Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You

[Mgellis]

Originally Posted by Langy

No, it does not. There's no mention of how to go from asteroids->finished goods in Spaceships 6.

How odd. Are there any ships that appear to be truly independent of any supply line? Like the Mobile Industrial Colony?

To me, a factory capable of doing assembly, machining spare parts, etc. should be able to handle the creation of components. I'm sure a factory includes 3D printers, lathes, tool & die equipment, etc.

I suppose another way to do it is to just say that if you are fabricating the components that you take generate them as you would any other goods and then turn around and use them. You will produce a larger physical quantity of basic components more quickly, but that's because the fine machining, testing, etc. for finished goods takes longer. (As an analogy, in the time it takes to build a house, one can cut enough boards, etc. to build several houses.)

For example, a SM+7 factory can produce $15K of goods per hour. Okay, during the first hour, it makes $15K of components. Those components are enough to build $37.5K of goods, but the time involved will be 3.5 hours instead of the 2.5 hours it would take if was buying the parts from an external supplier.

In other words, if you have to make your own components, it takes 40% longer to produce finished goods.

I suppose if someone really wanted to be persnickity about it say, "But you have to have 40% of the components that will be the 40% of the finished goods!" I did a little number crunching and you can do that pretty much indefinitely, but as far as I can tell it won't go above .667. (That is, 1 + .4 + (.4 x .4) + (.4 x .4 x .4) +...and so on). So even with this restriction, you could say that the entire fabrication process should end up taking 5/3 as much time as it would if you were able to just buy the components.

I just wish there was an official ruling on this (or, if I'm wrong, an official ruling the says, "No, you were right the first time. Buy two factories to handle the two steps." Which would be a more simple way to do it.) Or something.

Again, to me, the issue isn't that I want to spend time running the whole fabrication process. That would be a pretty boring campaign. I just want to know how to build a space colony that is totally independent of other settlements. To do that, you have to be able to cover the entire industrial process from ore to product.

Mark