Cycles And Hours

I've tried several times to inject some realism into my Traveller campaigns.

Mr Garabaldi has mentioned some aviation maintenance stuff that reminded me to do some maths.

The rules command that a ship put in for annual maintenance or suffer ever increasing chances for malfunctions.

Based on the prices and times, this is an annual overhaul.

I've total-party-killed the group several times when they neglected that overhaul and misjumped to oblivion.

But the duty cycle on these things is...  Light.

The annual maintenance is based on running the jump drive for a week in jump 13 times a year.  Likewise the maneuver drives run for five days max in the worst case scenario per jump.

That gives the jump drive 2,184 hours between overhauls and the maneuver drive 1,560.  The ppwer plant is running when either drive is running, so it's got 3,744 hours on it when the worst case hours puts into drydock.

That 1,500 hour between overhauls on the maneuver drive affects in-system traffic more than interstellar.

A 1G shuttle making the run to Jupiter uses about 300 hours of that time.  So five round trips before needing to overhaul the motors.

Compared to aviation, these numbers seem tiny.

But we're talking insane amounts of energy and miraculous effects.

The reliability of the jump drive is the worst, except for all the other ways.