' Wrote:If we were to go by vanilla lore, it would take six month just to refit a battleship. It's in one of the rumors, it says Battleship Yukon will be moved to Norfolk for that.
Refit does not equal new construction.
Refit means that you're taking a completed ship in, pulling old things out and putting new things in. That means that the ship is going to be down for a while.
Also, it IS possible using modern day assembly line production techniquies to make improvements literally while the line is running. You provide a certain amount of empty spaces, then the teams change out from the old parts to the new parts. So if the body style doesn't change, just the trim pieces, it's an easy swap out.
' Wrote:While a zero gravity environment greatly enhances the movement of incredibly heavy components, the lack of superstructure robotic equipment such as cranes and massive 'welding' devices, at least just looking at the construction facilities would slow down the process.
For that, I blame the original designers of the game. They didn't put anything that detailed into the original graphics, and no one has changed things since then. To actually build a ship you would need a basic framework. Then bring the crews in and start laying things out. In the Honorverse by David Weber, he mentions how the Grayson' turned normal construction yards on their ears by simply going out to an empty spot and throwing the framework out there, and then starting to build where ever they were. No up, no down, and a spherical volume.
I think the original game designers were influence by Star Trek the Motion Picture.
The cranes and welding devices are too small to see from a distance. Doesn't mean they weren't there. Or perhaps this is the final inspection dock, where the ship was moved.
From a limited perspective, Ktyan has a point, except that again he's failing to consider Discovery robotics. The old joke being how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood comes to mind. How much more production than humans would 10 robots do at the same job as 10 humans if they didn't have to stop for pee breaks, lunch breaks, or to sleep, and were only down 1 hour per day for preventative maintenance?
I agree that a battleship probably takes a full year to build from scratch. But if you start building them at the rate of one per two weeks - that means that at the end of year one you've built one battleship. At the end of year two, you have 26 of them.
That's how the Corsairs, Order, Outcasts, CR, and BHG can have their fleets.
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
Doesn't look like your average car production factory, riight?
Does that mean we're not capable of creating a mass production facility for fighter craft? Of course not!
I bet we can create a mass production facility for this.
Then, I'd recommend you to take a look at the amount of produced 2nd, 3rd, 4th and planned production for 5th generation fighters, and also check their costs. You see, with technological development, next gen equipment becomes significantly more complicated and expensive then previous gen.
Otherwise, we'd have Kuba being able to produce analogue of F-15, what is simply impossible. The same reason why indians are making their tank for 30 years now, and when they, how it seems, finished it, they're still buying T-90.
You need decades to create a "School". Here I mean R&D capabilities that will allow you to create top-notch equipment.
As for complexity, well, in ICBM production (as I often show it in another RL comparsions) you'll have a cooperation of about 250-500 production facilities, if we exclude screws and bolts, and start with special alloys, electronics etc.
TL;DR - you can make a fighter from what you can find on open market. You, maybe, even will be able to mass produce it. But it'll get totally raped by any military fighter produced by one of the Houses.
It's like putting F-22 vs Mig-3. Latter one won't even understand what happened.
Designing is far more time-taking, since you have to ensure your construction does not have weak points that might be fatal. Multiple prototypes before even showing something "usable" to your client/commander.
Ship building... nano-technology is propably too expensive to utilize on giant scale like producing multiple ships, instead being used to patch small structural failures during combat. Fighters are likely to be manufactured like F-22, add advanced technology countered by complexity and fact it is an space ship, which like aircraft cannot simply fail. Capital ships - like we build naval ships but: EXTREME condition (space, there is no drydocks) and size of it. Parts certainly will be shipped from other factories to it's final assembly point which mostly cannot reproduce all big parts. Through I pressume The Ring complex propably is self-sustainable in ship-building (multiple orbital industrial complexes turned into one) if you get ressources there.
' Wrote:Designing is far more time-taking, since you have to ensure your construction does not have weak points that might be fatal. Multiple prototypes before even showing something "usable" to your client/commander.
Ship building... nano-technology is propably too expensive to utilize on giant scale like producing multiple ships, instead being used to patch small structural failures during combat. Fighters are likely to be manufactured like F-22, add advanced technology countered by complexity and fact it is an space ship, which like aircraft cannot simply fail. Capital ships - like we build naval ships but: EXTREME condition (space, there is no drydocks) and size of it. Parts certainly will be shipped from other factories to it's final assembly point which mostly cannot reproduce all big parts. Through I pressume The Ring complex propably is self-sustainable in ship-building (multiple orbital industrial complexes turned into one) if you get ressources there.
Well, about drydock - don't agree with you. If you're planning to make space battleships in the amounts higher then few, you definitely have the capability of creating a "drydock". It's not really that complicated, compared to the creation of BS.
EDIT: A drydock.And another one, with people (for size comparsion). Of course, it'll be few times bigger for BS production in space, also it'll require way more resources, at least double "hull" and few more things,, but nothing that special and complicated, compared to what you'll be building inside.
