[hal]

One of the things I just finished examining was the starship construction rates from GURPS TRAVELLER STARSHIPS.

I looked at the rules for construction of a 200 dTon Empress Marava class ship, versus a 5,000 dTon Destroyer hull, vs a 500,000 Tigress Dreadnaught class ship.

The numbers I got were startling to say the least: The first number before the slash is CT construction time, the second number is the GURPS TRAVELLER time in weeks (where 5 days = 1 week):

200 dTons: 48/25

5,000 dTons: 144/11 weeks, default time becomes 25 weeks (6 months)

500,000 dTons: 232/238 weeks


As you can see - GURPS TRAVELLER time to build hulls takes less time for the smaller tonnages than it does for the larger.

While CT didn't have shipyard sizes per se, they did have production values based upon the capacity value, which in turn was calculated from the population of the work force manning the shipyard. Said population was equal to the world's population/1000 (assuming a Government modifier of 1...)

In all? GURPS TRAVELLER makes some changes to the ship building rates. It unfortunately does nothing to give an idea of how many dTons of hulls are being produce each year. The rules for the "aging of ships" implies that ships can last a LONG time before they're retired. So, how many hulls production does the Imperium need to service its needs?

<Shrug>

That value doesn't seem to exist, and likely never will. What does one really need shipyards for?

1) construction of new hulls
2) overhaul of aging hulls (rebuilds)
3) Modifications to existing hulls

No where will you see just how much shipyard capacity is used for "maintenance purposes" and there is a resistance to "inventing house rules" to address that issue. But that gets me back to my original issue...

How much shipyard capacity is TOO much? You don't build a HUGE shipyard and then only use 10% capacity. You don't keep an entire workforce employed for the theoretical maximum if you only have enough work to keep 40% employed at any given time. My thoughts are this:

If one took the entire trade structure requirements for shipping, multiplied it by 1.1 - you would have sufficient capacity for shipping the goods and have each hull carrying about 90% its full capacity at any given time. That should be at best, the highest capacity of shipping that is required.

If Military ships can last some 80 years without problem, what is the duration of an aging civilian fleet? If you only have to replace about 1.25% of your existing hull tonnage per year due to aging losses - that's not an awful lot of shipyard capacity being kept busy on a regular basis (1.25% is 1/80).

I expect, with the formula approach that I took, I probably don't need to have 6 digits for contract numbers. If fighters take a minimum of 1 month to produce, then a shipyard with 55,000 shipyard modules can produce some 1100 fighters every 6 months. Somehow, I don't think the Imperium is building that many fighters per month - not in peacetime at least.

Ah well, speculation on this matter is likely not worth the effort.