Re: Campaigns

David Griffin wrote:
> 
> --- Noam Izenberg <noam.izenberg@jhuapl.edu> wrote:
> > More opinions and thoughts on the campaign.
> >
> ...
> > Re: Liberty ships
> > In war time you're going to need a way to mimic
> > this. Something like
> > deficit spending (which would be a big can of worms
> > in a simple system).
> > Were they really more expensive, or just built more
> > cheaply? (5 hull
> > rows?, less armor (and therefore mass) for the same
> 
> > mix of systems?)
> >
> 
> Well, you have to be careful as to what you learn
> on the history channel, but according to them, they
> were cheaper, using welding instead of rivets (and
> so were less resilient to storms and easier to sink.
> At one point the shipyards were competing to see
> how fast they could build them. The winner was just
> about 4 days!
> 
> So in wartime, a highly motivated builder could
> probably build a few designs of ship much faster
> than they would previously in peacetime, especially
> if they could cut corners. A liberty equivalent
> would be merchant ships (useful in campaign games
> probably) which had fragile hulls but were cheap
> and fast to build.

This points a little bit towards building time being dependant upon
number of hull boxes, not mass or NPV. After all, a mass 100 warship
would have 100 mass full of drives, systems, armour, shields etc,
whereas a mass 100 merchant could well be 70 mass of empty space. In
fact, correcting myself while I type, construction time would be
dependant on (mass - empty space). As to what constitutes 'empty space',
certainly cargo capacity would, I'd suggest that fighter bays would too
(or maybe count 1/2 or so) which means that a mass 100 carrier could be
built quicker than a mass 100 battlecruiser.

> They did basically the same thing in WWII for
> escort carriers. So I suspect the same trick might
> be possible in FT. Perhaps it would be possible
> to design a light carrier (4 squadrons) with a
> fragile hull at a very cheap price. Since fighters
> are so effective in FT, it might work out well.
> Fighters, unlike warships traditionally, tended
> to be built on assembly lines. Indeed it was this
> assembly line mentality that resulted in ships
> like the liberty and the escort carriers.
> 
> Also, even discounting these "special" ships,
> regular ships get built more quickly in wartime
> too. Of course your campaign system may already
> take this into account, but if it is based on
> "peacetime" build rates, it might be a good idea
> to up them a little to reflect the panic/motivation
> involved in fighting a war. Maybe the side losing
> would get an increased production rate based on
> everyone working to breaking point.

Weapon systems are often the bottleneck in real world ship building.
Many ships of the late C19th or early C20th ended up with guns,
sometimes even turrets, intended for other ships but diverted to avoid
holding up the latest / greatest dreadnought class. Foundries capable of
forging large calibre guns were few and far between. Whether this is
relevant to the GZGverse is another matter.

Tony

-----------------------------
Tony Francis
Senior Software Engineer