Quality Control

[NightFalcon (OP)]

I've always wanted to see this in a game...

The idea would be that ships/constructions could be done either quickly and badly, or slowly and masterfully. For example, in World War II, the United States decided that it simply could not fight the German U-boats in the Atlantic, and so it decided to simply send over so many supply ships that Germany couldn't sink enough to strangle the American forces on the mainland. However, this concept would not have worked had American construction factories not been able to turn out hastily constructed supply ships.

Anyway, the point is, a little slider bar: quality =======|=== speed, would let us choose whether we wanted a high quality, carefully constructed ship. Alternatively, we could drag the slider closer to speed (as in the example above) in order to get the ship completed faster, but have it be more prone to attacks or mechanical failure. This way we could turn out massive numbers of ship during wartime, and during peace, revert to high quality constructions.

Thoughts?

[Brian Neumann]

Interesting idea.  The problem with this would be in how to implement it.  The easiest would be a modifier on the breakdown chance.  A high quality ship should have a somewhat lower chance of breaking down, on the other hand a ship made twice as fast should have a significantly higher chance of breakdowns.  A scale of double the time for a 25% reduction in breakdowns (multiply the chance to break down by .75 would work) to tripple the speed of building and get a ship with a x10 chance of breakdown.  

I am making the assumption that the current build speed would be for a decent quality ship in general with some ability to get a better quality but at a significant slowdown on production.  On the other hand speeding up production by much would be cutting a lot of corners.  You can do it, but a lot of the corners cut are going to be in the area of quality control.  This modifier should not be changable either after the ship has been built exept with a lengthy shipyard stay where they effectivly rebuild a lot of the interior of the ship.  

Just my two cents worth
Brian

[waresky]

am fear r useless and too hard for "Coding" Steve's ingame,this features.

Srry for my bad english.

my 2 cents (nice idea..but too many micromanagement and there r very though of them around)

[Shinanygnz]

Something as simple as a minimum "length of service" would do, i.e. your ship starts at 1 year without maintenance and can't be reduced below that, so you always have a higher chance of things breaking.  Shouldn't be too hard to implement - it's just an extra field in the dB

Stephen

[dooots]

Couldn't you just say increase the maintenance clock by five times the time saved?  It would increase failure rate and let you "fix" the ship with an overhaul that would take longer then if you did right the first time.

The maintenance clock adjustment is based off of an old post from steve that said overhauls take a quarter of the time on the maintenance clock.

[James Patten]

Great suggestion about quicker building vs slower building.  However whatever negative would be used for a quick-built ship would have to take into account those of us that don't play with maintenance requirements checked on.  Maybe make the ship easier to destroy during combat would represent the corners that were cut, or easier for life support to be lost and kill the crew, or some other tangible problem.

[welchbloke]

Great suggestion about quicker building vs slower building.  However whatever negative would be used for a quick-built ship would have to take into account those of us that don't play with maintenance requirements checked on.  Maybe make the ship easier to destroy during combat would represent the corners that were cut, or easier for life support to be lost and kill the crew, or some other tangible problem.

One method might be to increate the chance of explosions/secondary damage.  To use a modern analogy, a modern warship tends to have more bulkheads/damage control compartments and more expensive materials that are more resistant to fire.  If you build a ship to civilian standards it would be just as seaworthy (or spaceworthy) as the warship but it would suffer more damage from the same warhead as it has not been built to the same damage control standards.  As I understand it, this is one of the issues with trying to build some of the Royal Navy's designs to civilian standards (all in the name of saving costs).

[On_Target]

Great suggestion about quicker building vs slower building.  However whatever negative would be used for a quick-built ship would have to take into account those of us that don't play with maintenance requirements checked on.  Maybe make the ship easier to destroy during combat would represent the corners that were cut, or easier for life support to be lost and kill the crew, or some other tangible problem.

Or just have the option for speed vs quality greyed out if the Overhauls Needed box isn't checked.

[Father Tim]

Or just have the option for speed vs quality greyed out if the Overhauls Needed box isn't checked.

That would be my suggestion.