"Full Thrust: Shipyards for campaigns" Topic

I was playing around with online grid designers, especially the multicolored ones, and started having the germ of an idea. I'd like to add a bit of pressure in decision making in how ships are produced.

Now, usually there's a cost limit per yard per turn, and sometime various ship designs having various turns to completion. I thought making a grid to have the yard admin fit different sized ships, with overflow meaning multi-turn production was intriguing. Now, how to size the ships?

Then I realized I could use the FT damage diagrams. They are supposed to represent hull hits.

The rest of the rules are still percolating in me noggin': does a yard have to have full cost of ship available at start, can you 'interrupt' a ships construction, keep track of special system?

But, I'm liking what I've got so far. Anybody do anything similar?

Doug

Federation and Empire (rules normally renowned for their complexity) simplifies construction to paying for a ship the turn it is available for service. IIRC, F&E turns are 3 months, and I'm reasonably sure that even with enormous shipyards you'd be looking at a couple years to build something the size of a Constitution-class.

If you want to increase your complexity but still keep it below real-world levels, I'd allow for multi-turn construction that can be interrupted or at least delayed.

I'd also consider giving each shipyard a maximum number of hulls and hull boxes that it can assemble. The reason I'd only consider it is because a starship doesn't have the same construction issues that a shipyard does. You don't need a drydock to build the hull, you can do all the initial assembly in open space. I'd prefer to see a drydock structure, because that would reduce the amount of debris floating around. But you can decide to build in open space and completely ignore the physical limitations of the drydocks.

For that matter, a sufficiently-large fleet tender like the Jovian Chronicles Gagarin-class could actually act as a drydock and allow construction of smaller ships (anything under ~350m long in the case of the Gagarin-class)

For maximum complexity, the real world has what are called long-lead-time items. Things like the reactor, turbines, and reduction gears if you're talking ships. The electrical generation and main engines, basically. These actually need to be ordered about 2 years in advance of construction of a submarine, and it takes several years to build a sub. The earliest Virginia-class subs took 7 years from start to commissioning, the second flight was simplified to 5 years from keel-laying to commissioning, and the third flight are being commissioned about 2.5 years after keel-laying.

Impressively, the Japanese Izumo-class "helicopter destroyer" only took 18 months from keel-laying to commissioning, and those are the size of WW2 fleet carriers!

So I think that your shipbuilding should take about 2 years, though the time between commissioning and complete acceptance for service can be as much as another year or two. Though if you're in an active shooting war the ships are run through a very abbreviated acceptance trial. USS Gato (lead ship of her class of subs during WW2) was commissioned on Dec 31 1941, and was ordered to the Pacific on Feb 16 1942, all of 6 weeks after commissioning. However, the transit down the east coast, through the Panama Canal, up to San Francisco, and then across to Pear Harbor took another 8 weeks, which allowed for an unofficial extended shakedown period. So I'd add another 3 months or so to your build times for a minimum wartime shakedown.

I'd suggest you start with the rules for Repair on p35.

I'm not saying there's a factory floor of such-and-such dimensions in space, There are limitations both as to total size and individual ships that can be handled by the shipyard.

I am uncomfortable with the idea you can throw a bunch of parts into a space and just attach willy-nilly and have a

It's an abstract that I think can be justified. Least, I live on hope…

I'll keep noodling.

Doug

I hadn't given shipyard operations much thought, since I don't have any local players to run a campaign. But here's some ideas:

Assume a shipyard of 150 mass capacity (can work on 300 mass worth of ships per campaign turn).

I never did like the idea of a ship being produced in one turn. F&E for example, ran strategic turns in 6 month increments, and you paid for this ship when it became available. It was assumed that the ship took several turns to be built, and that additional complexity was abstracted. There was an exception for the B-10 hull, wherein you paid 5 Economic points for every turn you wanted to make progress on the ship; you then rolled a die and added that to the running total. Once the running total hit 40 (I think), the ship was done.

I also like the way Imperium handles ship production. You paid for a ship, and put the ship in the production queue a number of turns later. Once that turn arrived, the ship was available.

So here's some ideas to ponder:
1) Specify that it takes 1 Strategic turn to construct 50 mass worth of ship (i.e., a mass-150 ship takes 3 turns to construct).

In a shipyard of mass 150 (300 mass capacity), allocate a 150-mass chunk of "working area" for the ship. So in practice, you could have 2 of those ships under construction at one time.

2) Divide the cost of the ship up into portions, paying the next installment of the cost each turn. So divide the cost of that 150-mass ship (3 turns to construct) into 3 installments, and pay that cost each strategic turn until it is completed. You could interrupt construction if you had to, and as long as you kept records of how far along each ship was, no big deal.

If you didn't work on the ship in a given turn, assume that the hull was gently floated off to the side to make room for other work, or if you prefer, the construction assets were simply re-deployed onto another hull. The point being, if you aren't working on a given hull this turn, it isn't taking up shipyard capacity and you can work on something else.

