Re: Campaigns

--- Laserlight <laserlight@quixnet.net> wrote:
> > That's why you'd want to limit this special
> processing
> > to two or three classes you were going to build a
> > lot of.
>
> So you'd say :
> Prototype ship, any class = x3 normal cost and time
> (keeps players
> from continually designing the "ship of the month")
> Factory tooling = x10 ship cost, allows ships in
> this class to be
> built at -10% cost/time.  Can be bought multiple
> times (eg pay 5000NPV
> and you can built 100NPV frigates at a real cost of
> 50NPV).
>

Not bad for covering the ordinary ship, built faster
but still ending up to be a standard ship, lasting
just as long as an ordinary ship (no dangerous
corners cut)

> > savings in Liberties was cutting corners. But you
> > are right, a lot of the savings was modular
> > construction.
>
> Which means part of the construction time wasn't in
> the yards, it was
> back in the prefab shops, so they weren't really
> building ships in 4
> days.  Still, yard time is expensive and prefab is
> easier to set up
> than building new slips.
>
>

Ship not ships. The fastest one built was 4 days.
Lots of other were fast, but not this fast. Yes
this was done by assembling the parts (so optimum
conditions).

Prefab components can be machine produced in factories
at rates that rival automobiles (and boggle the minds
of shipwrights). The more of this you can do, the
more likely you can achieve those speeds.
Standardizing
on just a few weapons, screens, and so on would seem
to allow you to accelerate your shipbuilding by taking
advantages of common parts in all your units. I doubt
this is the way FT ships are typically built, but
a LONG war might force an FT builder to consider
unusual tactics (or maybe they do it already I
don't know).

The Liberties went further than that though in
assembling components that were not normally
considered
fit for inclusion in a ship -- using methods which
were guaranteed to produce a shorter life, weaker,
more easily sunk ship -- in order to produce a lot
of them. I'm not sure exactly how you express this
in FT, but perhaps your hull boxes cost 1.5xnormal
mass, but 1/2 cost in points as regular
ones (so you end up with weaker ships but cheap ones).

Often in situations like this, you build your ship
out of parts you may already have on hand (building
escort carriers out of liberty hulls for instance
which was done I think). In this case, you can
take advantage of more economies of scale.

Suppose you created 1 design in wartime. Suppose
it had 2 variants -- a freighter and an escort
carrier (added fighter support modules including
launch bays and recovery bays). Suppose they were
all the same mass. They might have different hull
because hull is really airtite doors, bulkheads,
and so on, not just size. It would be possible to
modify the freighter even after it was launched into
an escort carrier if the need was great. The cost
would be cheap, not nowhere near the cost of
building another escort carrier (they would be
designed to do this). Now you build a lot of
freighters
before the war and some escort carriers. War
happens, you build CVE's like mad, and convert a
bunch of the freighters you have.

This is kind of a weak comparison, but take our
C-130J's. If sold as a tanker, you can remove
the internal tank and use it as a freighter. Or
you can put it in and *bingo* it's a tanker. It
can change for every flight. Maybe you could build
the freighters like that too so that you could slide
the whole fighter bay into the cargo bay(s). After
all, you don't need a flight deck. Maybe to
facilitate this, the actual cargo bay is also a module
in which case maybe you pay some mass lost for the
mass of the inserted bay.

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