[High-Tech] GURPS Industrial Economics (building on Low-Tech Companion 3)

[Michael Thayne]

I'm interested in attempting to extend the economics rules in Low-Tech Companion 3 to TLs 5-8. I suspect this becomes significantly more complicated, due to fine-grained division of labor, complicated supply chains, etc. but those very facts make such a project useful, since LTC3 can't just be used for higher TLs as-is.

Campaigns has nice one-paragraph rules for setting up production lines:

To set up a production line costs 20 times the retail price of the item. The production line makes one copy of the item in 1/7 the time it took to build a prototype or in (retail price/100) hours, whichever is less. Each copy costs 20% retail price for parts, or 50% for parts and labor.

This seems like it gives non-insane results when you have nothing else to go by, but I suspect is not terribly realistic. I'm pretty sure many production lines will cost more than 20 times the retail price of the item. Ultra-Tech p. 89 expands on these rules slightly, allowing that larger production lines will let you work faster. 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.

Another issue is that many items will see more than a 100% markup from production cost to retail cost. High Tech notes that if you buy AK-47s in bulk from the factory, they cost around $90, but gives the retail price at $450. Actual markups for a variety of items could be very useful for designing better rules, OTOH maybe that's not worth worrying about if we're going for the level of resolution in LTC3.

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.

A big issue is getting greater clarity on what "parts" mean. That hides a lot of potentially important detail, in terms of e.g. number of steps from raw material to finished product. Would be worth researching real-life case studies of this, to get somewhat realistic rules.