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Shepard Quest Mk V, Base of Operations (ME/MCU)

Van Ropen said:
And selling on that scale implies that many people out there would like the idea, enough to shell out for it - no matter what, there is going to be a bottom limit. My original point wasn't objecting to the idea, it was saying that this is very much a niche product.
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Given that I don't plan to limit the design purely to human markets... I would say we could sell hundreds of millions of the things. With hundreds of thousands, if not millions, purely for humans, especially if we incentivize it with "turn in your aircar / shuttle and get a big discount" kinda politics.

But that's just my assumption / gut feeling. We'd need to do a market assessment.
 
Yog said:
Given that I don't plan to limit the design purely to human markets... I would say we could sell hundreds of millions of the things. With hundreds of thousands, if not millions, purely for humans, especially if we incentivize it with "turn in your aircar / shuttle and get a big discount" kinda politics.

But that's just my assumption / gut feeling. We'd need to do a market assessment.
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This is going to have to be way bigger than an aircar if you want to stick all that awesome tech in it, and make it reasonably comfortable - even only for one person. Even if it was shuttle sized (doubtful)...I don't think most people drive around in things that large. Even in the best case scenario, these are considerably more expensive than an aircar, probably than an aircar+house combined, and there is only so far we can subsidize them.

But yeah, Esbilon can deliver the verdict - pointless to keep talking around each other.
 
Yog said:
The economy of scale. I am pretty sure that by increasing production scale (including licensing the idea to large corporations), stripping out military tech (weaponry, gardian lasers, etc) we could bring the cost down significantly.
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I could be wrong but I don't believe that economy of scale quite works like that. While improving one's production technology or finding cheaper labor/raw materials reduces the production cost per unit, increasing the number of units made doesn't reduce the cost per unit. We're already using the best production tech so the production cost per unit is more of less fixed unless we find cheap raw goods.

No what I know economy of scale does cover is "setup costs", annual costs, upkeep costs, or other costs that can be averaged over a production run. A basic example would be if it cost $10 in raw materials and labor (production cost per unit) to make a widget, but it costs $100 to get the tools to make a widgit, If you only made one you'd need to sell it for >$110, but if you made 100 you could sell each one for >$11 and make a profit and most likely more then if you only sold one for >$110. This one of the reasons that products with low sales numbers cost more even if they contain just as much material and are just as simple to make as other products.

Now for our case labor costs are assumed to be applied at all times, so even if a factor sits unused we'd still pay the workers. That cost is folded into the factory upkeep cost. So the production cost listed in the speed sheet should be just for the raw materials. (We do seem to be ignoring retooling costs). So regardless of the number of units sold/made the minimum sale value would be [Material Cost]+[Factory Upkeep]/[Total production for Quarter]*[Unit Production Cost]+[Factory Cost]/[Lifetime Production for Factory (est)]*[Unit production cost]. Now we can sort of ignore a product's popularity/sales exceptions to some degree as we don't have to deal with retooling. And well we haven't really been paying attention to the full production cost of an item, mostly 'cause we make too much money :).

On the other had if you take out all the expensive military grades stuff the price will drop a lot but don't expect a price lower then 10 Million credits (fighter drive core cost). The Normandy SR-1's drive core alone cost 120 billion credits, which is apparently the same cost as ~12,000 fighter cores. (Numbers are from Rear Admiral Mikhailovich in this video). Additional its also noted that the full cost of the Normandy was "as much as a Heavy Cruiser", though that may have included R&D costs as well, but it does give a lower bound for a heavy cruiser. Now I don't know how the QM feels those numbers fit with the cost provided in the quest, but I do recall that the were noted to be "about right", though that might have been old QM or a bad memory. But just recall those for any use of FTL ME, 10 million credits to make a ship about the size of a couple of large cars do the FTL thing. And if the codex data on the eezo equation is to be believed the cost will go up exponentially for larger masses, well... assuming the same power plant, but that's a silly assumption isn't it?

Of course if UberJJK wants to tell me I'm crazy about the economy of scale thing, he'd know better. I know I at least effed up the terminology.

And now to do something other then internet nitpicking.
 
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Hoyr said:
Of course if UberJJK wants to tell me I'm crazy about the economy of scale thing, he'd know better. I know I at least effed up the terminology.
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You are mostly right.

Economies of Scale do technically reduce the unit cost since overhead is spread over the number of units produced. And it can also reduce the variable cost to a point since materials are generally cheaper the more you buy.

Now while the following explanation does overlap with yours a lot it's probably easier to follow:

Costs are broken up into two variable and fixed costs.

Fixed costs (also called Overhead) are, as their name implies, fixed payments you have to make irregardless of production. Rent for example. Electricity often finds itself here even though it's technically fixed and variable. Things like depreciation also go here but that can get really complicated and we fortunately aren't worrying about that in this quest.

Variable costs are, again as the name implies, dependent upon the number of units produced. Theoretically if you produce nothing your variable costs should be zero. However this doesn't only cover the materials it also covers the Direct Labor. The details of what is and isn't covered however is complicated enough that I'm not going to try and explain them.

