Shipyard Production

[Enoki]

Not as doable as you'd think.

First, your crew estimates are far too low. Three hundred is just for cruisers, the capital ships quoted require much more. Much more like 4K for a Tigress and 1K to 1.5K for the others. And we haven't counted frozen watches yet.

Service personnel, the 'teeth to tail" ratio, are going to be perhaps ten times the number of crew.

Then there's training, another factor that's hard to stuff into a spreadsheet macro. Yeah, during WW2 the USN was able to take hillbillies and turn them into radiomen and radar operators, but what was the TL "gap" in question? One or two? Are you going to take a kid from a TL 4, 5, or 6 world and train him in a reasonable amount of time to operate, maintain, and repair TL 14 and 15 equipment?

Then there's distance. Are you going to recruit a kid from Lishun to serve aboard a BatRon in Daibei? You're going to man your sector fleet from the sector in question.

You're going to need many more men than you think, you're only going to be able to recruit them from worlds above a certain TL, and you're only going to be able to ship them so far.

Go ahead. Build those 1100 ships in one year. Now man them.

Okay, let's say it's 10K per ship average. Most of those ships would be smaller ones, not massive battleships or such after all. That'd be 11 million personnel total out of a population of say, 10 billion. That doesn't even reach 1% of the total population.
If we say the ships require 10% of that total, that's 1.1 million crew. Again doable on a population of billions.

As for TL... It depends on how recruiting is done. It could be entirely possible that lower TL planets are targeted for recruits at about age 10 to 12 who are then placed in military schools off world until trained at 18 and they enter the service. Low TL worlds with large populations might be happy to have this happen as they eventually get skilled high TL people back potentially. For those chosen, and their families, this might be a way to rise socially and pay the bills. Many Second World militaries are seen that way today on Earth. Even top tier militaries are often seen as a way to get a trade or skill and get ahead for people at the lower end of the social spectrum.

You assume that the Imperium has a system and political problem with recruiting similar to Western nations on Earth today. It is entirely possible they use a different system. In ancient times, and even well into the industrial age, many nations coupled long term military service to other desirable outcomes for those who served.
You put in 20 or 30 years starting out at a military school at age 12 and you get a small plot of land back home, or a big bonus for retirement, or a decent stipend. Your pay might be several times what you could earn back home.
Now you have professional long service personnel that literally grew up learning how to operate ships rather than draftees. Given you have a population base that will easily support millions of people in the service and amounts to maybe 1% or less of the population, the service can be selective about recruits, keeps them in service for years, and has the time to train them thoroughly.

So, you take a smart kid of 10 who can read, write, and speak in a language the Imperial Navy will accept from a TL 5 world and begin training him at a military school to be an operator / technician in the Imperial Navy. By 18 when he is put into the service, he's a skilled and competent crewman.
The same goes for officers. Bring back midshipmen in a big way. Start with kids from more affluent families and let them grow up in the Imperial Navy.

This system makes sense given the relative slowness of communications and travel between systems. Such a system takes a long view of military service rather than it being a temporary thing.

 

[Garnfellow]

The numbered fleets and fixed sector fleets are an Imperial organisation scheme. The Solomani might have had other ideas. At a guess the bulk of their forces are concentrated against the Aslan and the Imperium. Terra might have had a massive Home Fleet as a strategic reserve.

Fighting Ships of the Solomani Confederation indicated that Terra maintained a fairly large strategic reserve fleet, which was used for the Diaspora offensive.

When the Solomani started to retake world in 989-990 they would have been ready for war, so have concentrated their forces close to the Imperial border.

FSotSC and MGT: Solomani Rim suggest that the Confederation Navy in peacetime breaks assets into subsector fleets for adminsitrative purposes, though during wartime these assets form ad-hoc task forces as needed. The narrative agrees that the Solomani had massed squadrons near the border, allowing them to overpower the Imperials using surprise and numbers.

 

[Garnfellow]

At a guess you would not scrap ships during a war, unless you run out of manpower.

