I kind of like everything I am reading here, it's interesting.
Regarding how long it takes to construct a ship, I think of it is a matter of how efficiently the ship is being built. The biggest factor is material cost, not building time.
You have a large, modern shipyard, utilizing an obscene number of Robotic Components, and having those robots continuously fed all of the materials needed so that they can work nearly non-stop, then yes, I can imagine a ship being built literally before your eyes, and ready for operation faster than most would believe (if they did not know better already).
But the whole process, from the drawing board, to the beginning of the assembly line, and then finally to then end product, if you add that in, then that would make everything seem like it was taking much more time. Regarding parts, some components simply take a long time to manufacture.
But the shipyard workers, the assemblers, they do not need to worry about that. For them, the parts are ready to go and just need to be put into their proper places. Someone just needs to pay for it.
And this "prefabricated and modular" system is pretty well reflected in Discovery. Everyone has noticed that there is a limited variety of ships available, right? Now days, there are (I am making this number up, guessing) hundreds of thousands of different kinds of automobile designs, from cars, trucks, vans, to transport vehicles and job-specific vehicles. This seems to work fine on the ground, and I imagine the tradition carries on in Disco, on planets and even some stations.
But when you are dealing with space travel, you want tried, proven, and reliable. And that is the most time consuming factor of the ship building process in Disco, I believe. Ship Design.
Starting from scratch, Hah!, years upon years, at best. Even modifying a current design is risking catastrophic failure. The motto, "If something is not broken, don't fix it." strongly applies to space ships I feel.
If you already have that design, then you just knocked off years. Next is making the parts for the ship.
Two words: Mass Production. Sirius does it well, at least in regards to space ship parts. There is only one kind of Liberty Defender. They are all designed the same, constructed from the same components, and are built the same. All ships of the same "class" in Disco use the same modular weapon systems, with few exceptions. Chances are excellent that, for any ship available in Disco, parts are ready and available to begin construction the second you pay for the ship.
So, there are a limited number of ship designs out there. As a result, each design can have parts for it mass-produced and readily available (from somewhere), as opposed to a demand-driven production. And for enormous projects, like a Carrier, there would not be enough parts all ready and waiting in storage to build one hundred of them. But, the components that do take a long time to produce would be stockpiled in abundance, since the manufactures can safely bet the Liberty Carrier design will not be changing suddenly and make everything obsolete. Other parts that take less time to produce will be kept in much smaller stock.
It does not take a very long time to build a ship. Any ship. New designs do not come out each month, or each year, or even each decade, all of the designs that are out are all tested and perfected. Parts are readily available and constructed ahead of time, as long as the design proves to be in demand (and when you are talking about the space ship of a particular group, you can bet there will be demand for as long as that group exists.). Actual construction itself can be done fast or slowly, depending on various variables, such as type of workers, number of workers, access of the parts needed to those workers, etc.
Under ideal circumstance, I do not see a problem with a new cruiser coming into service after a matter of months, or even weeks. Sooner, if partial construction began before the request was even made (you have all these robots and parts waiting, you are a rich company, and you *know* the ship will sell, why not start now?). Smaller ships, hell, have it done in a few days.
This is all assuming that your ship is not super special and customized. In which case, prepare to wait several years.
Oh, and also,
' Wrote:Hey, maybe in the future we will have a ship-building mod...
That is a strangely arousing idea to me.
<span style="color:#999999">"There are many ways this could go wrong. Let's try them all."</span>
