Re: Campaigns

--- Richard and Emily Bell <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
wrote:
...
> 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; 

When the Liberties were built modular construction
was an alien concept and as you say, it paid 
dividends for wartime construction. Now, we even
use similar modular tactics for our regular ships
(at least somewhat). Do you think this is done in
the FT world, or are the ships pretty much handmade?
 
>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
> of chevies a day.
> 

That's why you'd want to limit this special processing
to two or three classes you were going to build a
lot of. In full thrust the number one for me would
be escort carriers (fighters are deadly in numbers
in FT). In a campaign setting, freighters would be
number 2 (assuming this is modelled). I'm not sure
what would be number 3. You couldn't use this 
technique on everything and wouldn't want to. I
would want my SDN's to last for 30 years, not fall
apart 3 years after being built. Part of the speed
savings in Liberties was cutting corners. But you
are right, a lot of the savings was modular 
construction.

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