Right now when retooling for a shipyard if designs are similar enough a single shipyard is sufficient to produce those similar classes.
As it stands the limit here is that the refit cost must be within 20% of the tooled classes cost, if that cost goes above 20% for the refit, you either need to retool or build a new shipyard for the other class.
This new tech line would increase that 20% threshold. As an example first to 25%, then to 30, 35, 40, 45, 47, 50. Something like that. So at the max tech level you would be able to refit ships that are within 50% of the cost, making your shipyards much more flexible.
Now there are also tonnage limitations, the ships need to be a similar size. You might consider another tech line to make shipyards more flexible in that way but I think at that point they might start to become too flexible so I’ve focused only on the cost side of things.
Not a bad idea at all! Personally I hate this as I’m bit old-school and rigid, so I want my shipyards building a single class and only that class and nothing else but I can see the value for the players who love tinkering with classes to make the most out of them. These techs could also be really expensive so that it is significant decision - do you dedicate the population and minerals to build more shipyards or do you spend the one-off investment of RP to make your existing shipyards more flexible? That sounds like a good gameplay decision to me!
Roleplay-wise I could see parallels for a tech like this, basically things like nano-bot tools or other programmable facilities that can adjust for different designs without time-consuming physical re-tooling.
Gameplay wise, I do worry this could just as easily be a game option for the player to turn off re-tooling shipyards all together as at somepoint it may just no longer be necessary with enough shipyards of sufficient size.
There’s currently a tech to reduce the time and cost of re-tooling shipyards for a new design which can still serve the roleplay idea of improved tools easily adaptable to a new design, if not instantly. What would be the gameplay advantage of expanding the build cost threshold over the existing tech to reduce time/cost of re-tooling?
This is a good point, and is part of the reason why I didn’t attack the other threshold that exists for tonnage similarity.
I think its functionally very similar but this has the added benefit of being less fiddly as with this tech you wouldn’t have to spent a bunch of time going to shipyards and telling them to retool.
This is quite convenient when you want to create several different ships on a “universal basis”, replacing only one type of components on the ship.
A simple example: I tried to copy the design of my Orbital Miner by replacing the Mining modules with Salvage modules. The ships are the same size, and everything is the same except for one type of component. 23% cost difference. Pain.
This was the lowest value received. Changing the number of other components increased this difference or led to an excessively large size difference.
As a result, I had to leave half of the Mining modules, so now my Salvage ship is classified as a Miner, and the officer’s priority skill is mining. Not exactly what I wanted.
Design a ‘ship’ with two mining modules, three salvage modules and retool for that. The shipyard will then be able to build either of your existing designs.
But if I want some more variants? For example, 5 sniper frigates, which differ only in the installed expensive cannon? I checked that in my game, one C5 Particle Beam on a 2.7kt frigate is 34.2% of the cost of the entire ship. I can’t build it in the same shipyard as the frigate with C3 Particle Beam. I won’t be able to create an intermediate class with 5 types of weapon in same ship size.
I mean, that tech would make it much easier to work with ships of the same type and/or ships with some expensive components.
In terms of the commercial restriction, this is mostly to force us to keep committed to our ship designs. Already, the incoming small craft shipyards is gonna go REALLY hard, which’ll enable use to build any ship =/<1000 tons in them without regard to tooling, and this goes along with being able to build FACs in what are currently fighter factories. We don’t need more versatility in our shipyards
Secondly, we can say that military modules (weapons, sensors etc) are too specialized to be able to be built in any old shipyard
Thirdly, it would just be nice to be able to build most commercial ships in a wider variety of commercial yards without constantly retooling. Players already work around this to a degree by building stations with confacs and just using huge fleets of tugs
For me it would make sense to connect SY flexibility to either the ship design itself, or the shipyard itself. I don’t see how technology alone could solve this issue, it would need to be through infrastructure/design investments.
For example a parameter to Ship Design “Ship Modularity” which makes the design more expensive to build, but allows greater flexibility building other ships in a SY tooled for it (as more cost is spent on making the base class modular/flexible/plug&play compatible)
Or connected to the shipyard in some way, perhaps connected to number of slipways or cost of expansion (flexible shipyard with x1.3 modifier for all costs in expansion and retooling but 35% flexible instead of 20%)
I think it would make sense if this was something you had to construct, not research. Like adding additional tooling to a shipyard (with a scaling increase in cost) that makes building anything there slower. Or some other negative to balance it.
Building techniques evolve (think about rivets vs. welding, or milling vs. additive manufacturing (i.e. 3D printing)). So, a tech line could be acceptable, to slowly improve the capability.
Building techniques do evolve and a tech could fit with the real world. But from a game play perspective I wonder if either opting at the design of the ship or tooling/retooling of the ship yard might be the better option.
A hybrid model is certainly possible maybe tech that reduces inefficiency by opting for the a shipyard that is more focused on multitasking.
P.S. I am not sure that change is needed but lots of interesting ideas.
