Re: Mission Creep - Was Re: The new US Army APC the Stinger

At 2:19 PM -0600 7/1/02, B Lin wrote:
>It seems that mission creep is commonly found in big budget projects 
>- Cheyenne helicopter, International Space Station, etc.  Is there a 
>way to simulate this in a GZG-verse campaign game? 
>
>For instance, if the form of government of a 
>planet/country/political entity allows nepotism or just plain 
>pork-barrel politics how would you factor in the procurement of 
>extra units, above and beyond what the military requests? i.e. you 
>get 8 battlecruisers instead of the 6 requested, but the military 
>has to pay for those extra 2 because a senator/bigwig decides the 
>shipyard owned by one of his constituents needs the extra work.

The alternate to this is that the government contracted for 10 
initially, but some of the senators cut it down, then they complained 
that the contract cost too much per unit, so they kill the project 
entirely.

>Or alternatively a specific modification is designed for tanks to be 
>used in the combat engineering role.  It happens that the refit can 
>only be done at the factory.  Instead of only refitting tanks going 
>to the engineering batallions, a bigwig decides that all the tanks 
>need to be refitted "just in case". It also happens that said 
>factory employs his nephews.

Or the crews perform mods in the field that aren't authorized and it 
works. Unless you're casting and machining new major components. 
Little can't be accomplished at depot level bases. Heck, there were 
gun re-fits performed on Churchills in Egypt where the Howitzer and 2 
pounder were swapped between mounts in the hull and turret iirc.

>A third case might be a space transport unit that halfway through 
>the design process acquires more armor to make it a limited assault 
>transport.  But this reduces the top thrust from the original 
>specification.  Do you up the engines or accept the decreased thrust?

Very common. Scope creep pure and simple. Properly designed ships 
actually have space left over in the design for additional weapon 
fits as time goes on. Smart designers/builders include the conduits 
and support infrastructure to allow for the fitment with minimal 
additions. Most of that stuff is far easier to build into the ship 
than add on later. Especiallly if you can hold the module upside down 
for the workers to work on the components at floor level rather than 
over head.

The opposite of this is where the design is accomplished in a minimal 
of time and there's a major issue. The Autoloader on the T62 (or was 
it the T72?) had a certain taste for the gunner's arm and tended to 
take it into the breach.

>In the first case, would there be minimum procurement amounts?  For 
>instance if you commission a new class of cruiser, would you have to 
>commit to 20 hulls built in a 10 year period?	Or would you have to 
>buy tanks in 1000 unit lots?

Ships are much larger components and don't get quite the same thing 
out of economies of scale that tanks and aircraft do.

>In the second case, are there provisions for a unit that is designed 
>one way to have a flaw so that it doesn't meet the original 
>specification and requires a refit to bring it up to specification?

That's why you have product improvement cycles and design boards in 
the first place. There's a balance between good feedback from the 
design board and the end user and not enough. Just the same, you can 
spend so much time adding features that have been requested that the 
vehicle has become a white elephant.

>
>In the third case what do the design changes cost?  In real life it 
>costs a lot of time, effort and money to make major design changes, 
>especially as you get further along in development.  If lead times 
>are years, should there be an additional cost to make modifications 
>to the design?  On another related thread, if you design 
>multi-function modules, do they always work as specified or do they 
>have more teething problems than dedicated systems and/or higher 
>maintenance costs?

Depends on who builds them and if they cut corners in a good or bad way.

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