Re: Campaigns

David Griffin wrote:

>
> 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.

The Liberty ships were assembled in such a short time for a number of
reasons, but the foremost one was that they were designed to be
assembled
quickly and they were composed of standard components that could be
built up
away from the yards.  Any ship could be fabricated in this way, even
battleships and supercarriers.	However, there is a downside:  The
initial
engineering and tooling costs are more, so you do not actually save on
the
amortized cost of each unit; unless, you build alot of them, even though
each unit requires less man-hours and capital to build.  While each
Rolls
Royce is much more expensive than any Chevrolet, GM spends thousands of
millions of dollars to tool up for a new model, but RR just sends a new
set
of drawings to the guys that bend the metal.  RR expects to sell a few
hundred automobiles and GM expects to sell several hundred thousand.

For a campaign setting, you would have to assign engineering and tooling
costs for each new class.  the engineering costs would depend on how
different the new design was from a previous design, and how ambitious
it
was (modular warships would have the highest costs, as too many
variables
are only defined when the ship leaves port).  The tooling costs are
related
to how fast you want them built.
If you are only building four battleships, they may as well eachl be a
one-off, from a common design (to share engineering costs, but save on
tooling).  But if you plan on building 200 frigates, in a short amount
of
time, then spending a lot on tooling to mass produce them is a good
idea.

It is cheap to build a single RR car, but very expensive to build
hundreds