Useful Starbases! ? Modders, please respond.

[Trachmyr]

I have to disagree with you about no spaceyards in ships... robotic factories could easily handle such a thing (even today if we ever built something big enough to hold it), but perhaps a restriction on how big they can build something... for instance each shipyard (400 tons) can build a max of 200ton ship... perhaps this getting better as the facility improves (to where eventually a baseship could build a dreadnought or heavy carrier with 3 shipyards)... Also the rate of production should be lowered, but only if MM allows multiple shipyards to contribute to the rate of production...

Additionally, there should be NANOTECH in the game, and this would vastly improve the effectiveness of shipyards.

As a final note, perhaps building ships with a shipyard should also use supplies equal to the amount of resources used... thus you would have to be either at a port or have a fleet of resupply ships to allow a shipyard to produce massive fleets on the front line.

[Jubala]

As Trachmyr said space yards should have size limits on what they can build. But I don't think in the way he wants it. Space Yard Facilities should not be able to build anything bigger then 600kT (Battle Cruisers) and Space Yard Components should be more powerful and be able to build the biggest ships. Either they should be so powerful as to be better then a SYF with max pop bonus or they should get the pop bonus from the planet they are orbiting. I'd prefer simple raw power.

Why like this? Look at the size of the bigger ships. A BB is 800 000 Tonnes ship designed for use in deep space, not on a planet. It can't handle the stress of gravity when landed and just boosting the thing into orbit would cause heavy pollution.

At least that's my opinion. Maybe I placed the cutoff wrong (600kT) but it needs to be there imo.

Edit:
Forgot, I want to be able to build stuff in pieces like cargo and assemble on site (bases to deploy at warp points). Or at least tow the bases around.

[This message has been edited by Jubala (edited 14 January 2001).]

[Trachmyr]

I'm sure that these ground facilities have the ability to build large craft in orbit, these races are much more advanced than our 1970's space shuttle program... Why I believe that ship shipyards should be limited is the fact that you need labor and heavy macinery which is much more difficult to fit on a ship/base than a planet.

IMO that is...

[This message has been edited by Trachmyr (edited 14 January 2001).]

[Tomgs]

Well eliminating shipboard spaceyards will also kill Sphereworlds and Ringworlds. I realize that they won't be built too often but I have a game going now where I am building about 10 Spherewords just to see if I can.

[Barnacle Bill]

If you assume that there is nanotech & robotic industry everywhere, then planets & population are completely irrelevant. All that matters under that paradigm are resources. You would not bother with colonization. You'd just park shiploads of nanobots in asteroid belts and they would crank out - more nanobots. Weapons would just be - more nanobots which would "eat" enemy hardware and make more of themselves out of it. It wouldn't look much like SE4, which is more "space opera". I prefer a SF paradigm in which we just see incremental improvements vs how things are done today (which is pretty much what "space opera" means - modern day or historical naval paradigms translated into space, with tech that is better but similar in principle to that which goes with the historical paradigm). So, I "reality check" things against my real-life experience (retired USNR CPO, 8 years active duty in submarines, on the commissioning crew for one new boat so I know a lot about shipyards).

Aside from the above, a practical reason that I don't like space yards in ships is that it reduces the value of real estate. The industrial base that realy counts is your space yards. If you can't move them, or at least not quickly (assuming my proposal for remote assembly of bases were in effect), then you have to defend the place they are. Otherwise, you just move them at first indication an enemy has seen the system they are in. In fact, to increase the importance of real estate & population I think it might be a good idea to give a production bonus to space yard bases based on the population of the planet they orbit (have to think that through more, though).

As to building ring & sphere worlds, if you could remote assemble a base as I have proposed, you could still build them pretty much as today. That not being in place, in my own data set when I killed space yard components in ships, I also reduced the size of all the ring & sphere world associated components so they will fit in a base ship.