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Ship build times

Alex Hart

Alex Hart

Well-Known Member
I was doing some research on how we could build ships for the kuvexian war, when I noticed something curious. Ship build times scale linearly with tier, not exponentially, as one would expect for building a craft that has exponentially more stuff that needs to be made to complete it. There's no real technological thing on SARP I can think of that would cause this to be happening. Does anyone else think this is odd? Should we make a fix for this?
 
Not a bad point. Exponential growth would make sense, presuming that the vessel increases comparably in width and in height as well as length. There are cases where this isn't true, however. There are also cases where some vessels are gunships where a good part of their length is the spike, or where some vessels don't scale the same way in the number of decks. It's also possible for two ships in the same Tier to be notably different sizes.

While I agree with the exponential concept as a possible basis, perhaps more prudent than simply a linear growth, it isn't a perfect solution as much as perhaps a starting point or gross simplification. This isn't an FM ruling, mind you. Just discussion. I'd like to see you post more of your findings so I can see them when I have time. I'm going to sleep right now.
 
Sorry for the double post. It's been most of a day since my past reply and I've got more new input based on having a clearer head. I also want it to show up on notifications for a few specific people.

First, Here is the link to what I think Alex is referring to.

Now, each Tier is roughly considered to be double the previous Tier in scale, attack, and defense. This pattern holds roughly in the sizes listed here for Tiers 9 through 15. Math says that doubling the scale of something (which means doubling the length, width, and height) would increase its internal volume by a factor of eight. A basic rule of thumb would imply that increasing the tier of something by one would make it eight times more costly to produce in time and resources. There are, however, mitigating factors. This presumption would indicate that the same number of people would work on any ship at any given time, when in reality the number of people working on a ship at any given time would be increased roughly in step with the added volume. As such, Eight times as much ship does not equate to the increased labor taking eight times as long in practice. There are other matters such as how complex the vessel is, how much extra care is needed to produce and shape its frame and hull, shared components, etc. Even ships in the same tier, like the Chiaki and Plumeria, can take vastly different amounts of resources and time to complete.

A basic thought could be to quadruple each tier's construction time over the previous instead of octupling it. That would compensate for the labor issue if even in a crude way. Another idea might be, using that as a rough guide, to try to get a rough idea of each individual ship's construction time to augment the table and add it to the NTSE's requirements for a ship's submission complete with a paragraph of justification. Smaller size within Tier, simpler shapes, and more common armor materials might make a ship take less time, for example.

I also find myself wondering how long refits of existing vessels would take. Perhaps the current table is a better fit for refit timing.

Thoughts?
 
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My main issue was with the fact that the building time scaled linearly instead of exponentially. Even doubling times is an enormous improvement, but 4x seems to make sense. I'm not entirely sure about ship build times being assigned individually. On the surface, that seems like a good idea, however it will vary greatly between factions which will need a lot of consideration to figure out.
 
One problem I just thought of is an OOC one, though. If we still had Tier 9 take 4 days to make and did quadrupling, Tier 10 would take 16 days, 11 would take 64, 12 would take 256, 13 would take 1024 (2.8 years), 14 would take 4096 (11.2 years), and Tier 15 would take 16,384 (44.9 years). Who would want to wait literal OOC years or decades to be able to use this equipment?

Even if we just doubled the Tier from the previous one, it'd take 256 days to make a Tier 15 piece of equipment.

I understand your issue from a logical standpoint and agree with it, but do you have a better way than what we currently have to balance it with the concern of waiting too long to employ a design in RP to hold user interest? I could see trimming down Tier 9 construction's time and sticking with doubling possibly working.
 
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Tier 15 at 2x would be 256 days for a dreadnought or colony ship. Tier 15 at 1.75x would be 114.89 days. Tier 15 at 1.5x would be 46 (4, 6, 9, 13.5, 20.25, 30.375, 45.56).

If we need to, we can fiddle with the Tier 9 ship's times a bit to alter the 'starting condition' to fit.
 
Tier 9 is 4. Tier 10 is 8. Tier 11 is 16. Tier 12 is 32. Tier 13 is 64. Tier 14 is 128. Tier 15 is 256.

That equation looks like it should work on the surface, but it doesn't. I would have thought that the "2^0" slot would have accounted for the starting condition as well, meaning 2^5 looks like it should be 6 multiplications anyway...strange.