Agreed, though I think you would be constantly rotating new units in while relegating older units out to secondary roles. That formerly first-rate BatRon becomes a second-rate, the second-rate becomes a third-rate reserve, the third-rate reserve goes to the planetary navy as their first-rate unit . . . so on and so forth.

 

[Whipsnade]

This was a good thought but I think AnotherDilbert has already made the point I would have: a single 90 billion pop world can provide all the labor we would ever need.

Here's another of those pesky sociological problems that never seem to be acknowledged or even thought of when creating "Spreadsheet Solutions":

As the Imperium, do you want all you warships in one sector built and manned by the inhabitants of ONE WORLD in that sector?

Hell, do you even want a majority of your warships in one sector built and manned by the inhabitants of one world in that sector? Or built and manned by the inhabitants of a handful of worlds in that sector?

Leaving aside internal security concerns, as an enemy, I'd absolutely love to have only one real target in that entire sector.

If I may torture the Bard; There are more things in heaven and earth, Garnfellow, than are calculated in your spreadsheets.

YM obviously Vs.

 

[flykiller]

do you even want a majority of your warships in one sector built and manned by the inhabitants of one world in that sector?

does that mean you limit your number of warships? can't see that in the face of a significant threat that takes more territory from you every time you fight it ....

(taking the spinward marches) just how are you going to man a navy, numerous or not, that is not majority trin/moran anyway?

 

[AnotherDilbert]

As the Imperium, do you want all you warships in one sector built and manned by the inhabitants of ONE WORLD in that sector?

Ha, no.

With a reasonable dose of imperial paranoia you would probably deploy the personnel in another sector.

But the manpower is available, if we use several planets we have several times the manpower, which I think was the core point.


On the other hand there are not that many worlds in the Imperium. The majority of the population lives in ~300 popA systems, and the wast majority (~95%) in ~1000 pop9+ systems, the other 10000 systems are just noise.

Even fewer of those have starport class A and TL F, so that they can build Imperial warships.

 

[Enoki]

Or, as I suggested, you recruit heavily from smaller worlds where they have everything to gain by being in the military and little to lose back home. That way when a major world gets "uppity" shall we say, the military being sent in has no stake in the fight and will follow orders to restore "peace and tranquility" through mass casualties...

The Romans used that method. So did the Persians. Even the colonial period British Army did it. Hire the locals, put in reliable officers loyal to the crown, then ship the unit somewhere where the troops have no affinity for the locals where they are now, and voilà!, you have reliable troops lead by reliable officers who will follow orders.

Throw in some good reasons for the troops to want to serve: Money, looting / prize taking allowed, bonuses for combat, land, citizenship, whatever, and they are all the more willing to serve loyally. In such a situation, mercenary units would be a first choice by the empire to deal with local situations. Why waste your good troops on something piddling when you can easily hire a bunch of totally expendable mercenaries to do your dirty work?

 

[flykiller]

Hire the locals, put in reliable officers loyal to the crown, then ship the unit somewhere where the troops have no affinity for the locals where they are now, and voilà!, you have reliable troops lead by reliable officers who will follow orders.

this would allow rebellions anywhere of any nature and of any degree to be addressed readily. it would also, however, create resentment everywhere, as no one likes to see their citizens sent off to occupy other systems while their own system is occupied by foreigners. so, in immediate response to immediate problems nobles would institute and rely upon such a system - it is, after all, the most immediately efficient. their heirs would take up leadership of an increasingly resented system, however, but having no other method would implement more of the same. subsequent heirs would receive an impossible mess, and that would be the end of the imperium.

 

[Garnfellow]

TL C does not qualify, max tech required, whether that is TL13 or TL14 for the Solomani.

I don't think this is quite right. CT High Guard has "The Imperial Navy may procure ships of up to tech level 15, although it also procures vessels at tech levels 10 through 14" (20).

