[Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Greetings, all!

In your opinion, what is the typical build of a mobile shipyard (like the ones in Homeworld 2, or the Mothership in HW) at TL9? I'm assuming that Stardrives are TL^, but otherwise am hoping to minimize ^'s. For those who haven't played, it's a huge ship which houses hangars, mining and research facilities etc. to produce other spacecraft from scratch (e.g. from an asteroid belt's resources, assuming a rich belt).

Thanks in advance!

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

What exacly do you want to know ?

I assume its something huge, like a middle sized city.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

At least one sample build which would suffice for the task. How many workshop/refinery/factory/hangar/etc. systems and what skill set for operators for what ship SM etc.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Haven't added up any numbers but, from the latest Spaceships, it seems that it all depends how fast you want it built and what size.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

I almost don't care about speed. I care about the fact that this shipyard will be able to design and produce ships up to and including a certain SM at its TL.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

What maximum size ship can the mobile shipyard construct? Looking through Spaceships, it would seem the maximum size that can fit through hangar bay doors is SM-3 if using a combines 3-6 bays. The internal construction facilities would take place inside a hangar bay, so just design the shipyard to be at least +3 SM greater than the largest craft it can build. Add in all the appropriate factories for building the components and refineries for processing the raw materials. The mining operations are probably performed by secondary craft, so make sure to include a couple of extra hangar bays to hold the support craft. You might even get away with having the refineries be on the support craft also. That way the craft could mine and process the raw materials then deliver the processed materials to the shipyard for construction use.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Do you have SMs in mind for the Mothership and the biggest thing it can build? I played the game, but I don't really know how big those things would be.

Also, the SS6 rules are going to determine an extremely long build time for those ships.

Also, it technically could be an SM +6 ship with one factory...it would just take forever and require building externally. And are you giving the thing any non-stardrives?

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Well, the ships moved unrealistically fast and had reactionless drives. Plus they slowed down by turning off their drives instead of doing counter-burns.

I wouldn't worry that you can't build a beam frigate in five minutes and just consider it an abstraction of the interface.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Well, the external building is acceptable (for bigger ships, anyway), but I still expect the miners to be held inside, even if they fly out to mine.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

According to the Homeworld wikia page, the mothership from the Homeworld 2 would be SM+15, and was described as being smaller than that in the first (a dedicated warship/mobile military shipyard, rather than a colony ship). There's no firm number for the size of the original mothership.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

I am Hopeless at formating threads (hints graciously accepted - but don't expect much - I can't even publish a blog never a mind a webpage)

Mothership
Craft dST/dHP Hnd/SR HT Move Lwt Load SM Occ dDR Cost
Ama 300 -2/5 13 0.03g 100kton 10kton +12 210ASV 10? $21 Billion

FRONT Power System Details cost Crew
1 Armour (Light Alloy, spread over entire hull) or Hanger? $50M/$10M 0/10W
2 Stardrive $1,000M 10W
3 Control: Comm 3AU; Sensor 3LS; level 10; $200M 20C/10W
4 Habitat 600cabins devoted to full life support for crew $100M+ 10W
5 Habitat 600 cabins of offices, med bay and entertainment, etc $100M+ ?C/10W
6 Robot arm $1,000M 10W
Core Radiation shelter for up to 600 bunks $20M 10W
CENTRE
1 Mining 500tons hour $100M 1C/10W
2-4 Hanger 10,000ton capacity $30M 30W
5,6+Core Factory $15M per hour $15,000M 30W
REAR
1 Power Plant Fusion 50years $1,000M 10W
2-4 Fuel eg $1M $100M -
5-6 Reaction Engine, eg Fusion Rocket 0.03g, 12mps DV $2,000M 20W

Rate of Construction
SM+5 or 6: $15M per day in the factory.
SM+7 to +10: $1.5M per day in the factory plus 12 tons per hour for assembly in the hanger.
SM+11 or bigger: $1.5M per day factory time plus 4 tons per hour assembly alongside.
Reaction Engine Options:
• Mass Driver $300M: can use anything for fuel, eg powered rock = free fuel or $10k/tank. DV 0.3mps/”tank”, 0.01g/drive But requires Power Plant.
• Nuclear Light Bulb $500M: uses hydrogen @ $10M/tank. DV 0.8mps/tank, 0.01g/drive.
• Fusion Pulse Drive $1,000M: uses nuclear fuel pellets @ $250M/tank. DV 5mps/tank, 0.02g/drive.
• Fusion Rocket $1,000M: uses either hydrogen @ $10M\tank or Water @ $100k/tank. DV depends on thrust and fuel but from 2-12mps/tank, 0.005g-0.03g/drive. I’d vote for water @ DV4mps, 0.015g.
• Antimatter Thermal Rocket $500M: uses Antimatter catalyzed fuel @ $60,000M/tank. DV1.8mps/tank, 0.1g. Can be high thrust and/or use water for x2/3/6 thrust and scaled DV.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

The [code] tag lets you post in a fixed width font and keep your tabs. Just write it in Notepad, type [code], paste it and close the tag in the usual way.