Whatever the reason, you're one multiplication short.
 
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I'm of the opinion that either current build time for the tier 9 and 1.75 multiplication factor should work, or a 10 day base build time for tier 9 with a 1.5 multiplication factor.
 
There is one angle that might be overlooked. Now I don’t know if it is on purpose or not. But I do notice that the building rate is generalist, meaning every faction within sarp uses the same building rate. That is some I raise my eyebrow for. The economical strength between let say Yamatai and NDC is not the same and thus those building rate shouldn’t be same as there is a huge difference with supplies, raw minerals, production and personnel. If this was the intend, I said nothing :)
 
That's certainly something that would need looking at, and Toshiro touched on that in at least some manner when he talked about having each ship class having its own build time. However, another method to address that could be build time tables for different tech/economy levels.
 
Given that the ability of a faction to make ships in war changes from day to day due to various minutiae, I'm not so sure that defining to that degree is such a good idea. There's a practical limit to how complex we'd want to make this.

Making it a by-ship basis should probably be as complex as we dare and may well be too much for many people as it is.
 
What are thoughts on this now? Some time has gone by, and I think it would be about time to start putting together drafts for the new build times.
 
This is not an FM stance from the FM cadre of nepleslai. Just my own take on it~

I think build times should be increased somewhat.

I cant say how long it should be but only that it should take more time. Even yamatai, With its sheer industrial might and resources cant screw in screws or attach armor for the size of some of these ships in just 4 days in some instances. Time taken for materials being transported (They dont just keep Zesu and leptonium in piles outside the ship... OR even starship grade weapons and ammo! Things need to be kept safe and locked up and arrive and stuff!) installing everything right, Doing final tests, actually launching the ship.


These dont have to be listed! But a simple increase in time would make sense if you just say (Theres more to building a ship than just building it.).

And since the buildup limitations where made for PVP (Which nobody will ever do because even the smallest factions are so biased towards their own tech they would refuse to lose a single battle even if nepleslia rolled an entire assault fleet into their space!) its a non-issue.

Plus it helps limit stuff like (Im not putting down the NDC. This is just an example used that i like!) the fact that USO was taken down by blatant military spending of just a few ships. Yet the NDC in roughly the same time and with less on-hand resources to work with has more ships than they would have been able to afford.

I know everyone wants the big navy. Warships arent tanks and arent troops. They are valuable and expensive to build and maintain. And if factions large or small can just roll out a hundred ships in the blink of an eye (Like yamatai with its sheer industrial might or nepleslia with its 35,000 lorath shipyards and industrial war focus that makes it build and recruit faster cause NEPLESLIA!). Or smaller factions like even the NDC, Neshetan, Future new and small factions, Etc. Rolling out hundreds of ships when they have a population and economy that couldn't even afford or sustain a fleet that size.


Hell... I need to find a way to introduce all these new ships to nepleslia to replace all the ones taken off the wiki without just (Well the old ones are gone and the new ones take their place) since nepleslia can field close to 15,000+ ships. Even tho they have thousands of shipyards still canon (Which if there was still PVP im sure people would screech and scream about all those lorath shipyards...)

TL:DR. We lose nothing by increasing the time and enforcing it. The only time it matters is when an enemy like kuvexia rolls 100,000+ ships into the sector. In which case the loses faced makes good RP for a recovering faction after the fact trying to re-build its navy. Instead of just "We field 1,000 more ships. Nothing of value was lost we just build more and crew them!"

 
Well I'm for increasing build times though hope we also look into crew limits. I know this would be harder to check but some smaller factions should have a harder time fielding a larger fleet due to personal availability.
 
Alright so I'm getting real tired of this misconception that the NDC just rolled out a 141 ships in a blink of the eye. It needs to stop, because it's far from the truth, and it's just gotten to the point that it is utterly irritating and makes us sound like rule breakers everytime it's said.

Those ships, minus 40 of them, were build over a year and a half. We are not the USO who would roll out 30 ships in one month. Additionally, none of them are fully crewed, as AI are used to fill the gaps given our populace that's smaller then other faction.

Also, there is an entire population known as the Gunja that we do constant trade with. They are our largest source of materials mined for construction. And much like the ship crews, a lot of the build process has been heavily automated, or gaps filled with AI support.
 
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