Now one idea that might be looked at in a Star Trek/Star Fleet Universe oriented game is this: In the SFU they built "war classes" of ships that were stripped to the bare essentials to speed up construction and lower costs. I am not sure how to represent these in Full Thrust (perhaps give them 5-row hulls to represent their less robust construction?) per se. Perhaps say that instead of taking one turn for every 50 mass, change the construction time to 75 mass can be built per turn (but the hull is not quite as robust since you stripped out all the "fluff" systems that normally would absorb damage (labs, bowling alleys, libraries, etc).

While I'm not certain if any better than a pure number driven process, I like the visual nature of the grid, and am trying to conceive of a rationalization for it being a sort of project management flow chart.

Still cogitating…

I SO hear you on 'I never did like the idea of a ship being produced in one turn', but will accept it as being doable in the smallest classes.

However, I also don't like just halting production and switching to another as not having some cost of efficiency.

Doug

I SO hear you on 'I never did like the idea of a ship being produced in one turn', but will accept it as being doable in the smallest classes.

The US was able to crank out Liberty ships in an average of 42 days, subs and destroyers in 3-6 months. So there's a good precedent for small warships being completed in one campaign turn.

Even the bigger ships were cranked out pretty quickly when the US was in a full wartime economy. Of course, the US had a huge advantage in not being restricted in materials for the most part. Japan, on the other hand, was horribly restricted in armor steel, to the extent that there was a real choice between building ships and tanks.

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I really like the idea of using the number of hull+armor boxes as a/the limiting factor for the shipyard. To give a real-world example, the Delta Refit Pier where I used to work had two alongside berths and one drydock. The drydock was nowhere near big enough for an Aircraft Carrier, as it was only wide enough for a (large) sub. Maybe 100 feet wide and 700 feet long or thereabouts. You need huge drydocks for the Nimitz-class carriers, 1300 feet long and ~200 feet wide. Gotta have space for the staging to hold the hull panels in place until they're attached to the ribs.

Though modern shipbuilding seems to have settled into the large modules model, where significant chunks of the ship are built elsewhere and then brought to the drydock for final assembly. This speeds things up since you can start building the Island of a carrier before the flight deck is finished, and just drop the island in place as soon as the flight deck is ready to install the island.

By saying that, say, the Mars shipyards have a capacity of 9 ways with only two 50+box ways, this means you can build 7 hulls smaller than 50 boxes, but only 2 Ark Royal-class supercarriers (or one Ark Royal and one Valley Forge Superdreadnought), to use existing designs from Fleet Book 1. Or you could say that the Mars shipyards have a total capacity of 500 hull and armor boxes with no individual hull limits. The simple limit is probably better, and more accurately reflects the current method of shipbuilding.

Depending on how major a campaign system you want, you might even want a way to build or expand your shipyards. Not important in a short campaign, but pretty significant in a long campaign.

Very quick idea-thought.

Every planet/shipyard is rated as to how many points per day it can produce

Level 0 – not possible: the skills or material are not available

Level 1 – is launching stuff into orbit from the planet, short postings for workers due to lack of infrastructure etc.

Level 2+ a "space dock" is available. It has to be built at Level 1, and to a certain size declared at the planning stage. This can build ships up to it's size at the rate of 2pts per day

To upgrade to a Level 3 it takes it's size in days (Docks always upgrade like a level 1)

Ditto Level 4.

OR you can stay at your level, but increase the size of the dock.

Of course you could use the space tugs to build bits in different systems, and then marry them all up- as long as its done at a big enough.

You might want to impose a maximum points per turn that can be used across the galaxy- they can only dig the stuff up at a certain rate!

I like the hierarchy, but production is still pretty much linear by 'cost'. Size of ship limitations are fine, but I was looking for something with a bit multi-dimensional thinking, without TOO complex.

Thanks!

@Lion As 'shipyard' is a bit abstract in my idea, expanding production would be adding more capability, more boxes. Expanding a 'shipyard' would entail increased scale of coordination, bigger boxes.

Bigger boxes are more production AND more flexibility.

Okay, shooting from the hip now. Haven't been applying 'more thought' as suggested earlier. Real Life [tm] you know…

Doug

In GDW's Traveller expansion "Trillion Credit Squadron" the population of the planet, multiplied by the government type (0.5 to 1.2 for no government to dictatorship), divided by 1000, was the maximum tonnage a class A or class B starport could work on at a single time.

Construction time varied from 40 weeks for a 100 ton scout ship, to 160 weeks for a 10,000 ton light cruiser, to 208 weeks for a 100,000 ton light battleship.

For Power Projection, divide tonnage by 500 and those are your hit boxes.

Keith F.

I think those construction times are too long, kmfrye, though they might have been accurate for the 1970s.

I mean, a 747 is at least 150 tons empty (747-8 are over 200 tons empty) and those don't take 40 weeks to build today. (Cargo capacity for a 747 is listed at ~160-175m^3, since IIRC a Traveller 'ton' is actually a measure of volume, not mass) Loaded to Max Takeoff Weight, a latest-generation 747-8 is 442 tonnes, and Boeing finishes one of those every couple days to a week. I think the total assembly time is ~10 weeks. Interior fit&finish alone takes about 5 days.

And as mentioned, the 15,000 ton Liberty Ships could be built in an average of 42 days.