StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Time to update that ISCA page in the Alliances thread, no?

PeZook wrote:

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Time to update that ISCA page in the Alliances thread, no?

Yep. The budget is updated all the time, but the ship selection grew wider!

RogueIce wrote: Yeah, kinda need to include those Coast Guard cutters and nuclear stuff in the ship prices though.

How can I decide how I want to spend the USD$500 million I'm setting aside for ISCA purchases if I don't know how much everything will cost me?

RogueIce wrote:EDIT: Why does Shroomania have 5 DWT being used up with nothing in the slot?

The Yosemite Bear wrote:PS I would like some floating drydocks for my trade facilities, hmmm, purhaps I could design a floating Airship field....

Hey, if it's private companies making the orders, that shouldn't affect my government's budget - right?

Shroom Man 777 wrote:I will now burn my wallet with a HUEG order of FCSs.

Hey, if it's private companies making the orders, that shouldn't affect my government's budget - right?

Guide to shipbuilding:

Basic stuff about real-world shipbuilding

Building a ship is no small feat ; Even a very small freighter is a huge undertaking, requiring thousands of tonnes of steel and plenty of skilled workers.

Modern shipbuilding is normally done in a modular way. Huge elements of each ship are assembled on land, moved to a drydock/slipway and welded together right there. This is convenient, as the slipway is only occupied for the assembly process, however it required a shipyard to have extensive productoin halls and facilities on land.

These requirements mean that constructing a shipyard from scratch is a huge undertaking, requiring many years and millions of dollars in investment.

How do we measure a ship?

...with a tape measure, of course!

But seriously, while we could get into details light lenght, draft, beam and so on, for the purpose of the game, we'll use two basic measurements:

DWT

Or deadweight tonnage - this is the cargo capacity of a ship, which means the space where it can hold cargo. It's extremely useful for merchant ships.

Gross tonnage

This is the mass of water a ship displaces ; Calculated, basically, from volume of the submerged portion of the hull. Displacement can have several values: different for loaded and unloaded ships, different for surfaced or submerged submarines, etc.

Now, I decided to use DWT as a measure of shipyard capacity, but this isn't alway accurate. This is why a highly complicated and nasty web of conversion tables and standards has been implemented


So, the base shipyard capacity is measured in DWT, but this only works well for merchant ships. Why? Because they're simple to build (relatively speaking). Even the huge monstrosities are not that complicated.

So, if you want to play with all of that, how do we determine what kind of capacity we need to build ships? First, some basic rules:

1.Treat DWT capacity as "shipbuilding points". This is for simplicity's sake: We could model every individual shipyard in SD.net World, but that wouldn't be much fun.

2.If you need to figure our how much points a ship costs, try to find info on the Internet, and convert displacement to DWT by multiplying the displacement by a factor of 1.5. It's not particularly accurate, but it should work.

3. You can build ships over several years: If your shipyard can build 30 thousand DWT a year, and you want to build a 50 thousand-tonner, then you can "spend" 30 thousand in the first year, and 20 thousand in the second year.

4. Nuclear powered ships get their DWT multiplied by 2, beause of significant difficulty in implementing a nuclear drive.

5. If you want to build a dedicated warship, you calculate the "points" based on displacement, and then MULTIPLY BY FIVE. This is because warships are incredibly difficult to build, require far more strigent quality control, expensive and delicate electronics, etc.

So, if you want to build a Kennedy-class CVN, you take its displacement (82 thousand tonnes), and multiply by 7.5 (1.5x5), and then by 2 because it's a nuclear-powered ship. So, in total, a Kennedy-class carrier will take 1230 points (DWT capacity) - one full year for a Tsardom which commits all its shipbuilding capacity to this single project. More realistically, it will take a Tsardom about two years to build without occupying all its shipyards. Smaller nations can forget about building CVNs.

Due to this process, the ISCA budget sometimes has weird figures for DWT: remember, the DWT entered into ISCA does not always correspond to the cargo capacity of a ship. It is done to reflect additional difficulties in construction, and will always be noted when it happens.

So, how many points do I have?

There are, basically, five nation levels.

L1: Duchy

L2: Principality

L3: Kingdom

L4: Tsardom

L5: Imperium

Each of these levels has different GDP, navy and shipbuilding capacity. When comparing with real-world countries, we'll use a baseline of Spain which can produce about 450 thousand DWT of merchant ships annually.

This is what we can expect a Kingdom to make. For ISCA I used the following baselines:

L1: 60-100 DWT yearly
L2: 120-180 DWT yearly
L3: 500-600 DWT yearly
L4: 1000-1200 DWT yearly
L5: 1800-2000 DWT yearly

How much does it cost to upgrade my shipyards?

For ISCA purposes, I use an off-the-cuff estimate of 2 million US dollars per 1 thousand DWT yearly capacity. Part of this goes to construction of drydocks/slipways, and part towards the shore-based infrastructure (which is extremely important!).

RogueIce wrote:So if I read it right, if I spend 2 million bucks, I can double my DWT?

PeZook wrote:

RogueIce wrote:So if I read it right, if I spend 2 million bucks, I can double my DWT?

No, you can add 1 thousand per year to your overall capacity

So doubling your capacity will cost you 2 billion.

Edit 2: It probably is a low-ball estimate, though. I'm not exactly an expert on maritime construction

So anyway, the automated FCS, is that only in the FCS-L variant? I'm trying to make my own spreadsheet to track yearly purchases. Although I'm no expert at Excel so I'm sucking hard.

The Yosemite Bear wrote:they don't need to nessearrily be nuclear capable, though I do have the support infrastructure if they are.

Because of the IRT's dickery, Shroomania is closing itself from the UAR and the IRT.

But Shroomania joins PeZookia in asking the UAR (nicely!) to tell the world what, exactly, is it that they want with relation to global affairs.

... you're closing off the UAR for something we did? We didn't even tell them what we were up to, other than that it was for a "classified but important reason."

Shroom Man 777 wrote:But just because I'm going along does not mean I want to, and I really want to normalize relationship with Shep. The fact that it took me a long while to announce my closing-of-borders should be a hint of how I dislike the current setup and situation. I want my discount Blackbeards, goddamn it!

Also. I am scared. Very scared. My people are huddling in the shadows of their fallout shelters, with teary eyes.

But the IRT has really pissed Shroomania off. We HAET you more than Shep now

I'm not even sure what ya'll are worried about with regard to the IRT