The T20 Fighting Ships book states "At the present time (993) the Imperium possesses a mature Tech Level 14 capability on its highest-tech worlds. Many worlds possess lower TLs, and thus starship construction for the Navy is conducted at TL 12-14 to allow contracts to be spread out and to ensure maintainability once vessels are in service" (3).

The T20 Fighting Ships of the Solomani Confederation doesn't have as definitive statement on Solomani technological capabilities, but the example ships are mostly TL 13 and 14. So I'd assume the Confederation of the Rim War period also constructed starships at TL 12-14.

 

[welsh]

I'd suggest the limiting factor on shipyard capacity is economic: it's the demand for ships.

It's all good and well to to assume that with a given population and a given starport you can build x zillion tons of ships, but certain realities intervene:

1. You can't build ships without skilled labour (or expensive robots);
2. You can't have skilled labour unless you can keep skilled labour employed;
3. Your expensive robots won't pay their way unless they're churning out product;
4. Ships last a very long time (decades) and can be refitted, which reduces demand; and,
5. The gulf between merchant shipping demand and naval demands is huge.

How many Type A traders do you need to build to take up the slack when a big Navy contract to build 60,000 ton cruisers is done with?

I suggest that navy ships are built in a limited number of Navy yards, not at every class A starport. The number of Navy yards is limited because the navy already has lots of ships, so it hardly needs to replace a lot of tonnage at any given time.

Most shipyards are smaller operations turning out merchant vessels.

This ought to make us reconsider the big ship universe, I think. And the difficulty of ramping up production to replace losses ought to be a serious deterrent to the costly wars the Zhodani embark on so carelessly. In any case, the question is not how many ships you can possibly build but how you can sustain enough business to keep the lights on and the skilled workers employed.

Unfortunately, this doesn't lend itself to nice neat formulas based on UWP data.

 

[Garnfellow]

I'd suggest the limiting factor on shipyard capacity is economic: it's the demand for ships.

Now this makes good sense.

 

[Enoki]

I'd suggest the limiting factor on shipyard capacity is economic: it's the demand for ships.

It's all good and well to to assume that with a given population and a given starport you can build x zillion tons of ships, but certain realities intervene:

1. You can't build ships without skilled labour (or expensive robots);
2. You can't have skilled labour unless you can keep skilled labour employed;
3. Your expensive robots won't pay their way unless they're churning out product;
4. Ships last a very long time (decades) and can be refitted, which reduces demand; and,
5. The gulf between merchant shipping demand and naval demands is huge.

How many Type A traders do you need to build to take up the slack when a big Navy contract to build 60,000 ton cruisers is done with?

I suggest that navy ships are built in a limited number of Navy yards, not at every class A starport. The number of Navy yards is limited because the navy already has lots of ships, so it hardly needs to replace a lot of tonnage at any given time.

Most shipyards are smaller operations turning out merchant vessels.

This ought to make us reconsider the big ship universe, I think. And the difficulty of ramping up production to replace losses ought to be a serious deterrent to the costly wars the Zhodani embark on so carelessly. In any case, the question is not how many ships you can possibly build but how you can sustain enough business to keep the lights on and the skilled workers employed.

Unfortunately, this doesn't lend itself to nice neat formulas based on UWP data.

I'd say the biggest limit isn't economic, but rather the capacity of the yard. If the biggest thing they can turn out is say, 10,000 tons because that's the biggest building facility they have, then it doesn't matter if there's cash for construction of something larger. To do that the yard will have to expand. Even repair and maintenance facilities can limit what will be built.

For example, the RN was limited prior to WW 2 to how large a ship they could build by dry docking facilities available for maintenance and repair. The USN build huge dry docks (always #4 for some reason) at US Navy yards in the mid to late 1930's to avoid a similar problem. These are still large enough to take a carrier today.

So, just because you have a Type A starport doesn't necessarily mean they can build warships, or ships of any size. At least, that's the way I see it.

