[Wanderer]

Originally posted by tbontob:
My understanding of mothballing is that basically the ship is sealed off. If so, you cannot upgrade a ship and still have it sealed off.

Not so much sealing off as putting it in a port with a skeleton crew so as to avoid paying for a full crew, provisions, ammunition and fuel. I believe the Last Turkish battleship had a crew of 2 for several years (an old captain and his dog!) before the government decided to scrap it. Generally ships in mothball are cheap to maintain but deteriorate rapidly. Perhaps SE4's unmothball cost should be higher to represent the huge amount of work required to turn a decaying hulk into a battleworthy ship once more.

I can't see how this would prevent modifications to the vessel being made, though. There's no crew/ammo/fuel on board. Old parts that are rusting away can be replaced etc. Generally though, in real life mothballed ships are put in mothballs prior to being scrapped (the only exception I can think of is the American battleships mothballed then put back into action for the Gulf War), so it's hard to judge how this should be handled.

As to paying a crew for being in combat readiness, take the Bismark as an example. It was built, and then IIRC went on sea trials in the Baltic for about a year to train its crew. Only then did it venture into the Atlantic.

The sea trials were important because in its first battle, it sunk the battleship Hood which was the pride of the British fleet and damaged the Prince of Wales.

Pretty good for a novice ship.

Indeed, and the Prince of Wales was only recently built (when she left port to intercept the Bismarck she still had civilian contractors on board trying to get the main armament fully operational. During the Denmark Strait battle she was rarely able to fire more than 7 of her 10 main guns due to mechanical failures. Despite this she did manage to hit the Bismarck, rupturing a fuel tank and causing her to run for St. Nazaire. Several British ships were rushed into combat too quickly - I believe the record was a destroyer crippled/sunk just a week after being completed.

An interesting point is that the Tirpitz (sister ship of the Bismarck) was also recently built and was still working up when Bismarck sailed - hence she wasn't allowed to join the sortie (thank goodness - one battleship proved hard enough to stop).

The thing is that there are two issues that are lumped together in SE4:

1) Crew experience/training. This can be got round in real life by assigning crew from other ships to your new ship, or indeed, by training crew whilst their ship is being built. This is especially true if you have several ships of the same design on which to gain experience.

2) Vessel shakedown. No ship comes off the stocks fully operational, especially if the design is a new one. Generally weeks/months of sailing are required to shake out all the little niggling problems and make the ship fully battleworthy.

So, if we want to be really accurate, I guess we could build the spaceship, and then have the ship hang around the planet for a year while its crew are being trained (to the basic minimum) and only then venture out into deep space.

I'd like the training to be more important, perhaps by raising the amount of experience you can get, raising the amount you can get from training etc. This would mean ships raced into combat would be at a great disadvantage against those carefully brought up to full battle readiness. It would probably really hurt the AI, though.

Anyway, I've rambled on for enough.