High Guard 2E construction times

[Spartan159]

Should there be a modification to the construction times, by scale or TL or something? Or does an Atlantic class Heavy Cruiser really take 110 years to build? 915 years for a Tigress? Maybe the construction times need to be rethought?

 

[PsiTraveller]

I always houserule that the shipyard is doing 1 million a day per 100 tons of space devoted to the effort. So a 1000 ton shipyard, able to make up to 500 ton ships, could make 5 X 100 ton ships, each doing 1 million a day. Large vessels still take a long time though.

 

[rust2]

915 years for a Tigress?

That's a prudent economic decision. It provides a long term employment guarantee for the shipyard staff and the government of the planet in question can also rely on a steady tax income for the planet's development. And once the Tigress is completed it is already outdated and has to be refitted, which adds some more years to the employment and the tax income. Plus, the Imperial Navy has enough time to design the blueprints for the successor model. No problem there at all ... 8)

 

[-Daniel-]

915 years for a Tigress?

That's a prudent economic decision. It provides a long term employment guarantee for the shipyard staff and the government of the planet in question can also rely on a steady tax income for the planet's development. And once the Tigress is completed it is already outdated and has to be refitted, which adds some more years to the employment and the tax income. Plus, the Imperial Navy has enough time to design the blueprints for the successor model. No problem there at all ... 8)

So her maiden voyage is from the construction ship yard to the retrofitting ship yard? :lol:

 

[rust2]

So her maiden voyage is from the construction ship yard to the retrofitting ship yard? :lol:

Well, actually, after 915 years they prefer to call it a "crone voyage" ... :wink:

 

[-Daniel-]

So her maiden voyage is from the construction ship yard to the retrofitting ship yard? :lol:

Well, actually, after 915 years they prefer to call it a "crone voyage" ... :wink:

Ok, I literally laughed out loud at work. Well played Sir. :mrgreen:

EDIT: Fixed Typo.

 

[Spartan159]

I always houserule that the shipyard is doing 1 million a day per 100 tons of space devoted to the effort. So a 1000 ton shipyard, able to make up to 500 ton ships, could make 5 X 100 ton ships, each doing 1 million a day. Large vessels still take a long time though.

I had a look at Starports. It had a construction time per module for different types of shipyard module but apparently it is up to the GM to make all the starports? The general starport examples only covered service time and fees from what I saw.

 

[-Daniel-]

Back to the serious conversation about time. Was there any response from Mongoose on the time needed to build the Tigress? Was that really the intended outcome or is the time needed in need of correction?

 

[AnotherDilbert]

I commented on this issue in the beta, with no response or change from Mongoose, so I guess they are leaving it to the Referee.

 

[-Daniel-]

I commented on this issue in the beta, with no response or change from Mongoose, so I guess they are leaving it to the Referee.

It is too bad because while I can just ignore it, it does seem like something that would be easy to adjust. 915 years just feels silly.

 

[-Daniel-]

I commented on this issue in the beta, with no response or change from Mongoose, so I guess they are leaving it to the Referee.

It is too bad because while I can just ignore it, it does seem like something that would be easy to adjust. 915 years just feels silly.

Ok, I have been thinking, what if high end or specialized Shipyards were made up of several "shipyard units" Each unit is a shipyard as outlined on page 62. So they could do more than the $1MCr per day with their combined work. Say the star of the navy shipyards is made up of the equivalent of 20 shipyard units. So now that Tigress at a total of 333,624 days needs 333,624/20=16,681 days in that particular shipyard or only 45 years rather than the 191 years. Now of course these mega-shipyards would be rare, tied to class A only locations I would imagine, but at least it could stop the silly 200 years to build one ship thing.

Just a half baked idea.

 

[PsiTraveller]

Well a Nimitz class aircraft carrier takes 4 years to build, the Navy buys one every 5 years http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/how-fast-could-america-build-more-aircraft-carriers-13653

So a massive battleship should probably not take more than a decade to build IMHO. Otherwise it becomes a bit of a generation thing. Someday son, when you grow up, you can fly in this thing. I know they did this sort of time in building cathedrals, but a military operation has more pressing matters. Losses in the field would need to be recovered, and if ships take so long to construct how are losses in war replaced in time to be useful in a conflict. Either that or losses from the Fifth Frontier war would be replaced in 30 years? That is a long time to leave a border undefended.

So could a Liberty ship program be built?, perhaps not in 4 days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Robert_E._Peary but something fast enough to have an impact on a war.

Or do you want ships that are so important because they take so long to build that an act of sabotage or a disaster in battle changes the fortunes of a Sector for a generation?
It is interesting to think about.

Reading about the SS Robert Peary: There were 57 Man years of labour in each ship, and generally in the war were produced in about 41 days. That is 500 people working around the clock, so 1500 on triple shifts.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

CONSTRUCTION TIMES
Construction times vary wildly, depending on the size and complexity of the spacecraft and the capabilities of the shipyard. On average, assume that it takes one day per million credits to build a spacecraft at an average commercial shipyard.

This tells us absolutely nothing about how long it takes to build a Tigress at a Naval Depot. This tells us something about how long it takes to build a Free Trader at your local small-business-friendly yard.

Remember, the Imperial Navy has thousands of capital ships, and probably buys/builds them in lots of tens or hundreds. The scale is completely different from modern capital ship construction.

Other editions hints that it takes in the order of a few years to build even the biggest ships, and that process can be speeded up considerably with experience and throwing resources at it.

 

[-Daniel-]

CONSTRUCTION TIMES
Construction times vary wildly, depending on the size and complexity of the spacecraft and the capabilities of the shipyard. On average, assume that it takes one day per million credits to build a spacecraft at an average commercial shipyard.

