More opinions and thoughts on the campaign.
Re: Resource shipping. I think that shipping of resources as "raw MCr" between
systems is a
good compromise. If you want commerce raiding or piracy _anywhere_ other
than point of origin or destination you're going to have to devise a
campaign way to intercept fleets/convoys en route (Jump interdiction,
fixed jumpgates/warp points, parsec-scale sensors + immediate jump
reactions, etc.)
Re: Liberty ships In war time you're going to need a way to mimic this.
Something like deficit spending (which would be a big can of worms in a simple
system).
Were they really more expensive, or just built more cheaply? (5 hull rows?,
less armor (and therefore mass) for the same mix of systems?)
Re: Timescale
I think I like the 1-week/turn strategic scale _but_ it means that ship
production really isn't going to be much of a factor unless you're in
war-level production mode. If you start out with 10,000-20,000 pts of
ships in your (entire) fleet, for example, adding a Destroyer every 12 turns
(even 1 cruiser every turn during war production) ain't going to do much
unless you play very quickly. When the wars really get hot attrition will far
far outstrip production. Shipping raids and pirace also make more sense in
this scale.
If you go for the 1-week timescale you can almost abstract
production/construction out of the game and play with fixed startup
forces, adding a few "re-enforcements" every few turns (the category
would represent newly constructed, refitted, un-mothballed ships pressed
into service, and would be a factor of starting strength, not current
attrition state.)
If you really want production/construction to be a game factor, I think
you need the quarterly or even yearly turn.
Re: Advances I enjoy tech advances in campaign systems. If you go for the
longer timescale, a tech tree (and therefore starting tech level) could be
defined. It could be as simple as a% modifier for costs of certain systems
(e.g. Main drive gets 10% cheaper). Could be new tech (Humans reverse engineer
KV drives), or any number of other things (UN
introduces Heavy P-torps). Some of the best martial dramas in B5, for
example where when the white star _fleet_ showed up for the first time,
and when the Alliance had to take on the Shadow-tech augmented
Earthforce.
Re: Tricks Speaking of SF TV and movies (not real wars) a great deal of the
drama of space combat there centers around getting the unexpected edge (esp
since fights are rarely even - the good guys are often outmatched by the
bad). In one-off scenarios, there's really no place for this, but in a
larger campaign, it'd be nice for some unexpected gambit every now and then
(could be abstracted to legendary officers as in that other game system, or
something like Karma points).
> --- Noam Izenberg <noam.izenberg@jhuapl.edu> wrote:
...
> Re: Liberty ships
> mix of systems?)
Well, you have to be careful as to what you learn on the history channel, but
according to them, they were cheaper, using welding instead of rivets (and so
were less resilient to storms and easier to sink. At one point the shipyards
were competing to see how fast they could build them. The winner was just
about 4 days!
So in wartime, a highly motivated builder could probably build a few designs
of ship much faster than they would previously in peacetime, especially if
they could cut corners. A liberty equivalent would be merchant ships (useful
in campaign games probably) which had fragile hulls but were cheap and fast to
build.
They did basically the same thing in WWII for escort carriers. So I suspect
the same trick might be possible in FT. Perhaps it would be possible to design
a light carrier (4 squadrons) with a fragile hull at a very cheap price. Since
fighters are so effective in FT, it might work out well. Fighters, unlike
warships traditionally, tended to be built on assembly lines. Indeed it was
this assembly line mentality that resulted in ships like the liberty and the
escort carriers.
Also, even discounting these "special" ships, regular ships get built more
quickly in wartime too. Of course your campaign system may already take this
into account, but if it is based on "peacetime" build rates, it might be a
good idea
to up them a little to reflect the panic/motivation
involved in fighting a war. Maybe the side losing would get an increased
production rate based on everyone working to breaking point.
> Also, even discounting these "special" ships,
a DD in 3 months is a lot faster than peacetime.
> it might be a good idea
Good idea--this would help shelp keep things balanced for the life of
the capmpaign, instead of it being "fight two battles, whoever wins now has an
> David Griffin wrote:
This points a little bit towards building time being dependant upon number of
hull boxes, not mass or NPV. After all, a mass 100 warship would have 100 mass
full of drives, systems, armour, shields etc, whereas a mass 100 merchant
could well be 70 mass of empty space. In fact, correcting myself while I type,
construction time would be
dependant on (mass - empty space). As to what constitutes 'empty space',
certainly cargo capacity would, I'd suggest that fighter bays would too
(or maybe count 1/2 or so) which means that a mass 100 carrier could be
built quicker than a mass 100 battlecruiser.
