On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 at 16:58, <xxxxxx@quibell.org.uk> wrote:

I have never got the “you spend more on the car maintaining it than the car is worth” thing. The value of a car is in its utility and effectiveness as a means of transport, not it’s monetary value. If it costs you £2,000 in maintenance keeping your paid off 15 year old car on the road (that’s worth £100 scrap), but it costs you £4,000 a year financing a new car (that depreciated by 1/3 of its value as soon as you drove it off the forecourt) then your old car is better value. It does the same thing (get you where you want to go) at less cost … but I’m sure that’s just me … anyway …

No, I agree. It feels a bit like those moments my sister tells me she's "saved" £50 because the <whatever> was £100. NO. You've *spent* £50... <sigh>

I'm a fine one for driving hardware into the ground. When first married we drove an original mini. When it finally reached its end (mainly because of the virtual impossibility of getting new baby and luggage in the back) and we 'upgraded' (to a Nissan Sunny of all things) we thought all the roads of our town had been resurfaced overnight.

I'm much the same with computers/phones, keeping them long past any ability to sell them on to anyone

And showing that good design against required specification really is the thing with the 2^nd longest production run of any military aircraft (the C130 above being the longest) I give you the:
Antonov AN-2

Entering service in ’40s and still in active military service today

Wow!

On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 4:44 PM Kurt Feltenberger <xxxxxx@thepaw.org> wrote:

Well, a bank won’t give a 40 year loan if they did not expect it to last that long. I would expect that 40 is the time for the major refit. Car loans are normally 6 year term, average car lifespan is 12 years. If that applies to ships, then average lifespan would be 80 years. But then my vehicles are 14, 19, 24, and 47. So while half the ships are done at 80, there will still be a few working at 300.

I've long thought I'd like a 'Traveller ship age' table to quickly generate such information (it would then work very nicely with my rules for when/how much to throw in the 'What's Wrong With the Ship?' tables. Just before I sit down and do something massively complicated with dice/formula because I'm a bear of little brain at math(s), is there an easy way to model (with two or three six sided dice) something like 'mostly not too old but with occasional outliers like 300'? Or is a table the only real one way of doing it?