Point me to one place in Sirius where there is a drydock capable of producing any battleship first. Every shipyard I saw is building capital ships in air-less environment.
' Wrote:Well, about drydock - don't agree with you. If you're planning to make space battleships in the amounts higher then few, you definitely have the capability of creating a "drydock". It's not really that complicated, compared to the creation of BS.
EDIT: A drydock.And another one, with people (for size comparsion). Of course, it'll be few times bigger for BS production in space, also it'll require way more resources, at least double "hull" and few more things,, but nothing that special and complicated, compared to what you'll be building inside.
A space 'drydock' would have to be, by the very nature of the ship that was being built, very, very large.
But don't forget one minor detail that we have to deal with here that Disco shipyards would NOT have to worry about is gravity. The pieces and parts would still have the same inertia and resistance to movement - but once they're moving, they're going to keep moving. And instead of having to have all sorts of big wooden chocks under the ship simply to hold it up - you could quite literally hold the darn thing in place with a couple pieces of wire. (Okay, it'd have be pretty strong wire, but it wouldn't have to be much.)
And Knjaz, you're showing precision assembly lines for modern fighters, with everything put together onsite. If you only have an order for 400 fighters total over 5 years, you're not going to make a regular production line capable of putting out 20 fighters per day. Certainly they were much easier to make, but Lockheed was producing 15 P-38's PER DAY in World War II.
An assembly line for battleships could be technically possible, but still be of very limited practical use.
Every ship needs a crew.
I imagine space ships to have far smaller crews than military vessels today, but you would still need to train these people, which would take far longer than to construct a ship for them (in your scenario).
Houses would also have to rely on getting enough volunteers in the first place. When countries mass-produced every kind of war-machine in WW II, they also had forced drafts to man these machines.
The amount of fuel needed by a huge battleship is also enormous, as is the logistic effort to obtain and supply that fuel. Mass-producing warships might easily overstrain this supply, as much of the work here requires human attendance as well ( as opposed to full robotic work).
' Wrote:Every ship needs a crew.
...
Again people are the limiting factor.
That can get into a huge area that we've gone into in the past that never actually resolved anything.
A typical US Aircraft carrier right now has a crew of about 5,000 - but that also includes aviation mechanics, pilots, and all the specialized people you need when you're dealing with a ship that large - including the full doctor and dentist to take care of all the SMALLER ships that are part of your fleet. Typical modern destroyer has a crew of 275. The New Jersey used to need 3,000 crew, while a typical modern cruiser only carries 450.
So in Disco terms, I see gunboats are the equivalent of WWII PT-boats, with 15-20 crew. Dessies probably take about the same as today - call it 250. Cruisers probably take 400, and actual Disco battleships really don't have much need for more than 800 crew. Certainly you'll find more people on something like a Jinksu, because the Zoner battleship isn't really a battleship - it's a portable city.
So let's look at the manning requirements for a typical fleet, say 5 battleships, 5 cruisers, 10 destroyers, 20 gunboats, and 100 fighter / bombers. That's only 7,750 personnel needed. Sure, you're going to have an additional 7,750 REMF's providing support, so call it 15,000 for one fleet - call it 20,000 if you throw a carrier into the mix.
The US Navy currently has 330,000 personnel. Translate that into an entire house, and you'll see that Liberty should easily be able to have a Navy with over 1,000,000 people. That's enough for 250 battleships, 250 cruisers, 500 destroyers, 1000 gunboats, 50 carriers, and 5,000 fighter / bombers - just from the population of Manhattan alone.
(Remember, 4 BILLION people? You also don't need large standing armies like we have now - those would be subsumed into Spehs Mahreens <hattip to Monte!> and smaller ground forces.)
So any issues regarding personnel ... aren't really an issue.
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
' Wrote:And Knjaz, you're showing precision assembly lines for modern fighters, with everything put together onsite. If you only have an order for 400 fighters total over 5 years, you're not going to make a regular production line capable of putting out 20 fighters per day. Certainly they were much easier to make, but Lockheed was producing 15 P-38's PER DAY in World War II.
EDIT: Changed it to a link - didn't realize it was that big
I'd presume that Liberty would probably want to make 30 - 50 fighters per day. So they'd gear the assembly line up to do that.
Answer is provided in your own link. We simply cannot build as many modern fighters per period of time as 60 years ago. That is due to next generation becoming more and more complex each time. Granted, we're not one of the great Houses, we don't have economy consisting of many billions of people. You seem not to comprehend how much easier it was to make
Although, 30-50 fighters a day for such complex platform as, say, even our "modern" air superiority fighter is damn HUGE number. Astronomically huge. Maybe, just maybe, Liberty will be able to pull that off. If we take into account it economy, that includes billions of people, many systems, space stations etc. Of course, if they're top-notch fighters, not some scrap.
Oh, found finally. Production cycle of one Su-30 lasts 18 months.
Granted, more then 1 plane can be (and is being) built at same time.
I've yet to find the production cycle for your WW2 fighters, to show the difference between generations.
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