Rules for building ships without a shipyard?

MasterGwydion

Emperor Mongoose
Are there any rules for building ships with no shipyard? I ask for two reasons. One, is the guy building a 10-ton light fighter in his barn with his racing team. Two, is for the people building space stations, as they are obviously not built in a shipyard.

Edit: and 3, I want to design a Dyson Ring for a potential campaign, because mega-structures are cool. lol
 
Construction decks are like mobile shipyards. Large structures would be built in smaller sections and then attached together. It uses the same rules as a shipyard, but is limited to half the construction deck's size.

For the barn, does it have a workbench? With a fabricator? Closest thing to that sort of construction rule we have, you saw the other day on page 35 of the Excel Ship Designer thread.

But it strikes me that a barn of appropriate size fitted out with the latest mechanical/electronic gear of a racing team would be little different from a full hangar. Add in the workbench, and with sufficient tonnage of spare ship's parts of the correct tech level and you can start making pieces, providing you had the blueprints.
 
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A dyson ring as Dr. Dyson envisionsed it, or as most sci-fi sees it? (Dyson's concept wasn't a solid sphere, but a collection of structures intended to collect power from the star.).
 
For the Barn thing, I would start with the base building rules from PoD, and then have tools, be a manpower multiplier. I also would probably make a number of ship compotents as unable to be made by a singular person. Like the Fusion+ reactor. And the fuel tank that holds the liquid hydrogen and maybe also the avionics and the transponder, if for your setting a ship like is required to have one.
 
Of all of those, the only thing I would see as needing external input would be the programming of the transponder by an official of the appropriate governing body.
Everything else can be built with an appropriate fabricator... or at least the complete parts listing can be built that way, providing you have the specs to input into that fabricator. Whether that is an issue of law level or referee fiat is a subject for a game master to decide.
 
Engineering would be the bottleneck.

Electronics and hull could probably be hammered together, maybe even the materials purchased from the local Home Depot and Radio Shack.

Batteries, if you aren't doing the Le Mans race, which leaves us with one to nine percent of volume manoeuvre drive.
 
Everything else can be built with an appropriate fabricator... or at least the complete parts listing can be built that way, providing you have the specs to input into that fabricator. Whether that is an issue of law level or referee fiat is a subject for a game master to decide.
And the Fabricator is of sufficiently high TL; to make TL 12 parts you need a TL 14 (or TL 15) fab.


Are there any rules for building ships with no shipyard? I ask for two reasons. One, is the guy building a 10-ton light fighter in his barn with his racing team. Two, is for the people building space stations, as they are obviously not built in a shipyard.

Edit: and 3, I want to design a Dyson Ring for a potential campaign, because mega-structures are cool. lol
And Four} There needs to be a way for a community to bootstrap themselves by building the first. This is especially important for a TL 'N' construction deck on a lower tech world -- how is the first one ever built? Is the first just built as a 'prototype' with TL N-1 equipment, and then it (with all the quirks and drawbacks) is able to build non-prototype TL N copies of itself? Is that too easy?
 
And the Fabricator is of sufficiently high TL; to make TL 12 parts you need a TL 14 (or TL 15) fab.



And Four} There needs to be a way for a community to bootstrap themselves by building the first. This is especially important for a TL 'N' construction deck on a lower tech world -- how is the first one ever built? Is the first just built as a 'prototype' with TL N-1 equipment, and then it (with all the quirks and drawbacks) is able to build non-prototype TL N copies of itself? Is that too easy?
Collapsed, pre-fab, self assembling building that is a construction deck shipped in from a higher tech world. Land near the site, position the box over a foundation, hook it up to a power supply and watch the thing unfold itself.
 
Collapsed, pre-fab, self assembling building that is a construction deck shipped in from a higher tech world. Land near the site, position the box over a foundation, hook it up to a power supply and watch the thing unfold itself.
No good; that is just declaring it is turtles all the way down. It is indistinguishable from claiming that all technology, everywhere, was only ever discovered once (by some ancient progenitor race) and everything afterwards are only copies. We know that is not true for the in-game universe though; there are systems which developed technology independently.

Still, the progenitor problem doesn't go away -- how did the first 'X' ever get invented and built?
 
No good; that is just declaring it is turtles all the way down. It is indistinguishable from claiming that all technology, everywhere, was only ever discovered once (by some ancient progenitor race) and everything afterwards are only copies. We know that is not true for the in-game universe though; there are systems which developed technology independently.

Still, the progenitor problem doesn't go away -- how did the first 'X' ever get invented and built?
OK. I see. You were talking developed in isolation, and I was going with a colonial model.
 
OK. I see. You were talking developed in isolation, and I was going with a colonial model.
To be fair, I am not the one who asked the original question.

And while I do like the collapsed pre-fab construction deck, I suspect that 'construction decks' are an error -- especially if a 'shipyard' is less about fabricating components and more about arranging a selection of pre-made components inside a hull. It seems if the latter approach is taken, then an entire world of 'manufacturing plants' of appropriate TL is needed to keep the 'Construction Deck' supplied with the components. This makes the progenitor problem more about 'How do I make a higher TL Manufacturing Plant, without already having one'? Which sort of takes us into the weeds....
 
I asked the original question. I doubt your backyard racing enthusiast is going to be buying a shipyard just to work on one ship. Maybe a Workshop, since you only need a workshop to do maintenance and repairs? Maybe this would allow the building of a ship as a cottage industry as opposed to a full-blown commercial industry.

As for large things, (total separate issue) how do you build a huge ship or space station, by the rules, when no shipyard can be that large?
 
In pieces. See the wiki entry on liberty ships. They were made assembly line style, or their pieces were, and then the pieces were craned over to the slip and assembled there.
In the same manner, several shipyards can work towards one capital ship, making pieces that will fit in their bay and then assembling them externally with EVAs, utility craft and grappler arms.
This is mentioned in at least one of the Mongoose books
 
To be fair, I am not the one who asked the original question.

And while I do like the collapsed pre-fab construction deck, I suspect that 'construction decks' are an error -- especially if a 'shipyard' is less about fabricating components and more about arranging a selection of pre-made components inside a hull. It seems if the latter approach is taken, then an entire world of 'manufacturing plants' of appropriate TL is needed to keep the 'Construction Deck' supplied with the components. This makes the progenitor problem more about 'How do I make a higher TL Manufacturing Plant, without already having one'? Which sort of takes us into the weeds....
RAW, I interpret a construction deck to be a portable factory,, and a fabricator to be on par with a high end 3d printer that handles multiple materials.
Now, I make my players import ships parts or materials from an appropriate TL planet, because they are using the equivalent of a pirate base. but with those parts, the construction deck can make factories of its own TL to support itself. Then you only need raw materials.
 
In the same manner, several shipyards can work towards one capital ship, making pieces that will fit in their bay and then assembling them externally with EVAs, utility craft and grappler arms.
This is mentioned in at least one of the Mongoose books
High Guard 2022 (page 8):

"At the Referee’s discretion, very large ships can be built in a modular fashion allowing simultaneous construction. This means the total construction time can be reduced by up to 90%. This is typically done only on ships exceeding 50,000 tons."
 
Typically.

But unless they're using gigacasting, sub fifty kilotonne hulls would benefit as well.
I think the implication is supposed to be that each 'sub-unit' has to be 5k dTons or larger to get any benefit; and that the maximum number of sub-units is ten. Personally, I would tie both of those to TL; and it certainly seems like there ought to be some trade-offs possible between number & size of sub-units.
 
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