Maintenance Is Back

With the addition of Shin's PA(L) and Alex's BattleMech to the party's assets, the question of maintenance has come up again.  Up until now, David's helicopter has been the only item that required regular maintenance, and once the Light Gauss Rifle failed, he was able to make all remaining maintenance rolls automatically (TN 2 or lower, and I wasn't going to make him search for botches.)  The Tornado and the Warhammer are different animals, though, and require considerably more maintenance.  Here's what I'm doing to overcome the issue:

First, I lengthened the Maintenance Period to a month; the number of checks involved is already quite high without having to make them daily or weekly.  I also individually looked up each component for the Advanced Maintenance Rules (Strategic Operations, p. 174) and made a form for each vehicle, listing each of the components, their Tech Rating, and with fields for Quality, TN, Actual Roll, and Effect.  For the Tornado, this form has five lines.  For the Warhammer, it has 42 lines, which is a fair number of rolls for a player to make, especially given Alex will probably have to process these forms, on average, twelve at a time.

In addition, while I gave the party as pass on the original hardware they had, I am making them actually absorb the cost of maintaining these machines.  That is to say, they need to have the appropriate repair kits (A Time of War, p. 310).  The recharge costs are quite high -- about 850 C-Bills/Month to maintain the Tornado, and about 4,550 C-Bills/Month to maintain the Warhammer.  A deal by any stretch of the imagination, but still quite expensive for this party.  How they cope with these tremendous expenses should be interesting -- they're already considering bank robbery.