> They did basically the same thing in WWII for
Weapon systems are often the bottleneck in real world ship building. Many
ships of the late C19th or early C20th ended up with guns, sometimes even
turrets, intended for other ships but diverted to avoid
holding up the latest / greatest dreadnought class. Foundries capable of
forging large calibre guns were few and far between. Whether this is relevant
to the GZGverse is another matter.
To maintain balance, there should be some cost to "working to the limit".
Perhaps a shipyard could increase it's rate by burning up capacity (i.e. a
shipyard of 10 units could operate at 30 units for one month by sacrificing
itself) This would allow those short bursts of productivity, but help keep
it in check since it would cost future building capacity - therefore you
would be more likely to use it in desperate situations, rather than to gain a
short term advantage.
--Binhan
[quoted original message omitted]
> To maintain balance, there should be some cost to "working to the
This could be easily balanced by saying that an increase in productivity now
MUST be balanced by a corresponding decrease in productivity at a later date.
By putting a time limit on the productivity increase, you can then simulate
the exhaustion of economies on prolonged war footing.
> --- Tony Francis <tony.francis@kuju.com> wrote:
I agree with this, but during wartime, the freighters we're talking about
(liberties) were built at a rate that boggled the imagination not only
compared to warships, but also with freighters built before the war.
Since the only weapons aboard escort carriers would be fighters, they could be
easy to build too, though they might be easy to destroy. They too would be
"mostly empty" except for fighter cradles and support equipment. Perhaps in
wartime, this fighter support gear would be constructed modularly in a single
unit (squadron fighter bay) and installed in an assembly fashion aboard
anything that could contain them. It should be easier to convert freighter
hulls to escort carriers because you don't need a flight deck in space.
Maybe once the war begins, these things start supplementing real carriers, or
perhaps they end up being used as convoy escorts.
I think that I, too, would lean toward cost being the time determinant.
Systems (engines, weapons, sensors) need to be calibrated and tested as part
of the construction process. Also included in cost would be the training of
crew, transportation of them to the site, and time getting them use to the
idiosyncrasies of the new ship.
Freighters would not need as long to train/calibrate.
But I would agree, that if a ship is made under rush conditions, it should
show up as either a weaker hull (representing shortcuts taken) or as random
system failure upon the 1st Battle. Perhaps a threshold check loosing systems
on a 6. And make the 1st threshold
loose systems at 5+.
In the same way, crew that lacks experience could be represented by not
counting the LAST crew factor. This
would be the they-will-learn-in-combat or just-give-
me-warm-bodies approach. This often happens toward the
end of a war when much of your professional force has been lost to attrition.
-----
Brian Bell
-----
[quoted original message omitted]
> At 9:00 AM -0700 8/23/01, David Griffin wrote:
But remember, the components of the ships were being built elsewhere. They
were in essence assembling the ships from component parts on the slipways.
They were not built entirely in 4 days. In some cases
sub-assemblies were built in places as far away as Wisconsin and
floated down the Mississippi.
The escort carriers were a far cry from the larger fleet carriers. Both in
speed, ability, capacity and durability.
Prefab techniques will help. But you still need industrial capacity to make
those components.
> Since the only weapons aboard escort carriers would
But you have to add handling gear, armament storage space, shops, crew space,
pressurized areas for fighter maintenance, etc. Not a quick conversion I
suspect.
> At 5:40 AM -0700 8/23/01, David Griffin wrote:
Welding is actually stronger and lighter. It just has different crack
propagation issues. Cracks stopped at riveted seams, but the stress could be
transferred through the welded seam. There were also issues in the metal
composition due to issues with manganese imports. The metallurgy had been
changed to include a higher content of carbon which was stronger but more
brittle. The once the nature of the crack formation was discovered short term
fixes (crack arrestors) and repairs allowed for the existing ships to be used.
This problem of high probability of crack formation in ships (especially the
#3 cargo hatch cover on the Liberty Cargo ships) affected a large number of
vessels. For example, "On Feb 1, 1946 there were 2212 liberty ships in
operation, 2,047 had had corner's modified, 1854 had had crack arrestors
added." (pp 213, Naval Engineering and American Seapower, Rr Adm King)
> They did basically the same thing in WWII for
And for LSTs, DEs and PT boats.
> be possible in FT. Perhaps it would be possible
It was prefabrication. Not assembly lines that allowed the liberty ships. One
allows the other, but they are not the same.
