Author Topic: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities  (Read 16387 times)

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Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« on: June 25, 2016, 06:27:56 PM »
I am considering a change to the way maintenance facilities work for C# Aurora so I thought I would seek feedback first :)

At the moment, if you have 100 maintenance facilities (for example) you can maintain ships of up to 20,000 tons. Furthermore, you can maintain any number of ships of 20,000 tons or less. There are a couple of drawbacks with this approach:
1) It can be quite difficult to build sufficient maintenance facilities to maintain very large ships and it is often easier to build several smaller ones instead.
2) It is very easy to maintain large numbers of small ships (one of the reasons that fighters are excluded from maintenance facilities).

For C# Aurora I am considering changing maintenance facilities so that each one has a much higher capacity (perhaps 1000 - 2000 tons instead of 200 tons). However, additional ships would require additional capacity. For example, 100,000 tons of capacity could maintain a single 100,000 ton ship, five 20,000 ton ships or twenty 5000 ton ships (or any combination).

If there are insufficient facilities available, the maintenance clock on ships at the facility would be based on the missing capacity. For example, if a population had 100,000 tons of capacity and 150,000 tons of military shipping was present, all ships would advance their clocks at 1/3rd normal speed. (200,000 tons of ships would be 1/2 speed, 400,000 tons would be 3/4 speed, etc.).

There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach:
1) It is much more realistic and larger fleet bases would be much more valuable.
2) It will be a lot easier to maintain very large ships
3) I can lift the restriction on fighters using maintenance facilities.
4) It would remove the maintenance advantages of small ships vs large ones.
5) It would be less obvious whether a ship could be fully maintained at a given population (although I would add a tab to the Economics window to track this in detail for each population)

In this situation, I would add a tech line that increased the capacity of maintenance facilities. I might also consider having some form of auto-overhaul if the maintenance facilities had excess capacity vs the ships in port (based on the amount of excess capacity vs total size of ships), which would remove some of the micromanagement for overhaul.

Comments?
 
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Offline ChildServices

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #1 on: June 25, 2016, 08:28:02 PM »
I like this idea, but only if maintenance facilities are slightly cheaper both in BP and personnel, since now I imagine I'll need to build more of them. Maybe military slipways that aren't presently building anything could count towards maintenance limit in a less efficient capacity?

Overall I think this is a great idea, especially if it makes the maintenance facility component for ships more useful.
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Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #2 on: June 25, 2016, 08:50:41 PM »
Sounds good to me, and I know a lot of people have suggested this in the past. You might need to significantly buff how much they support though. I'm assuming that in the case of a ship only getting partially maintained then the corresponding MSP consumed will be partial too?
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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #3 on: June 26, 2016, 05:21:13 AM »
The current approach isn't without its merits, it mirrors some real-life constraints ("there are only so many drydocks large enough to service this ship"). An ability to service 1000 small ships doesn't equal the ability to service a single large one.
Also, the quantitative aspect is already taken care of by the planned need to manufacture MSPs.

With some of the planned changes, I'm already worried that it would be most attractive to play around the entire maintenance system (generous engineering spaces, recycle MSPs and scrap/salvage ships before they need servicing). Making the need for maintenance facilities scale with number of ships would increase the push to do so.
 

Offline swarm_sadist

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #4 on: June 26, 2016, 12:50:55 PM »
I'm going to have to agree with Iranon. Having 100,000 tonnes of maintenance facilities should still not be able to handle a 150,000 tonne ship, even at reduced rates.

Perhaps have an 'Orbit' command (not extended orbit), which tells the ship to receive maintenance from any planet based maintenance facilities, and have that ship take up the maintenance capacity of the planet only when ordered to.

Alternative: Make maintenance facilities just like shipyards, with Maintenance Capacity (maximum amount of tonnage) and Max Ship Size (Largest ship possible). Then allow maintenance facilities to expand just like a shipyard.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #5 on: June 26, 2016, 03:02:20 PM »
I'm going to have to agree with Iranon. Having 100,000 tonnes of maintenance facilities should still not be able to handle a 150,000 tonne ship, even at reduced rates.

Perhaps have an 'Orbit' command (not extended orbit), which tells the ship to receive maintenance from any planet based maintenance facilities, and have that ship take up the maintenance capacity of the planet only when ordered to.

Alternative: Make maintenance facilities just like shipyards, with Maintenance Capacity (maximum amount of tonnage) and Max Ship Size (Largest ship possible). Then allow maintenance facilities to expand just like a shipyard.

Yes, I think it makes sense that no ship could be maintained (at all) if it was larger than the total maintenance capacity. However, a total tonnage of shipping greater than the capacity could be partially maintained as along as no single ship exceeded the capacity.
 

Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #6 on: June 27, 2016, 01:19:58 AM »
I think we're forgetting that there is a difference between maintenance and overhaul. Shipyards perform overhaul and are limited by maximum berth size and number of slipways.
Major maintenance jobs are done in the shipyard, think engine replacement, sensor package removal and repair, major structural repair, etc.
Maintenance however is merely keeping equipment working, repairs, spare part replacement jobs, structural work being done piecemeal with cutting torches and welders etc. Not nessicarily limited by the absolute size of the ship but rather by materials and the amount of staff available to do the job. Maintenance doesn't make a ship brand new but rather slows the rate at which it falls apart.
So I think it makes sense that maintenance facilities are able to maintain a certain total capacity of ships, rather than a potentially infinate number of a certain size. Anything over the maintenance facility's size limit just stretches the resources and makes the work not as good.
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Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #7 on: June 27, 2016, 03:09:59 AM »
I like the idea of that change.  It makes a lot more sense to me, now I can stop explaining to new people how it really works.
 

