What is it proportional to then? My understanding is that is a discrete-stepped linear relationship, approximating y = 1 - x/120
where y is the reclaimable material, and x is the time elapsed in days.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it appears that your complaint is the balance sheet showing some ‘building depreciation’ number, and you think that number is too high; the much (imho) more useful complaint is how quickly materials become ‘unreclaimable.’
First off, depreciation is not a ‘real value,’ this is not currency leaving your account; it’s an averaged value of the degraded building materials; in order to maintain any asset you must periodically spend money on maintenance to ensure it works as intended; thus, in any balance sheet you will move some money from your ‘assets’ into an ‘escrow’ account in order to fund that maintenance in future; this is depreciation.
IRL, you can often spend this escrow on other things, and once that maintenance becomes due, you cover the costs with debt, as that escrow will no longer be liquid to purchase the required materials. This is not a feasible option in the long term, and there are many cases where creating growth with debt causes an org to go bankrupt precisely because they do not properly account depreciation; a more sustainable management involves using growth to cover costs, which involves ‘banking’ those costs before they come due.
Depreciation, then, is the monetary equivalent of degradation, and removing it from a balance sheet means that as soon as maintenance is due, you will be left with no option but to coliq, as you will have no ability to cover costs.
Correct; degradation is the process that prevents this, and depreciation is the financial equivalent. However, degradation is extremely effective at preventing deconstruction/rebuilding, as for any material used, you immediately lose 1 of each material - at the current stage of the game, this might not be as noticeable, but later down the line, this degradation is very effective for this purpose.
Say you build a new FRM, as the 100% degradation cutoff is 120 days (or 6 years, 208 days once scale factor is removed - see below), it costs 4 BSE, 4 BBH and 120 MCG. On the first day, the degradation of the BSE and BBH is 25%, while the MCG is 1/120th; at 59 days in, this is 50%, and 49.1% respectively.
No they are not; this is most noticeable if you plan a flight using the BLU command; fuel burn rate is listed in units/s but many of the flight options you plan are too short for that fuel rate to match the total fuel consumption - this is the only example of where the 20x scale factor is not used to display a time unit. This game uses real orbital physics, and as such, any flight in “real-time” would take anywhere from a month to years, and literally nobody would be playing. For comparison, you can make ~100 one-way flights between CX and uh, vallis, with the same ship before a building fully degrades, and i’d argue that spaceflight and atmospheric entry is significantly more time intensive than that.
So, now i’ve separated depreciation and degradation, what exactly is your complaint? Is it the line in the balance sheet, or the mechanic that underlies it?