A shipyard not only needs the physical means to build a particular ship, but also the talent and experience to do it. If the yard's equipment can make a component of X size and the ship you want built requires parts 2X in size, they aren't going to be able to do it.
Or, maybe your design requires using materials and techniques the yard has never worked with, for whatever reason. That would require the ship be redesigned to eliminate those materials and techniques substituting ones that the yard can do.

So, I agree that purely naval yards are few and far between and many of them would specialize in particular types of ships rather than build anything and everything. There might well be just a handful of yards scattered one per sector or less that turn out "capital" ships. Most yards turn out smaller stuff, escorts, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, or even auxiliaries and transports.

I'd also think that many merchant yards are required by the Imperial government to build "standardized" designs that include features that would make these ships suitable for limited military purposes in time of war. That is, they build say a large freighter or liner that can be quickly armed and turned into a merchant cruiser.

 

[tjoneslo]

But don't worlds need Class A starports (and associated shipyards) to construct starships?

Yes, but the B ports can be used to construct non-starships, and all of them can be used to maintain or repair ships.

 

[phavoc]

There wouldn't necessarily be an easy formula for this because there are too many variables and too few pieces of information.

I take the shipyard classification with a grain of salt. Unless the maps and planets were built with an eye towards fitting things together (and I don't see that happening), then really it's a moot point. We know that some places have shipyard capacity far in excess of the national needs (look no further than the shipbuilding giants in Asia). And then you have specialized shipyards that build specific types of ships but not a whole lot else.

So that Class A starport may be capable of building jump-capable vessels, but that doesn't mean every Class A has the same tonnage capability. And nowhere is it listed about the accompanying industry that is required to build jump drives, computer cores, weapons, etc. The world that builds the jump drives could be parsecs from where they are assembled. It's that way with jet engines today, and even some of the diesel engines that power modern cruise ships and freighters.

And a Class B doesn't normally make jump-capable ships, most likely because there is a better, cheaper source elsewhere. But everything else about the spaceship is equivalent to a starship - with the exception of a jump drive. And if that Class B can repair one, it probably could install one, too.

Starport classification is more or less arbitrary. So I treat the rules surrounding it as such as well - as long as I'm willing to provide more details as to why I'm doing so. Otherwise, at least for some gaming, there is nothing important adventure wise going on there, so a Class A is a Class A is a Class A.

 

[welsh]

I'd say the biggest limit isn't economic, but rather the capacity of the yard. If the biggest thing they can turn out is say, 10,000 tons because that's the biggest building facility they have, then it doesn't matter if there's cash for construction of something larger. To do that the yard will have to expand.

Yes, but my point is, the limitations that prevent that expansion are economic. If you expand to meet ephemeral demand, you get killed when demand dries up. And all your skilled workers disappear into other jobs.

It's economic realities that limit yard capacity.

 

[Enoki]

Yes, but my point is, the limitations that prevent that expansion are economic. If you expand to meet ephemeral demand, you get killed when demand dries up. And all your skilled workers disappear into other jobs.

It's economic realities that limit yard capacity.

I'd think that much like it is with the "military-industrial complex" here, expansion would be something the management would get the Imperial government to subsidize or fund.
"You want ships, give us cubic credits to build a bigger yard..." Or, it could be Count Sonso on the yard's board of directors goes to the Duke and gets him to get the Emperor or whoever to fund the expansion because "It's good for the empire's economy..."

It would be very rare for a company to expand massively on its own for something, as you point out, ephemeral. They'd use OPM rather than their own.

 

[Whipsnade]

Unfortunately, this doesn't lend itself to nice neat formulas based on UWP data.

Which has been my point from the first.

You can't take some formula out of TCS or other source, do some simple multiplication, and say Gee, they should be able to build X number of ships really easily but we don't see them...

There are a whole host of issues, some economic and some sociological, which come into play. It simply isn't a case of entering population size, tech level, government type, and port rating into your calculator.

On a final note, I remind everyone of just what field Mr. Miller studied at university. It wasn't history or economics...