Offline Paul M

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #8 on: June 27, 2016, 03:17:58 AM »
Maintenance is more like "harbor facities" and should be limited to the total number of ships you can "tie up to the dock" at any one time.  Pretty much as Mark says, we have shipyards which are the drydocks for refits and new builds.  I would suggest making the costs scale though.  As you tonnage maintainable grows the costs to increase it should grow as well.  I'm not sure what I would suggest as a cost factor but say: the first 30-50K tonnes is one price range, then then to 100K it is higher and so on.

Major facilities should be more expnesive than something that can only handle a squadron.
 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #9 on: June 27, 2016, 03:26:45 AM »
That doesn't make sense to me, if that is the case then why wouldn't I just build multiple smaller facilities on the same planet if big ones are super costly?
 

Offline ChildServices

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #10 on: June 27, 2016, 05:03:34 AM »
I'm not really sure what the maintenance facility is actually meant to represent to begin with. Can somebody tell me? I'd thought of it as the support infrastructure needed to keep ships up to a certain tonnage from falling to pieces when they're idling in orbit, but couldn't a shipyard facility do the exact same thing? And if so, why don't we make shipyards contribute to maintenance limit when they have idle slipways?
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Offline Paul M

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #11 on: June 27, 2016, 07:33:11 AM »
Because there are no "multiple smaller facilities."  It is a single "harbor facility" and there is only one of them per planet it is just more expensive the more extensive it has to be.  This reflects real life where a basic harbor capability was fast and easy to set up but as the harbor facility grows each new bit costs far more.  Look at WW2 and the harbors the USN set up.

A maintenance facility is like a harbor facility in real life.  They consist of machine shops, storage houses, piers the ships tie up to, handling tools (forklifts and cranes), on site housing etc.  In the case of aurora power plants to power the ship and life support systems for maintaining the ship while their reactors are off line and other things like that.  Basically the ship isn't sitting in orbit it is docked to a space station of some sort.  If a  ship is orbiting the planet it isn't getting "maintained by the planet."

So any ship using the orbit at x distance order should be on its onboard clock.  Being in maintenance means docked to space station, just like in real life it means tied up to pier.

A dockyard is where you build ships.  It is usually associated with a harbor facility but they are generally speaking different things.  Pearl Harbor had extensive harbor facilities but so far as I know no construction capacity for example, though it does have drydocks.  But in a wet navy you need a dry dock to do any major hull repair.  This is likely covered in aurora by the fact that you need a shipyard to do hull repairs.
 
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Offline Sheb

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #12 on: June 27, 2016, 09:41:11 AM »
Does it though? Ships can leave instantly from being at a planet. To me, it seems unlikely you have to physically dock at a space station. In zero g, it's much easier to move supplies and stuff around. Being in orbit is just that: being in orbit, and the maintenance personnel of the planet is available to fix any small issues. The docking process is when the ship is being overhauled.
 

Offline bean

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #13 on: June 27, 2016, 09:45:41 AM »
I really like the idea, although I think that just lumping all the tonnage together is a bit simplistic, and would make it a bit too easy to maintain really large ships.  There are definite economies of scale in shore facilities, and a facility that is maxed out by a single battleship which it is capable of supporting without problem is a bit hard to believe. 
I'd suggest making the maximum ship size that can be maintained something like (Yard Size)^(4/5).  If this is the case, the point at which it takes twice the maximum ship size in yard size is when the yard is 64,000 tons and the ship is 32,000 tons.  That's a bit lower than I'd prefer, but it's still decent.  If we go with (Yard Size)^(3/4), we get a crossover at a yard of 16,000 tons and a ship of 8,000 tons.  That 64,000 ton yard can support a ship of 22,600 tons now. 
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Offline 83athom

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Re: Considering Change to Maintenance Facilities
« Reply #14 on: June 27, 2016, 10:03:14 AM »
A maintenance facility is like a harbor facility in real life.  They consist of machine shops, storage houses, piers the ships tie up to, handling tools (forklifts and cranes), on site housing etc.  In the case of aurora power plants to power the ship and life support systems for maintaining the ship while their reactors are off line and other things like that.  Basically the ship isn't sitting in orbit it is docked to a space station of some sort.  If a  ship is orbiting the planet it isn't getting "maintained by the planet."

So any ship using the orbit at x distance order should be on its onboard clock.  Being in maintenance means docked to space station, just like in real life it means tied up to pier.
Actually spaceship maintenance you would only need the machine shops, storage houses, handling tools, and a shuttlebay/cargolifters. Because you wouldn't need to actually dock a ship to perform basic maintenance in space because it can just sit there unpowered/lowpower in orbit. You just need to send parts and workers up in shuttles to do their jobs then go home afterwords. The maintenance modules you can put on ships are basically the same thing, the shops and storage along with a shuttle/cargolifter of some sort.
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