> David Griffin wrote:
> I agree with this, but during wartime, the freighters
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; 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
On Friday, August 24, 2001 2:58 AM, Bell, Brian K (Contractor)
> [SMTP:Brian.Bell@dscc.dla.mil] wrote:
That could make a very good way to represent crew experience:
Untrained: -3 CF, 6 months training to make Green
Green: -1 CF, 6 weeks training and 1 battle or wargame to make Regular
Regular: +0, 6 battles to make veteran
Veteran: +1 CF, 12 battles to make Elite
Elite: +2 CF
Ships replacing casualties must roll greater than the number of replacements
(in% terms) to avoid being downgraded a step. eg: a Regular cruiser of 5 CF
replaces 2 crew after battle, there is 40% chance that the crew experience
will be reduced to Green due to key personnel losses. All navy replacements
are drawn from Green crews (unless you decommission another ship with
surviving CF aboard). Sending untrained crewmen aboard is asking for trouble
(although you could probably put them aboard merchant ships).
Wargames double the maintainance cost of a ship for a turn (or other
appropriate costs under the campaign rules used)
Neath Southern Skies -http://home.pacific.net.au/~southernskies/
[mkw] Admiral Peter Rollins; Task Force Zulu
> That could make a very good way to represent crew experience:
Hm, might be a little rough on a frigate or DD with only a couple of crew to
start
> Wargames double the maintainance cost of a ship for a turn (or other
Probably double for ships not in combat--more like x10 for ships that
On Friday, August 24, 2001 10:18 AM, Laserlight
> [SMTP:laserlight@quixnet.net] wrote:
As an example, HH spent her first tour aboard an SDN as an ensign before
promoting to a LAC as a Lt. for further training until finally getting her own
first DD as a commander. Untrained civilian becoming Green crew is normally
part of your
pre-deployment training (or should be, anyway) if you have a decent
program in place. If a campaign wanted to get that involved in crew
management, you need to pay your training costs 6 months in advance or pay the
penalty when you suffer heavy losses or big shipbuilding projects. For most
campaigns, you would presume the crews are already at Green status when
assigned to your newly completed ship.
> > Wargames double the maintainance cost of a ship for a turn (or other
Combat operations should be part of normal supply etc and would be taken into
account in post battle repair costs. It's more there should be some
sort of peacetime/non-operational cost for the live-fire exercises
required (what government want's to spend money on shooting at dummy targets?)
Neath Southern Skies -http://home.pacific.net.au/~southernskies/
[mkw] Admiral Peter Rollins; Task Force Zulu
Which means that in a campaign, a player could elect to pay training costs
BEFORE THE GAME STARTS to represent getting ready for war. The "funds" would
deplete resources available for building ships, though...
> "Robertson, Brendan" wrote:
--- Richard and Emily Bell <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
wrote:
...
> The Liberty ships were assembled in such a short
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
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.
From Brendan;
> Untrained: -3 CF, 6 months training to make Green
Or 6 weeks "training as you serve" in hard pressed wartime (or 1 battle).
> Green: -1 CF, 6 weeks training and 1 battle or wargame to make Regular
_6_ Battles?! The way most people play any given ship is lucky to
survive 2 in a row with crew largely unscathed. At FT squadron fleet scales,
ships go pop too easily. 2 or 3 at most.
From Richard Bell:
> Any ship could be fabricated in this way, even
> the
I like this allot, but how do you translate it to a simple campaign system?
Sseems like you need some kind of Tradeoff system Here's one example:
Ship cost x 3/ (design time x tool up time x production time) =
constant.
Simple example (I know the realities would be quite different)
A 300 Mcr BC class takes (from scratch) 1 year to design 1 year to tool up for
1 year to build at
The constant ("Ship Construction Constant") is 300 Mcr/yr^3
If you want to build it in 1/2 the time, you can:
Double the per/unit cost, design time, or tool up time
Increase design time by 4 months and add either 100 to the cost or 4 months to
tooling.
You might require some fiddling with the proportions to get something that
works in all scales that concern you. Or additional factors could be
introduced (e.g. "Wartime Panic Modifier" "Tech Breakthrough Modifier"
"Strained Resources Modifier")
- Each factor probably needs hard lower limits, or perhaps (if you want
real complexity) exponential scaling
- Bonuses to design/tool up for recycling old designs (Examples: The FSE
Jerez probably gets significant bonuses from basically being a Treiste welded
onto the back of a Suffren, NAC gets smaller bonueses for the
re-use of the 'teardrop' bridge and 'engine pod' designs.
