Ship prototyping...

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

One thing that struck me as somewhat odd when playing the game are at what ease I can just slap different type of ships together with the pieces of equipment that I have.

Would it not be a good feature that you also had to prototype your ships and actually design the main hull type of your ship as a component as you design the small components. That is make each ship design a research project in the game as you would with any other piece of equipment. The larger and more complex ships you build the more expensive the tech cost should be. So, it is faster to build large ships per tonnage but more expensive to design and prototype. This would get the effect that large complex constructions are more expensive and time consuming initially but more economically in the long run.

This would also force you to deal with specialization versus standardization in a more realistic manner. Especially with very large ship design types.

[crys]

i think this is not neccessary,

i see the retooling of the shipyards as a part of the prototyping, as well as the component research.


in addition, you propably would have to put the prototyping research into construction, which is allready a field with abundant usefull/needed research, or do you see it more as an logistical operation?

i guess logistics could use some more interresting research fields.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

To be perfectly honest here, the retooling of the shipyards does not have anything to do with prototyping a ship hull type and neither do the individual parts that you use (from a relistic view point that is).

What you actually prototype (design/engineer/research) in a ship is the actual hull configuration and how that integrates all the individual parts into one functional platform. Real naval ship development is a very time consuming and expensive part of designing a ship, much more expensive or time consuming than the individual parts such as weapon systems, engines and sensors etc...

I was merely suggesting this for its realistic purposes, I don't know exactly what it would do to game balance, but it would certainly make you think twice about making three specialized ships instead of one generalized ship, especially for large ships that you intend to build in much fewer quantities. Smaller ships will be built in larger quantities, so the benefit of specialization in this category will still not be an issue.

[HaliRyan]

It's actually kind of a neat idea.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

I really think that this idea could be added to the code with relative ease since it would use much of the existing mechanics.

One thing I would contemplate here is to allow research on both individual components and the ship hull at the same time, although this would probably require a bigger change in the code. So there would be two options in my opinion.

Option 1
Once you finished a designed and locked it in the Design View it is created as a research project. You can not start building the ship until you have actually researched the prototype. Once the research is done you can immediately build as many copies of the ship as you want to.

Option 2
As soon as you designed a component in the Create Research Project page it is immediately selectable in the design screen but listed in a different color (perhaps red) to distinguish that it is not yet a functional piece of equipment. If you design a ship using a component that you have not yet researched and you lock the design you may no longer delete these components from the research menu and must be researched together with the prototype before you can start building the ship.

An added bonus with option two would be that it is now easier to experiment with not yet researched equipment just to get a feel for how different ship configuration would look like.

[jseah]

You should probably be allowed to retool shipyards to the new class when they are being researched. 

So we have the prospect of a slow step by step process or a hurried rush where weapons/components are crash researched and produced, the ship design finalized, and the yard tooled all in parallel. 

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

That would seem pretty reasonable, but it might perhaps come with a slight increase in time as long as the prototype is not finished. Perhaps a +10-20% inefficiency until the research is done or something.

[crys]

ok it is propably not a bad idear to prototyp ships.

i just worry a little here, that the game gets more and more complicated.
i usualy like complicated games more, most games today get much to simple.


i see also some game problems with researching ships here.
when you need to research each ship first, where should the research go?
there is allready a lot of research going on in construction, you want to slow down the research anymore?

specialy with military ships, it is already a lot of reseach to build a beam ship, expencive research.
what about minor upgrades/changes, i think most of us have done mistakes with ship design.
armored turrets can get much smaller with just one gear research, new armor or shields.
its nice to upgrade a frighter or colony ship with new cargo handling.

should all of thouse upgrades need new research for prototyping again?


i think i wouldnt mind so much to prototyp comercial ships, but military ships already take so long to develop.



i would like to add a few things about prototyping in general too.
first i need to add, that i dont have much knowledge about prototyping, but i think i know some of the main reasons to do prototyps.

one is propably safty, since there are no exidents for ships in this game(crashes/hit by objects in space), there is little reason to test safty features. in addition all ships have an armor hull of 1 - which is strong enough to block a nuclear explosion of the strength of 1.

another main reason for prototyping is aerodynamics, which is not compleatly understood today, so testing different shapes is necessary. but in aurora all thouse ships are in space - where airodynamics do not apply.

im not so sure about the movement principles in auroa, think someone said before, there is some kind of energy field around ships - idk - maybe here are reasons for prototyping or not.


i think prototyping is a question about the understanding of the applied physics, if thouse are understood and mastered.
then it should be more a question about computing, instead of inovation.


edit: it propably looks like i want to block this idear, i just see alot of problems with this.
maybe we should point out thouse problems and maybe search solotions.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

Regarding the research that would surely be a balance issue, not even sure it would be a huge issue to be honest.

