Multi-role ships

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

Hello,

Please excuse me if this subject has been already debated to death. I wanted to know if some of you, or most of you, practice multi-role for non armed ships mostly (but not exclusively).

The fact is that refitting shipyards to new ships is a long process. Adding new shipyards capable of building big ships is even a longer process. So I was thinking, instead of having a freighter, a colonizer, an oiler and a collier, why not having a kind of huge multi-role ship? Sure, she would be less efficient in each role, but I think it is more than compensated by first her versatility, and second by how practical it is when you have to manage your shipyards.

So... what veterans (and less than veterans) players think of that?

[Vanigo]

To a certain degree, it's entirely sensible. I like to have small jumpships for survey vessels that double as tankers, for instance. Something like a freighter/colony ship, however, is pretty crazy. It'd only be about half as effective in either role. Adding tanker and collier capabilities makes it even worse, especially since magazines would make the thing a military design. Also, it's not hard to work things so a shipyard tooled for colony ships can also build freighters.

[UnLimiTeD]

With all that loss in efficiency, this looks like a deathsentence to any reasonably sized economy.
It's not that hard, you can actually build several ship types in one yard, as long as the designs are roughly similar.

[Charlie Beeler]

The combination you propose is a bad idea in my opinion.  In the long run it's better to bite the bullet in the early game and build the required shipyards for the speciallized hulls. 

With that said there are exceptions.  The most common in my games are combined supply and tanker roles in jump ships supporting survey squadrons. 

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

With all that loss in efficiency, this looks like a deathsentence to any reasonably sized economy.
It's not that hard, you can actually build several ship types in one yard, as long as the designs are roughly similar.

Oh I did not knew that, how can we determine before hand if a design is not too far from another?

[UnLimiTeD]

Create a colony ship and a Freighter, roughly same tonnage, refit the yard for the more expensive ship, and you should be able to build the cheaper one as well. I think I heard about a limit of 20% cost difference or something, not sure though.

[Beersatron]

On the class design screen, in the bottom left corner of the far right tab it will show you what other classes can be built when a shipyard is tooled for that class.

I generally design a freighter, copy it and remove the cargo holds for cryo until it's roughy same cost and tonnage.

[Brian Neumann]

One thing to make sure of with your shipyards is to build the capacity up first before building extra slipways.  In terms of overall time to start producing ships it is far faster that way.  The time to increase the size of the ship you can build is based on the total tonnage of the shipyard.  If there are three slipways for the shipyard then it will take three times as long to add any given amount of tonnage capacity.  By getting large enough first then expanding the slipways you can start building the first ship while you add the next slipway.  For most ships you will be able to add a slipway in about the time it takes to build 1 or 2 ships from the original slipway, and away you go.

Brian

[UnLimiTeD]

Initially at least.
Later, you might want to build a new freighter design, and need 20000 more tons, but until then, you want to massproduce something else, and more slipways allow you to keep producing while building up.
Always depends on the needs.

[Caesar]

The luxury liner showed up as allowing the shipyards to also produce my freighters and colony ships.

I double- or triple- checked, and then fitted its shipyard.


For some reason I can't build the colony ship anymore, and it doesn't show up on the 'other buildable designs' list anymore either.
I didn't change either.


I have this regularly, so I'll safely assume that multi-classed shipyards tend to bully you.

[Vanigo]

That's because the 'other buildable designs' list on the class design screen doesn't update when you alter the design. If you change a ship design, you have to switch to a different class and back before it'll display properly.

[Caesar]

The strange thing is, though, that I didn't alter the designs any more after it showed up like that.

I might, of course, still seem to have made some stupid mistake and did it wrong anyways.