> That's why you'd want to limit this special processing
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).
> savings in Liberties was cutting corners. But you
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.
> At 4:38 AM -0700 8/24/01, David Griffin wrote:
It probably depends on the nation and its current doctrine. The US builds
DDGs, SSBNs and a few other ships with the modular design. Carriers aren't.
Now, looking at ships, it appears that the all of the 4 major nations use some
Modular construction for some ships with some common parts. Now there modular
construction could also be part and parcel for subcomponents or for hulls in
general.
Likely the building process is subcomponent fabrication on the surface of low
gravity planetoids and then are lifted to orbit for final assembly of the
major components.
> [quoted text omitted]
I like this!
You can also make it easy this way: Make the constant = 1 day per MCr.
To design a variant of a class you must pay for BOTH the systems removed AND
added in the design and tooling phases. And then for the revised cost of the
ship in the construction phase.
For refit, you would have to pay for BOTH the systems removed AND the systems
added in the design for all THREE phases (design, tooling, construction), but
not for the other systems of the refitted ship.
If you are doing BOTH a redesign and the same refit to existing ships, use
only the refit numbers for design and retooling. If you pay for the redesign
first and decide later to also refit, you will have to pay the full cost (time
and cost) for the refit design and retool [refit requires using existing
support items (power, hard points, etc.), while a redesign allows you to move
these items more freely].
Payment above refers to both campaign cost and time. Tooling is also on a per
ship basis. If your dock needs to handle building 2 ships at a time, you must
pay the costs for 2.
Examples:
You design a Maximilian BC. This cost 333MCr and takes 333 days. You tool up a
construction doc. This takes 333MCr and takes 333 days. You then construct the
first Maximilian. This also takes 333MCr and 333 days. The result is that it
took 999MCr and 999 days (just under 3 years) to make the 1st Maximilian.
You make the next Maximilian. It only take 333MCr and 333 days (as you did not
have to retool or design).
You decide to add the ability to build Maximilians to 2 other docs. It costs
you 666MCr and ties up those docs for 333 days.
Later...
You decide to do a redesign of the Maximilian that replaces
the FP,F,FS Class-3 Beam with a Pulse Torpedo (same arcs)
and 4 armor with an ADFC and 2 extra PDS. The total cost of the systems
removed and added is 58. So it takes 58 days to redesign and 58 days to retool
each of the docks. Cost for redesign is 58 MCr. Cost for retool is 174 MCr (58
x3 docks). And the new cost for construction would be 339 and take 339 days to
construct.
You also decide to refit your existing Maximilians. The design for the refit
takes 58 days and 58 MCr. The retool takes 58 days and 58 MCr per dock where
refits can be done. And each refit takes 58 days and 58 MCr (once you get the
ship to the dock).
A minimum of 30 should be set for any phase of the project.
Or to paraphrase Laserlight:
The 1st ship of a design/redesign cost 3x normal
Refits cost 3x the cost of the systems removed and added. Cost is in time and
money.
---
Brian Bell bbell1@insight.rr.com ICQ: 12848051 AIM: Rlyehable YIM: Rlyehable
The Full Thrust Ship Registry:
http://www.ftsr.org
---
[quoted original message omitted]
> --- Laserlight <laserlight@quixnet.net> wrote:
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
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.
From: "David Griffin" <carbon_dragon@yahoo.com>
> > So you'd say :
That is the way it works, though--if you know you're going to build a
lot of them, you can buy the tooling to make it efficient. Example: I used to
sell plastics where the cost for a single piece was $200; the tooling would
cost about $8K to mold them, but after that you could get (minimum) 5000
pieces run for $30 each.
Of course, if you want to erect a bigger barrier, you could either have a
higher tooling multiplier or require minimums ("you can build 50 FF at
2500NPV; or you can build 30FF at 2500NPV--minmium is 2500NPV to start
the
> --- Chris DeBoe <LASERLIGHT@QUIXNET.NET> wrote:
...
> > Not bad for covering the ordinary ship, built
Yes, this is the usual way things are done. I wasn't intending to dissagree. I
was just saying that the Liberties were constructed without regard to how long
they'd last or how safe they were in storms. They cut additional dangerous
corners.
But hey it worked! A lot of them sunk on their first voyage and others lasted
only a few voyages, but there was always a new ship to replace it (or 10 new
ships).
In the FT venacular, one side of the conflict would be forever destroying
enemy freighters, but dang it there would always be more of the dang things to
destroy!
> Laserlight wrote:
> > That's why you'd want to limit this special processing
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