Hi,

I was reading an article about the ISS and how it will be de-orbited around 2020 because of equipment degradation / wear and tear.

Have you thought about adding that aspect of space exploration into the game? I know that BOTF delt with it as maintinence cost. But perhaps you could add in that stuff just doesn't last forever, especially when really long periods of time are concerned.

Maybe a complete overhual could be required periodically above and beyond simple maintenance costs.

I'm not really sure how well this would suit the game. It would be yet another series of calculations that the game would have to do and the feature wouldn't be one that was immediately obvious to new players; we could end up being bombarded with bug reports of ships randomly being "damaged" and the like. It would also be illogical that current design and scrapping techniques would still be used in Trek times either - i've never seen starships simply throw away old components for instance. Everything is recycled.

We are *intending* to change the way old ships are handled though. Instead of scrapping them, you will be able to mothball them. Mothballing will return a percentage of the build cost back into your resource pool, and the ship will lie out-of-use in your mothball yard. If an emergency situation arises and you suddenly need a fleet of ships, you can then spend resources on bringing the ships back into use. This would be far cheaper and faster to do than building a fleet from scratch afterall, even if you end up with a fleet of outdated designs. But those outdated designs could end up being the difference between you and assimilation...