Hogwash. Our ships are plated with armor to withstand high energy laser blasts and explosive bullets. Some even upgrade to "military" grade armor - and that's when you get past the shields. If you're gonna go down that path of logic how does space dust penetrate shields?
The W&T logic put in place is like everything else in this game - inconsistent and without direction. It seems to be put in arbitrarily as a credit sink.
It does appear to be purely a game mechanic or feature that penalizes anyone in a bigger and therefore, more expensive ships. It appears your costs will be low provided you content yourself with less. Aspire to expensive ships and you had better be an Oligark!
Using a car analogy from the past. If you drove a Moskvitch, Lada or Trabandt, then the repair costs were almost zero. Designed for the "masses" east of the Iron Curtain, the repairs could be done in a bicycle shop with empty baked bean tins
No, but you can assume the FSD projects a field or bubble of some sort to protect the ship and enable the warping of space-time.
It's a simple fact of life in space that micro-meteors are ship killers, and you can't just assume the FSD doesn't deal with them in an effective manner. At superluminal speeds, any particles of dust colliding with or penetrating the FSD field would erupt with incredible amounts of energy, if they survived the transition into the field at all they would be travelling at 1C and colliding with the ship would penetrate the entire thing.
Interesting theory! I love this games slant on science fiction.
However, I steer clear of any analogy to real world physics in this "game". If you think about just the basics, (force=mass*velocity) we would only need to hit a microscopic dust particle at supercruise or warp speeds and our ship would be a smouldering wreak
I like the warp bubble though!
The Star Trek shield theory was always a pleasant fiction. Keep those shields up and nothing can touch you, not even a Romulan disruptor
Bottom line is, in a "game" anything is possible, dependant upon the aims of the game creator.
As a game mechanic, excessive wear an tear forces the player to maintain a large bank balance, so you must trade as well as do all the other professions. Which, I suppose is what the game is primarily about.
My question now is, which ship is the best for deep space exploration? Light years from any repair........Voyager had organically self repairing systems and later a delicious Borg to help fix things, an inclusion for v1.2?....I digress