Like so:

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

IIRC the Mobile Shipyard could take a beating and beat back multiple foes at once.

Same with the Mothership sure it can't take on an entire large scale armada but could handle most destroyers and lower without too much difficulty one on one or 5 destroyers to 1 MS/Shipyard

But what you wrote there Jacob doesn't include any armaments.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Allow me to clarify:

This is not about exactly duplicating a shipyard or (Sajukar forbid!) Mothership. It's about duplicating the producing capability of an orbital or other space shipyard in Spaceships terms, in such a way that a single shipyard dropped in the middle of an unknown but mineral-rich star system would be able to produce battlecruisers, or even more such shipyards (built externally, of course).

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Figure out what the SM of your battlecruisers is. The shipyard should be 5 to 6 size modifiers larger.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

So you're ruling out external construction completely?

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

External construction would slow down your build time greatly. It's fine if you expect your operation to go for for a long time without being noticed. But since this operation sounds like it's intended to produce an unexpected strike force behind enemy lines, I'd think speed is a priority.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

if one was building a BC inside then ya 5-6 sizes larger would be required, but externally and IIRC from SS6 that any size ship that can't fit inside can be built outside.

So if you have a SM+12 Shipyard and you wanna build a SM+13 Ship you could do so, just takes 3x longer and costs more. I just skimmed over it during this post so maybe I missed the limit.

From SS6 pg 5
So that tells me that it takes the same amount of time as done in a hanger bay but externally.

So as for can it be done. Absolutely yes. Just takes a heck of a lot of man power (figure 3-4 shifts of 8/6 so work can be done 24hrs = less days) If it takes 40hr's to build something then it would take less then 2 days with shift work.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Well, not necessarily. It's a rather generic question.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

IDHMBWM
If a battleship were SM+12, it would easily fit into the hanger of an SM+16 mothership (unless I'm misremembering the numbers).

Scale the sort of thing I posted up by +4 SM, go for single hangers, emgim
nes, fuel tanks, factories... Add extra armour and weapon systems. Possibly Reactionless Drive.

Build time? Depends on a lot. A design from my own [heavily^] would cost $23,000M. SM+16 Mother build rate maybe $15M per day. Is that 5 years? I must be misremembering. Even speed built @ $70B that'd be 18months plus assembly.

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Actually Jacob according to the RAW in SS6 (pg4). In order to build a ship of SM+12 you would need an SM+18 shipyard ((SM+18) - 6 = SM+12) which is huge and would require some extrapolation. Which isn't too difficult but it would be very expensive.

As well if it were a brand spankin new design you'd need to use the new invention rules (p. B473) and would require Engineer(Spacecraft) with additional rules from SS6-pg5

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

Molokh: you have everything in Spaceships 6 pdf.

Actually, SpaceGurper, according to RAW, this formula is for production line inside a factory. You CAN build larger ships inside (if it fits), but it takes more time, and is more expensive. Read between examples on p.4

Re: [Spaceships] Homeworld-style Mobile Shipyard at TL9?
 

In SS6:
Internal construction can take place as long as you can fit the ship in either the "production line" e.g. the factory system, which is at SM-6, so a SM+15 mothership can make up SM+9 ships inside its factory for standard cost and assembly time.
OR
Assembly can be done inside the motherships hanger bay, as long as the finished ship can fit inside the bay. Therefore an SM+15 mothership with three Hanger Bays can manufacture an SM+13 ship internally with extra construction time (project treated as being 10x more expensive in manufacturing time(but same materials costs), with and assembly time of 8hoursxhull tonnage in man-hour terms, and then with the man-hour constraints of having 300 Work stations per bay)
OR
Assembly can be done outside the mothership at same 10x factory time,tripling assembly time (24 hoursxhull tonnage)

example:
you are building a SM+12 Battleship costing $11B, If you have a SM+18 sized Factory you can build this in: $11B / $150B/hr(extrapolated from SS) = approximately 5 minutes.

same ship, SM+15 sized factory, but with hanger bays big enough to contain it(actually just one at SM+15):
$110B (treated as x10 because of factory size) / $150M/hr = 733 hours 20 minutes manufacturing time and then 8x100'000 hours = 800'000 hours assembly time / 300 work spaces = 2666 hours 40 minutes of assembly time
Thus it takes 3400 hours to complete manufacture and launch
which is 141 days 16 hours.

Same Ship, with an SM+15 Factory, but with external construction:
$110B / $150M/hr = 733 hours 20 minutes manufacturing time
24 x 100'000 = 2'400'000 man hours construction time
What is not clear is what sort of work space requirements there are for outside construction, if it is purely manpower required, you could have 10'000 people working on the construction and it would take 240 hours, but assuming you have the same 300 people as above it would take 8000 hours, making total construction time 8733 hours 20 minutes which is approx. 364 days (with one day off for christmas ;) )