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Mobile Shipyard Craziness

Ethereal

Ethereal

Banned Member
So.. this is going to be a weird one. Before we start, I just spotted some rather large potential loopholes or things that need clarifying. Better safe than sorry, futureproofing and all that. These sort of need to be answered, if anyone or @Wes can.


1 - If you have a ship capable of mass fabrication can it create other ships? Shipyards only cover "Installations or starships that are capable of building capital ships and/or warships", not anything under that in size.

2 - Do mobile shipyards, if large enough, count as a "major presence" for corporation buildup limitation when landing on a planet? If they're the size of a factory?

3 - What if you make a mobile shipyard with multiple fabrication areas, not one, can you build more than one thing at a time? What if it's not an "installation or starship that is capable of building capital ships and/or warships"?

4 - If you have one huge fabrication area can you sub-divide it into smaller spaces? Make several fighters in one area rather than one and wasting all that space?

5 - Can mobile shipyards be scaled to meet the sizes of what they're making? Is there any reason not to make them dreadnought-sized?


Cheers, before we have any pseudo aether-stomboli happening.
 
Ok, here are some of my thoughts/observations.

First, it is clear that you can build something larger from a smaller fabrication unit. A tier 14 Shipyard can build a tier 15 dreadnaught or huge space station.

Second, shipyards are defined by what they can build, warships and capital ships.

To me, it seems logical that with the proper raw materials, blueprints, and starting fabrication bay, one could build progressively larger fabrication units.

So lets say for a moment that we have a carrier which has a fabrication unit onboard which can fabricate small fighter craft. Say tier 9. To me, it makes sense that they might with time and effort fabricate a shipyard that can build warship. However, once it is made, I think it would count against the MBL.

Keeping on with this carrier idea, lets say that they decide not to use their fabricator to build a huge shipyard. Instead, they just decided to make what it was designed to, fighters. That's fine, they add to the small craft section of the MBL.

Thus, with regards to 1, sure, just so long as it can't build a warship.

With regards to 2 I think that a single shipyard could count as a 'major presence' in a system as that is what new factions start out with. That said, I think we must also remember that the number of systems you can have count towards your MBL is capped by the largest number of players you have had. Thus a shipyard visiting a random system if you are at your MBL cap, does't count for the purposes of MBL.

To 3 & 4, I think it is certainly plausable to section off a part of your area and build more then one thing at a time or to have a ship with more then one fabrication area. Consider for a moment a modern 3d printer if you are building two things small enough to not interfere with each outher as it's building, then you can certainly build more then one thing at the same time. However, there is a obvious limitaiton, the print head can only be at one place at a time. Depending on the nature of the fabrication unit, I think other limitations may appear.

To 5, I think shipyards could resize themselves to become as large or small as needed. Consider for a moment a shipyard with an expanding middle section to accomadate larger craft. In terms of what size they should be counted as, to me it seems logical to classify them as the largest that they can be. You shouldn't make tier 15 shipyards because then they would fall under the huge spacestation catagory. However, I currently don't know of a reason that you would have your MBL shipyards be smaller then tier 14 except for flavor.
 
As far as I know, each single shipyard is capable of building a single warship at a time, but I'm not sure how that would apply to fighters.
 
That's the fear of the Aether Stromboli, however. We do not want shipyards to progressively grow bigger to the extent they can trivially almost dump out warships at a time. If we let a shipyard produce multiple fighters at once, we can simply "scale it up."
 
I don't actually see something in the guidelines that lists how many things a factory can build at once.

The obvious answer to why don't things scale up indefinitely is 'Thats now how things work IRL'. You'll inevitably hit some bottleneck to your production that can't be solved easily.
 
Gonna keep this short, as it’s been a long day for me. Anyhoo.
  1. Going to agree with @Soban on this one. Could a unit capable of mass fabrication build a ship? Yes - but it then would count as a shipyard under the MBL.
  2. No, if only because something that’s part of the “reward” associated with having a major influence in a star system - the shipyard - can’t be part of what’s required to get the “reward” in the first place.
  3. You can, but only for small craft, in my opinion - and if it isn’t capable of building starships, then, well, it’s a not a shipyard.
  4. Yes, but like Soban said: at Tier 15 they’d be counted as huge space stations - and there isn’t, in my opinion, any mechanical reason to not make a shipyard Tier 14.
Wes said otherwise in this post, @Zack; regardless, however, in order to prevent any future powergaming I’ll be submitting an update to the MBL tomorrow that caps the number of starships huge space stations and shipyards can simultaneously construct at 10 and 1, respectively.
 
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