This tells us absolutely nothing about how long it takes to build a Tigress at a Naval Depot. This tells us something about how long it takes to build a Free Trader at your local small-business-friendly yard.

Remember, the Imperial Navy has thousands of capital ships, and probably buys/builds them in lots of tens or hundreds. The scale is completely different from modern capital ship construction.

Other editions hints that it takes in the order of a few years to build even the biggest ships, and that process can be speeded up considerably with experience and throwing resources at it.

While I don't disagree with your opinion, in fact I agree, what you say makes so much more sense. But it remains the question was raised above based on the only reference we do have in the book. So I offered an alternative way to look at it so it didn't take 191 years to build one capital ship. I agree with you, Mongoose can handwave away the one line we do have by saying it only applies to ships under a particular size etc. but it seemed easier to just define larger yards capable of doing things faster though.

I really don't care what is said in the rule book, it just should be addressed somehow so we don't end up with silly references later like the 191 years thing.

 

[Galadrion]

Just as a quick off-the-cuff workaround, I came up with this: use the square root of the ship price in megacredits as the baseline construction time in weeks. That still puts the Type A Free Trader at around six-to-seven weeks for new construction (right around the same timescale as the default), but it puts the Tigress at a little over eleven years (a long project, but not unreasonable considering the scale of the ship). And, of course, a government with a pressing need and resources to burn could commit those resources, spending heavily in order to bring the launch date in.

Note that this is not a detail-oriented, heavily rationalized suggestion, merely a quick and reasonable-sounding game decision to come up with something that would work from the adventurer's-eye side of things. We don't care how the shipyard manages to produce a ship in so many days, only that we have a good estimate of how long we have to keep from being run off the planet (or incarcerated!) before we can collect our new toy.

 

[-Daniel-]

Just as a quick off-the-cuff workaround, I came up with this: use the square root of the ship price in megacredits as the baseline construction time in weeks. That still puts the Type A Free Trader at around six-to-seven weeks for new construction (right around the same timescale as the default), but it puts the Tigress at a little over eleven years (a long project, but not unreasonable considering the scale of the ship). And, of course, a government with a pressing need and resources to burn could commit those resources, spending heavily in order to bring the launch date in.

Note that this is not a detail-oriented, heavily rationalized suggestion, merely a quick and reasonable-sounding game decision to come up with something that would work from the adventurer's-eye side of things. We don't care how the shipyard manages to produce a ship in so many days, only that we have a good estimate of how long we have to keep from being run off the planet (or incarcerated!) before we can collect our new toy.

Oh, I like this idea. Offers a way to keep all the times reasonable regardless of size. NIce. :mrgreen:

 

[Galadrion]

*Laugh* Well, if you really decide to push it, you can still make things unreasonable, but with this, you're going to have to work at it. For instance, a planetoid-based space station built from something close to the size of Ceres is probably going to take decades to complete, even with my suggested modification. But if someone - either ref or player - decides to tackle a project like this, I would expect them to probably have the math to handle quite a few problems that won't come up in normal play.

Just as a throwaway example, let's say someone came up with a project roughly estimated to take thirty-five years for completion. That's just over 1,800 weeks; square that, and you're talking about a project budgeted at a little over three and a quarter trillion credits. By anyone's standards, that is a huge project, not something that wandering adventurers are likely to be driving. Honestly, the only game reason for ever needing "rules" for something along these lines is to allow the referee justification for whatever plot-guiding hand-waving needs done.

 

[phavoc]

None of the building rules cover the concepts of prefabrication really. Even many of the larger ships are built using prefabricated modules (which technically aren't part of the build time, though that's kinda cheating since they have to be built sometime and somewhere).

Case in point, during WW2 the fastest the US build and launched a Liberty ship was 4 days 15 hours and 29 minutes. The BB Iowa had her keel laid down, was launched and commissioned in 3years (far fewer pre-fab parts here). It took about just as long to build one of her barrels.

So it would not be unrealistic for a Tigress to be built in say 4-5 years. However, and with big caveats, it would take a dedicated shipyard and construction crew that knew how to assemble her. Plus the components would most likely be assembled and mounted in pre-fabricated modules. So the "true" construction time and requirements would be hard to estimate.

Basically I would say that players will never be buying warships, thus you don't need to worry about creating rules to build things like this. Or space stations of any size. The construction rules are meant to handle PC-sized vessels, so stick with those and you will have far fewer headaches. Unless you want to play strategic Traveller, and if so I'd say go out and pick up a copy of Imperial Starfire to do the strategic stuff.

 

[-Daniel-]

Basically I would say that players will never be buying warships, thus you don't need to worry about creating rules to build things like this. Or space stations of any size. The construction rules are meant to handle PC-sized vessels, so stick with those and you will have far fewer headaches. Unless you want to play strategic Traveller, and if so I'd say go out and pick up a copy of Imperial Starfire to do the strategic stuff.

For me, this is the bottom line. I never plan to run a large strategic game so the build rules cover the kinds of ships that I might have to deal with.

 

[fusor]

Basically I would say that players will never be buying warships, thus you don't need to worry about creating rules to build things like this. Or space stations of any size. The construction rules are meant to handle PC-sized vessels, so stick with those and you will have far fewer headaches. Unless you want to play strategic Traveller, and if so I'd say go out and pick up a copy of Imperial Starfire to do the strategic stuff.

Not sure how you can say "the rules are meant to handle PC-sized vessels" when they clearly are meant to handle ships a lot bigger than that. And space stations, for that matter. That's the whole point of High Guard - it's supposed to go up to big sizes that are beyond the sort of "Adventure level" ships that PCs run around in. It's really more for people who want a more complete design system or for people who enjoy the 'mini-game' of ship design for its own sake.