 

[Enoki]

I could also easily see some systems being more amenable to heavy industrial activity than others. Those that really don't care about environmental issues for example would have far less problems with the pollution created with heavy industry and processes using toxic "stuff" to make things.
A world run by say, an impersonal bureaucracy with a big population (hundreds of millions to billions) and say TL 10 but a starport of C or D might be in reality a corporate "owned" world where they've set up a bureaucracy to govern the planet and the bulk of the population is virtually slave labor. The low starport rating is deliberate rather than something that occurred "naturally."
Here, the lack of a planet-side starport with say, small ship loading docks or such as the only facilities could have been done to prevent workers skipping out on their contracts. It's harder to stowaway on a cutter that's being guarded as it is loaded, has a crew of two, and can't jump anywhere, than it is if there were a class A port with huge facilities and lots of ships coming and going...

 

[whartung]

Orbital facilities (the one most likely to be used for large ships) would be more dynamic, than static. For example, you may need a specialized facility to build the keel or spine of the ship, but once created, the result can readily leave that facility. A tug can move it anywhere you want, it doesn't even have to meet the most basic of requirements (such as "having to float") as a terrestrial ship would have.

This means you don't need dedicated space.

You need material, and machine shops -- but material is also readily moved in orbit. Machine shops can be specialized maneuverable facilities associated with a particular build.

But a key aspect is none of these are necessarily dedicated to a specific project. The facilities can be tasked to perform their specific role and then moved on to the next ship. For example, you could have a crew that does nothing but install drives move from hull to hull. You can move the crews and their specialized facilities to the project, rather than the other way around.

Either way, being in orbit leads to much more flexibility than building an enormous artifact that's trapped in the gravity well until it's much farther along the build process.

Similarly you can bring specialized crews and facilities from out of the system. Perhaps you have a specialized Meson crew.

 

[Enoki]

Orbital facilities (the one most likely to be used for large ships) would be more dynamic, than static. For example, you may need a specialized facility to build the keel or spine of the ship, but once created, the result can readily leave that facility. A tug can move it anywhere you want, it doesn't even have to meet the most basic of requirements (such as "having to float") as a terrestrial ship would have.

This means you don't need dedicated space.

You need material, and machine shops -- but material is also readily moved in orbit. Machine shops can be specialized maneuverable facilities associated with a particular build.

But a key aspect is none of these are necessarily dedicated to a specific project. The facilities can be tasked to perform their specific role and then moved on to the next ship. For example, you could have a crew that does nothing but install drives move from hull to hull. You can move the crews and their specialized facilities to the project, rather than the other way around.

Either way, being in orbit leads to much more flexibility than building an enormous artifact that's trapped in the gravity well until it's much farther along the build process.

Similarly you can bring specialized crews and facilities from out of the system. Perhaps you have a specialized Meson crew.

I think that's an over simplification.

Some equipment would have to be installed as the hull was built. This would be stuff that is large and complex and would be difficult to install in the completed hull. Major internal subdivisions and decks would have to go in as the ship were built simply because it's easier when the hull is open than when its closed up in its final form.

Fitting out could be done elsewhere without extensive specialized facilities but would still require the equivalent of large barges housing the shops and such to move alongside to allow workers to fabricate and install parts. You'd need space around the hull to place a number of these as few shops work in isolation of the others.

Some degree of prefabrication is also possible with the sections of the ship pre-fitted with most piping, and larger internal equipment fitted. These could be moved to an assembly structure.
An enclosed assembly structure with atmosphere would be preferable to an open space environment, even if still in ZG. This would eliminate the need for workers to wear space suits with limited stay times as well as the inherent limitations working in such a suit would bring.
It would also offer a degree of protection against micro meteorites and such, minimize worker radiation exposure, and protect the ship during assembly.

A yard might also be placed close to a low gravity satellite rather than in orbit of the main world as this would make moving materials to orbit easier and quicker. It would also free up orbital space around the main world for traffic.