Regrading retrofit I don't believe you need to do anything with that mechanic at all. A retrofit is more of an engineering problem just changing some of the structure or changing out components. Retrofitting is pretty expensive and time consuming as it is, no real need to change that in my opinion.

I really think prototyping would be a rather straightforward and intuitive change and would at least introduce an additional strategic level not just more complexity for complexities sake. At least that is my opinion.

In my opinion it would also solve the issue that bigger hulls are more efficient I/O wise to build over the long run. With this change you really need to think hard about what those really big ships actually should do and will dissuade you from building ten different type of battleship hull variations thus making smaller ships as useful in the long run once you have very big naval yards. Now, my experience with the game is rather limited so my analysis of this additional benefit might actually be a non issue. 

[crys]

how much research did you have in mind for prototyping?
beam fire controls go quickly over 10k research.


about retooling, atm you can build in a colony classed shipyard, cargo ships of the same size. im not sure how it exactly works.

about military shipyards, im not sure how much you can change on a ship disign without retooling, sometimes i forgot something small and it worked.
upgrading military ships designs can be importand, because newer components can be smaller(armor/turrets/sensors/...) and therefor increase youre speed-> decrease enemy ships hit chances

[Hawkeye]

I kinda like the idea of prototypes.
We could allways go the Starfire way.
From what I have read ( I have never played the game), the first ship of a new class takes a lot longer to build than the serial building afterwards. That additonal time could reflect the tinkering needed to make all parts work well together. Of course, in Starfire there also seem to be huge fleets roaming the spacelines, so the build-time increase could probably be reduced a bit.

That would get rid of having to research a new ship-class.

Or how about a delay between locking a design in the design window and actually being able to build it? Perhaps based on mass for commercial and mass/PPV for military ships.
Throwing out some numbers here:
Something like Mass/500 for commercial and Mass/500 x (PPV+20)/10 for military vessels. This would lead to:

40.000 ton freighter                 80 days delay
120.000 ton terraformer         240 days delay
2.000 ton geo-survey                 4 days delay
  --> probably add a minimum delay of, say, 30 days   

Orion Class DD (10k, PPV 36)            112 days delay
Cerberus Monitor (9k, PPV 48)         122.4 days delay
Enterprise Class CV (48k, PPV 0)         192 days delay
Eridani Class CG (15k, PPV 114)         402 days delay

All military ships are from Steve´s Space Race game.
The Eridani CGs delay seems a bit much, but keep in mind it is armed with 4 20cm UV-Lasers and 150 Box-Launchers, so there are a lot of systems to get along with each other.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

It just seems redundant with retooling.  Both slow down the introduction of a new class and make it more expensive.  Since we already have that, what's the point?  If you want new class introductions slowed down yet more, you could just increase the retooling penalty.

[crys]

ok i like this idear a little more.

what about retooling of shipyards? can you do this while the delay is running?

and some values seem high - thouse 120k tons for terraformer are just 4 terraforming modules.
maybe the number of systems should be part of the delay calculation. i would not count the number of engeneering spaces here.

for commercial maybe
size*#systems/(shipyard build rate*10)?

this would reduce the delay for ships with fewer systems - big systems - and would increase the delay for complicates ships with lots of systems


edit: TheDeadlyShoe is not so wrong either, there is already a huge delay with retooling of shipyards - except for the first tooling.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I really dont see how prototyping would serve a different purpose from retooling; theyre both time and resource based limits on your ability to build a new ship.

And the researching components thing is bad enough; it's rare indeed that you will build a new ship out of off-the-shelf components.  

[sloanjh]

It just seems redundant with retooling.  Both slow down the introduction of a new class and make it more expensive.  Since we already have that, what's the point?  If you want new class introductions slowed down yet more, you could just increase the retooling penalty.

My recollection is that the retooling delay/cost was intended to include prototyping costs.

John