[geoschmo]

Retroseries not only can double, it almost assuradly will come close to doubling the cost of the ship. When you factor in the 20% extra for the new comps, the 30% disposal fee for the old comps, and the maintenance you pay for each turn the ship is sitting while being worked on. You can save some if your base maint is lower, and some if you set up the retroseries so that you remove as few components as possible. And as far as speed it it pretty much equivalent to the speed you would get by building the ship on Emergency build.

So you can build a ship on emergency build in two thirds the time and for the same cost, but are penalized by reduced ship yard effectivenss afterwards. Or you can build the ship in two thirds the time with no reduced effectivness afterwards, by spending twice the resources to build it. And by a considerable amount of added micromanagment which doesn't really translate into game terms. It's actually quite an elegant balance IMHO when building a single ship.

Where it becomes sort of gamey however is when you consider constructing a bunch of ships. By doing retroseries on all of them you can free up your space yard to pump out another ship every turn. Your first ship isn't built any faster than emergency build, and only a few turns faster than normal build, but you get another the next turn, and another the next turn after that, on and on forever until you run out of resources or don't have enough repair capacity in sector to fix all the ships you retrofit in each turn.

Because of this, and the little trick Wanderer mentioned about retrofitting while you move your fleet, I have no problem not doing it in games if playing with people that object to it's use. And I prefer that the game owner specify if it is allowed or not, so I know noone else is doing it either. But if everyone understands it and agrees it's ok, I have no problem with it.

Geoschmo