Re: Campaigns

Laserlight 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).

At these costs, the first x10 does not get much, but the nineth one
reaps
huge awards.  For something linear, assume the facility is like a
pipelined CPU, and ships are instructions, and each stage in the
pipeline
is x10.  No matter how it is assembled, the latency of a ship is the
same
(time between ordering and completion), but the facility can be working
on
one ship per pipeline stage at any given time.	For example, if the
latency is one year, but there are twelve stages, it still takes a year
for a vessel to be built, but at full rate, one vessel is completed
every
month.	If no money is spent on tooling, all ships are built at the
prototype rate (x3).  Each vessel built at a tooled facility costs only
x1

The initial engineering costs could be something like x(10 +
0.1*stages).
While I would have to crunch the numbers to get all of the breakpoints,
these rules discourage tooling for classes numbering less than 6;
unless,
the ships are built at more than one facility, and it also assumes that
the cost of the yard capacity is ignored.

There is one down side to tooling up for mass production: the cost of
changing the design.  The simplest way to calculate a design change is
to
use the cost of the stuff added (but with no refund for stuff taken
away)and plug it into the tooling formula, and that gives the cost of
changing the tooling.  This is why tooling up for an untested design is
such a gamble.	If you tool up to produce sixty frigates a year, but
realize that the design does not fulfill its role, too bad.  Changing
the
design of ships built as prototypes is much cheaper

>
>
> > 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.

Four days was the time between launches. However, Henry Ford actually
built a completely integrated factory campus for the production of the
model T.  The La Rouge plant only took 36 hours to convert the requisite
amount of raw materials into a model T and there were alot of stages in
that pipeline.