Posted by: skoormit
« on: June 21, 2020, 12:09:17 PM »...smaller volume ships simply are more complex to build in general. If you build the ship using more volume then there are more volume where the smaller more complex components can be fitted, so these components are scattered in a bigger overall volume which make it easier to construct the whole ship. Imagine the engines having a much larger volume to fit into and therefore easier to overall construct when they don't have to be strapped all together in a more overall compact area.
Aurora spaceships have their components crammed in together as tightly as possible....
...bulky but cheap components make your life easier, not harder - they mean large volumes of your ship that take so little time to complete that you can leave them for the last minute, thus providing easy access to work on all the other more labor-intensive portions with maximal efficiency.
The tractor instead is a very "dense" ships. It's full of complex components all crammed together one next to each other. There's not much space for anything else, heat exhausts and the like have to be placed very carefully because you have so many delicate components in a small space. So, it's a lot harder to assemble correctly without design problems, and thus takes longer to build.
Thanks, guys. This is an explanation I can wrap my head around.
One way of putting it: compactness has a complexity cost, and complexity costs time.
Here's another way of reconciling it with my example:
As I originally imagined it, the HaulerXL was essentially just a big cargo hold on one side, and all the other components on the other side.
If I sawed the thing in half, it shouldn't take longer to build one side than it took to build the whole thing, no matter how one reasoned about surface space available for concurrent work tasks, etc.
However, that restriction is just the fault of my visualization of the ship's space. I'm using Earth analogues: a 16-wheeler, a freight train, a cargo jet, etc. These vehicles all, broadly speaking, have a large space for carrying stuff, and another space for the engines and whatnot.
But this type of broad spatial division need not be the case for a TN spacecraft.
Instead, think of the HaulerXL as, first, a sphere the size of the cargo space. Then add the other components, evenly spaced, around that sphere. The components are spread out, therefore design is simple and work is efficient. You could have one work crew installing each engine, say, and they wouldn't get in each other's way.
If you build those same components without that large volume around which to spread them, the design is complicated, and the work is less efficient. The work crews get in each other's way.
There's an easy explanation for this, at least in this case : the tractor+trailer combination (1906.4 BP) is more expensive than the freighter vessel (1786.5 BP), since the smaller vessels will need to dedicate more of their volume, proportionally, to armour protection. It's significant enough to notice here because armour is just so much more expensive compared to cheap, bulky cargo holds and the like.
That's fine as an explanation for why the Tractor plus Trailer costs more and takes longer to build in total.
But it is not sufficient to explain why the Tractor takes longer to build by itself than the HaulerXL. The Tractor has, by definition, no more of anything than does the HaulerXL. In fact, it has about 42% less armor.