Lets take the Arc Reactor for an example. During 2173-Q2 we had an overhead of 87,005,000 credits. That's because all the expenses listed in the expense section of the P&L are things we'd have to pay irregardless of our production.


The Arc Reactor itself has a variable cost of 50,000 credits.

Tthe formula for determining the average unit cost is:

C = V + F/N

Where V is the variable costs, F is the fixed costs and N is the number of units produced.

Continuing the example during 2173-Q2 PI produced 61,000 Arc Reactors therefore the cost per unit is (theoretically):

C = 50,000 + 87,005,000/61,000 = 50,000 + 1,426.31 = 51,426.31cr

Now in reality it's a lot more complicated since your pretty much never producing just one product, although in the example year we did, and there are all sorts of complicates associated with determining how Overhead is assigned, although we could easily do it based off the production spent on that line, but this is a brief overview.

So yeah as I said your mostly right.
 
Hey, just thought of something.....can we can make the shipyards quarterly upkeep cheaper by ripping out their station-keeping thrusters and sticking replusors in?

Replusors require no fuel, so we don't have to pay for ion thruster gas or fusion torch fuel, which in turn means we don't have to pay someone to visit regularly and top up the fuel tanks.

This kind of thing is one of the reasons why some people want NASA to run the em-drive through more tests and for it to pass in RL, no propellant means cheaper spacestations and satellites.
 
UberJJK said:
Doubt it's even needed. GEO sats only need 45m/s of Delta-V per year. That's tiny. Probably wouldn't cost more then a couple credits in fuel per year.
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It is somewhat needed in RL, most of the cost comes from actually sending someone up there to restock the fuel.

Also....if these shipyards are meant to build stuff like frigates/cruisers/dreadnaughts, then they are going to be pretty big, which means they need to expend more fuel to move.

ME has 'easy' spaceflight thanks to eezo, but it isn't cheap - you still have to pay for the eezo - replusors? No need for eezo, just have a couple of replusors scaled up, a few small arc reactors in there or just one big one, a spaceframe and a bunch of computers to control the whole thing.

Heck, if the cargo ships in ME are using ion drives, then I can see some cargo companies willing to fork out cash for PI to retrofit replusors into their vessels - no fuel means better mass ratios, allowing for more cargo, more cargo without having to pay for fuel means bigger profit margins.
 
UberJJK said:
You are mostly right.
[...]

Tthe formula for determining the average unit cost is:

C = V + F/N

Where V is the variable costs, F is the fixed costs and N is the number of units produced.
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While this is true to a first approximation, there are hidden depths to V and F. Sometimes F and V can decrease as N increases: for example, by buying larger, more efficient factories. More importantly, especially for our purposes, is that technological advances can cause V and F to change very rapidly, and this quest has technology advancing very, very, very quickly. The point being made earlier is that the advent of things like Universal Constructors, and especially fully automated von Neuman swarms mining the galaxy's asteroid belts could make V very, very small indeed, in which case building a fleet of spacefaring houseboats becomes relatively cheap (at which point the Migrant Fleet starts building temples in our name).

If you can get an FTL-capable houseboat for the price of a RL Winnebego, then yeah, probably a large portion of humanity will buy one, even if just for the novelty and to make vacationing easier, at which point we have a distributed version of a Reaper-defying Ark pretty much all sewn up. I... would be very surprised if we could manage that, though, if only because it would make the quest itself too easy.
 
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TheEyes said:
While this is true to a first approximation, there are hidden depths to V and F. Sometimes F and V can decrease as N increases: for example, by buying larger, more efficient factories. More importantly, especially for our purposes, is that technological advances can cause V and F to change very rapidly, and this quest has technology advancing very, very, very quickly. The point being made earlier is that the advent of things like Universal Constructors, and especially fully automated von Neuman swarms mining the galaxy's asteroid belts could make V very, very small indeed, in which case building a fleet of spacefaring houseboats becomes relatively cheap (at which point the Migrant Fleet starts building temples in our name).

If you can get an FTL-capable houseboat for the price of a RL Winnebego, then yeah, probably a large portion of humanity will buy one, even if just for the novelty and to make vacationing easier, at which point we have a distributed version of a Reaper-defying Ark pretty much all sewn up. I... would be very surprised if we could manage that, though, if only because it would make the quest itself too easy.
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If we want this to happen, our goal should be to be able to produce an Arc Reactor, Repulsor, gene Therapy bay, and unlimited FTL drive for around $20,000 (in today's dollars). With those out of the way for that little, building a full ship around them shouldn't be more than triple that, which puts it well in reach for a considerable portion of humanity.

If we're really dedicated to this idea, we could always sell stuff for less. Right now we're selling for the highest profits we can manage, but we could arbitrarily slash our prices by 90% (maybe 99%?) and still be net positive.
 
No, we have a 2.5x markup. We could cut the price by 2.5x, and we would be selling at cost, though we would be losing money on taxes.
 
Lagrange said:
really? huh, I thought we were selling production for as much money as we could make off it. Guess I was wrong.

