[Fyron]

Originally posted by Pablo:
One more thing I think is worth mentioning is that you may not wait till all your 'craters' are repaired before retrofiting to another design. I mean, for example you retrofit 2 big ships. One is fully refitted the next turn and another is not. It still has some 'craters'. You may give this ship retrofit orders without waiting for all the components to be repaired. This will not reduce the cost but only time in case you have researched some new techs.
Sorry if this is off topic

Not off topic at all. In fact, that is actually a useful strategy some people use called retro-series building. You make several steps of ship designs, using the 150% max difference in cost between designs to make each step as cheap as possible, while still being retrofitable to the next in the line. You can shave a few turns off of the build queue usage for a ship, so you can essentially get more ships built in the same amount of time. This does require that you have a lot of excess resource production available to pay for the retrofits though.

eg: Design X is the ship you want to build. To simplify the math, it costs 15000 minerals and 0 orgs and rads (max dif in cost is calculated from total resources). You want a 3 step retroseries. So, you need 4 designs. Call the 3 intermediate designs Design X A thru C.

X A costs 6667 / 1.5 = 4445
X B costs 10000 / 1.5 = 6667
X C costs 15000 / 1.5 = 10000
X D costs 15000

Build an X A, retrofit to X B and so on til you get to X. With a 3000 rate SY, design X takes 5 turns to build, whereas design X A only takes 2 turns to build. Make sure to round all costs up, to make sure that you don't get off by 1 resource.