In the terrestrial building industry (buildings, roads, cities) small, hungry companies can often build small projects incredibly fast (30 days to design and permit, 30 days to build for a roughly 4000 sf /400 sq meter/114 dTon fast food restaurant). The small ‘boat builders’ along the Florida coast appear to operate on a comparable schedule. In Traveller terms, it might be possible to find a small planet-based starship manufacturer that can build a 100-400 dTon standard design in a few months instead of years. Comparable to the real world business jet aircraft industry, there might also be third party companies with a small inventory of stripped down (hull, bridge, engineering only) standard starships that can be refitted to your custom specifications in weeks instead of months – at very premium prices.
In the terrestrial building industry the small, hungry companies lack the resources to handle very large projects. The large builders cannot afford to have idle resources, so your big project goes into the queue and often shares resources with other big projects. Even a small hospital (roughly 100,000 sf/ 10,000 sq meter/ 2800 dTon) will require years of design and years of construction. As Starflyer pointed out, much of the time is spent just waiting for your turn since these major contractors (and apparently large shipyards) have their resources booked years in advance. This would probably be the situation with most of the standard Traveller build times.
A VERY rough rule of thumb from business management is that manufacturing costs are about 50% materials/parts, 25% labor and 25% fixed costs/profit. Using this as a guide, 25% of the total cost of your starship divided by the average hourly wage of the workers will tell you how many man-hours it will require to build the ship. [For example, given a 1 MCr ship and 1000 Cr per month workers: the cost of labor will be about 250,000 Cr and the average hourly wage will be 6.25 Cr (1000 Cr/mo = 250 Cr/wk = 6.25 Cr/hr). So the 1 MCr ship will require 40,000 man-hours to build = 1 man x 1000 weeks, or 10 men x 100 weeks, or 100 men x 10 weeks, or 1000 men x 1 week.
In Traveller game terms, this means that ‘convincing’ a large shipyard that YOUR ship is a high priority could dramatically reduce the required construction time – but remember that EVERYONE wants their job done first. A Character with a very high SOC could discreetly arrange to be introduced to a member of the Board of Directors and mention his ‘urgent needs’ over lunch at the governor’s palace. It is amazing how quickly a single phone call can change the priority of some projects.