We need to figure out ways to bring down the cost of our stuff then.
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And maybe invest in some tax shelters. Hey, I hear real estate depreciation is a good tax shelter; how much to purchase Mindoir? :D

More seriously, it's the factory build cost/upkeep that's messing with our variable costs, thus the need for Universal Constructors and von Neuman asteroid-harvesting swarms. With essentially self-replicating factories our variable cost would become arbitrarily small; in other words, we become a post-scarcity society and win the quest. :)
 
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Do we have an index page for what everything costs? I distinctly remember seeing that somewhere, but can't find it now. Are we already maxing out on the number of labs/factories we can build every quarter?
 
TheEyes said:
Do we have an index page for what everything costs? I distinctly remember seeing that somewhere, but can't find it now. Are we already maxing out on the number of labs/factories we can build every quarter?
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Labs, yes. We can only have one set of them on a planet. Factories have been limited by money thus far, but that has become a non-issue going forward.
 
Van Ropen said:
Labs, yes. We can only have one set of them on a planet. Factories have been limited by money thus far, but that has become a non-issue going forward.
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Well, mostly. They're still limited by money, but we're putting up at least ten of the tier III factories every quarter until the first set of ten come online... all from a single factory III.

But we couldn't order a hundred right now, so we're still limited. /Nitpick.

Edit: And all the prices should be in the finaces Doc on the first page.
 
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Van Ropen said:
Labs, yes. We can only have one set of them on a planet. Factories have been limited by money thus far, but that has become a non-issue going forward.
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Huh. That... seems rather arbitrary. I mean, I guess I could maybe one set of labs per city, but one per planet? You'd think it would be the opposite: I could see logistics limiting the number of factories on a planetary system, especially since as was mentioned elsewhere mining is so hopelessly backward that raw materials still have to be imported from other gravity wells, and there are only so many launch windows one company can take over before it starts bottlenecking everyone else, but labs aren't limited by logistics like that.

I mean, sure, I get that it's just an incentive for us to learn to terraform planets expand, but it sort of tickles my "WTF?" sense.
 
TheEyes said:
Huh. That... seems rather arbitrary. I mean, I guess I could maybe one set of labs per city, but one per planet? You'd think it would be the opposite: I could see logistics limiting the number of factories on a planetary system, especially since as was mentioned elsewhere mining is so hopelessly backward that raw materials still have to be imported from other gravity wells, and there are only so many launch windows one company can take over before it starts bottlenecking everyone else, but labs aren't limited by logistics like that.

I mean, sure, I get that it's just an incentive for us to learn to terraform planets expand, but it sort of tickles my "WTF?" sense.
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Makes sense...but exponential growth of research points would have us purchasing the entire tree within quarters. It is an abstraction for the fact that many of these projects require Shepard's direct input - she is the research hero that unlocks them - and there is a limit to how much she can oversee at once.
 
Well, I'll have you know I managed to read through all five threads in a day...

However, can someone please tell me what's currently going on?
 
Shadows said:
Well, I'll have you know I managed to read through all five threads in a day...

However, can someone please tell me what's currently going on?
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Outside the story, we've planned out the next 6 quarters (to produce a badass frigate), planned out our expansion, and bandied about some ideas for research techs that Esbilon is considering. We've also been talking about economics, and political / cultural impact of some of the tech we'll be introducing.
 
Shadows said:
Well, I'll have you know I managed to read through all five threads in a day...

However, can someone please tell me what's currently going on?
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We are between quarters right now - the competition to secure the IFV contract is going on. After that, we will return to the next quarter, for which the vote has already been set. A research plan over the next six quarters has also been generally agreed upon.
 
TheEyes said:
And maybe invest in some tax shelters. Hey, I hear real estate depreciation is a good tax shelter; how much to purchase Mindoir? :D

More seriously, it's the factory build cost/upkeep that's messing with our variable costs, thus the need for Universal Constructors and von Neuman asteroid-harvesting swarms. With essentially self-replicating factories our variable cost would become arbitrarily small; in other words, we become a post-scarcity society and win the quest. :)
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Well I am unsure how smart to would be to produce such things considering that our enemy is an horde of very advanced AI who would probably love nothing more than hack those things and set them to harvest humans.
 
Erandil said:
Well I am unsure how smart to would be to produce such things considering that our enemy is an horde of very advanced AI who would probably love nothing more than hack those things and set them to harvest humans.
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The Reapers? The Reapers couldn't even properly hack the Geth, and that was after half of them tried to join up. By the time our AI are advanced enough to be entrusted with a von Neuman factory swarm they ought to have advanced enough anti-hacking algorithms that the metal squids they run into should be a quaint anachronism; we'll have already beaten Sovreign and Harbringer in back alleys and riffled through their pockets for loose tech by that point, so the Reapers should have nothing new to show us.

No, I'm far more concerned with how we're going to handle the Geth/Quarian divide. That's going to be a political shitstorm, since I fully expect us to push for integration as the only morally acceptable option, and I doubt we're going to want to wait around for Tali'Zorah to become an admiral to do so.
 
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