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Originally Posted by Michael Thayne
UT also declares that small devices take longer, which seems like it should drive their labor costs up in ways that create inconsistencies. For example, the rules suggest a $200 computer chip would take 40 person-hours to make, but unless the workers at the fabricator plant make significantly less than $5 an hour, the chip will cost more than $200. Better rules for chip fabs would be very helpful.
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Yeah, the "small items take longer" rule looks pretty dubious. Yes, fine detail tends to be expensive, but that's already accounted for via the price. This is double counting in a multiplicative fashion.
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A final issue is that none of the existing rules seem to account for worker productivity increasing by TL. LTC3 already avoids this (see Labor Costs, p.23) and LTC3's approach is probably what we'll want to use here.
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This is true if you use existing job descriptions. If you build the jobs from scratch using the Typical Monthly Pay tables in Basic 517, productivity does go up with Tech level. You don't get the finely researched values, but I think High Tech won't have many of these jobs defined anyways.
But labor saving devices are a big deal here. You need some pretty expensive tools to do TL 7 labor, and they often have upkeeps higher than their operator's wages. How do you factor in the productivity of a man with a backhoe digging a ditch? So that's another issue, I suppose.
EDIT: but I suppose for manufacturing that's counted as part of the production line. Though I suppose you could apply it to digging holes... maybe? What's retail on a hole?