Re: Campaigns

--- Tony Francis <tony.francis@kuju.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree with this, but during wartime, the freighters
we're talking about (liberties) were built at a rate
that boggled the imagination not only compared to
warships, but also with freighters built before the
war.  

Since the only weapons aboard escort carriers would
be fighters, they could be easy to build too, though
they might be easy to destroy. They too would be
"mostly empty" except for fighter cradles and support
equipment. Perhaps in wartime, this fighter support
gear would be constructed modularly in a single 
unit (squadron fighter bay) and installed in an
assembly fashion aboard anything that could contain
them. It should be easier to convert freighter hulls
to escort carriers because you don't need a flight
deck in space.

Maybe once the war begins, these things start 
supplementing real carriers, or perhaps they end
up being used as convoy escorts. 

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger