to the condition of their ships.
The post Great War naval treaties believed that battleships would be pretty much worn out after twenty six years, those are the ones with lots of armour, after which, the participants were free to replace them, if they wanted to. But they were permitted to modernize them, as long as they followed some guidelines.
It would appear that actively participating in a war, speeds up depreciation considerably, even if the ship was lucky enough never to suffer any major damage, especially the engines. One reason the British were willing to scrap their older battleships en masse to satisfy treaty requirements.
Capital ships and major combatants, however you define them nowadays, can partake of a service life extension programme, though not unique to the navy, but tend to be applied to hardware that governments don't want to invest in setting up new production lines to manufacture the replacements.
These tend to be nowadays pre-scheduled, around the half way point of the expected service time of the warships, since even the most generous defence budget that can swallow the next five or ten subsequent ones, is reluctant to spend constantly on expensive hardware.
SLEPs should be carried out every two decades or so, if only to replace equipment that has become obsolete, not really an issue with the stabilized technical base in Traveller, though since the Solomani had a preview of what next generation technology is going to be like by observing developments in the Imperium Navy, they built their ships with upgrades in mind.
SLEPs would also close examine engineering, and replace engines and power plants that have become worn out, or replace them anyway, prophylactively. With advanced technology, this may need only occur every three or four decades.
This seems rather urgent, as the zero point percent maintenance cost would indicate that most Traveller ships rely heavily on diagnostics to catch problems as they are about to occur, which minimizes the need for maintenance at it's associated costs, but ensures that any problematic component remains in place like a timebomb.
ons.
