They follow their military counterparts. The complications arising from increased size are significant enough that you can't just scale up the basic designs and expect to get something that works very well.
Shepard Quest Mk V, Base of Operations (ME/MCU)
- Thread starter Esbilon
- Start date
Alright. Where do Corvettes (about 50m, IIRC) fall? Frigates, or can we already build them with the Aerospace-tech we have?
I thought it would be something like that. When we research Frigates we'd not be learning how to make a Frigate we'd be learning how to make ships greater then say 10m and shorter then 100m.
Personally I figure it goes:
Fighters = <10m
Frigates = 10m -> 100m
Light Cruisers = 100m -> 300m
Heavy Cruisers = 300m -> 800m
Dreadnaughts = 800m->1km
Superdreadnaught = > 1km
If you look at the votes very few mention looking at expanding the business either as I suggested originally by marketing our game or as others wanted looking into what is needed like licences and so on for forming a PMC.
Unlike doing it in our 'spare time' like the Basic Vote option have our lawyer team or other administrative employees do the ground work and get us a report. A quarter is three months. I'm sure their quite capable of a couple of extra tasks in that time since their work load is rather light just now.
Van Ropen
Angry, angry about elves.
Well yeah, because we don't have anything marketable yet. I suppose we can sell the game, but it isn't finished yet anyways.
The PMC...is probably something that requires some personal input. We can handwave and say they laid the groundwork in the background in the meanwhile.
Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
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Is there any way we can buy Frigate tech, even partially? It's a technology is common use, so common even PMCs and pirates operate them. It doesn't make much sense that we'd have to start from square one when considering frigates are so common. I can see dreadnoughts being research-locked, but frigates and to some degree cruisers are common enough that IMO we should be able to buy the tech, fully or partially (1 million credits per research point up to a certain % of the tech?)
@Esbilon
@Esbilon
Not quite:
http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Starships#Trivia
Between Fighters and Frigates there's the Corvettes, which come in at about 50 meters from what I remember, and aren't really dedicated warships.
Frigates I would generally put around 150-250 meters. The Normandy SR-2, for example, is about 200 meters long.
Heavy Cruisers seem around the 700m benchmark, with some variance up or down.
The Turian cruiser seems somewhat small at 500m, given that the Turians are supposed to be the most militaristic race yet SA versions are almost half again as long. So, I'd argue that that's around the upper limit for light cruisers, which I'd put around 400-500 meters.
True but the licences to operate it and equip it are going to be the most difficult and extensive part.
Van Ropen
Angry, angry about elves.
I think the point was that we need to build from the ground up to make a design capable of taking advantage of all our new tech. When you think about it, 400 points is pretty damn cheap, and probably already represents using whatever basic knowledge we can.
It's a 400 pt tech, you can research in over the course of a month and a half, that's hardly square one.
Regarding sizes of warships, one of the crucial things about a fighter is that you can't move around in them, and you can't live in them. As soon as you want to build something to accomplish that, you're looking at a Frigate when going by the tech tree.
On one hand you do make a good point. The tech is well known. On the other hand however just what we have no radically alters how frigate designs work.
Lets say a Frigate has a 50GW reactor with an 85% efficiency. That means that every second it's producing 7.5GJ of waste heat that needs to be dealt with.
The Arc Reactor meanwhile produces somewhere between practically zero and actually zero waste heat.
So now one of the ship's largest sources of waste heat is gone which has all sorts of implications.
Then there are Repulsors. Thrust from electricity alone. That means no need to carry around propellent which leads to space savings.
Speaking of which you've already got massive space savings from swapping out the reactor and removing the reactor fuel. Not just that the ship likely lost tens, if not hundreds, of tons of weight.
Oh and of course the fact that Repulsors generate somewhere between practically zero and actually zero heat. Which means your frigate is a lot harder to detect.
We've also got new materials to apply that change things in ways I'm nowhere near qualified to imagine.
In short a Paragon Industries Frigate built right now with our current tech would be so far away from a normal Alliance frigate you probably wouldn't even realize it was one until you saw the flag.
Okay, so taking that into account, right now if we build a shipyard, we could only produce fighters (where we have a non-compete clause with CHA), gunships/close-support craft like the Mantis, and shuttles like the Kodiak. Which is nice, but not really that much of a gamechanger on the large scale the way ships with Arc Reactor + Repulsors would be.
Taking that into account, I think our best business strategy for the next year or so would be to take the 3,5 billion we get from our deal with CHA each quarter, and use them to top out our production capabilities on Mindoir; build 3 Factory-IIIs in the other two cities on the planet, and upgrade our two lower-tier factories in Landing, for a grant total of about 8 billion.
The rest, invest into founding a PMC that we can equip with our suits and whatnot, and either start looking into expanding onto a different planet, where we can build more factories and labs, or save up for a shipyard to build on Mindoir, first.
I'd be tending towards the former, as we should have the funds for the shipyard together fairly soon once the factories come online.
That's for laboratories, I think. Only one of each type per planet.
Factories we're limited to 3 per city, but they can be whatever tier we want them to be.
Yeah; fighters and the like were well-known, with cruisers and dreadnoughts each carrying a small complement. It's just that Humanity were the first ones to introduce the concept of a dedicated carrier.
I don't think it's ever said that Shipyards can only produce ships just that fighters cost more to build on the ground and that anything larger needs a shipyard. That said,
This is more efficient since Factory III's cost 33k per unit of production compared to a Shipyard's 50k per unit of production.
Shipyard doesn't really take much saving up. They are only five billion after all. Or at least the starting one is.
I think we should build our shipyard on Mindoir first. We want to concentrate as much stuff as possible for security.
Once we have a PMC running we can probably start building a research lab on another planet and putting our more loyal soldiers there. One of the big bonuses a lab on another world is we can send Conrad there!
No seriously I think we might manage to make it work. By that point Conrad would have been working with us for over a year and we can tell him he's the only person we can trust to run the lab. It's even true*!
*IIRC wasn't it mentioned that each planet requires it's own research hero? Revy does fine for Mindoir but if we start building Labs on say Eden Prime or Elysium then we need a research hero to supervise.
Leingod
Immaculate Blooming Lotus
If we do move Conrad to another planet (and please, please do) we'll have to make sure to keep him far away from stuff like the Skyllian Blitz or Saren's attack on Eden Prime, because you know Conrad's going to try to imitate Shepard and probably get himself killed.
Five billion, actually, from what I remember.
True, though if it becomes a question of waiting for the shipyard, and expanding offworld to build more factories and - most importantly - labs, the latter takes precedence, IMO. Money-wise we're pretty much set by now, but the more labs we have, the faster we can research.
Pretty sure we don't need the PMC to expand; it'd be just an additional way to make some revenue.
I like that idea.
Nope; requirements for expanding onto other planets have always been rather nebulous. My guess is that we'll have to top out our labs and factories on Mindoir first, excluding shipyards.
Oh god no. That's a terrible idea. Conrad with control of a full lab complex and no one riding herd on him?
We'd end up getting a call at three in the morning from a pissed of Admiral wanting to know just where the hell his planet has gone.
Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
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As far as PMCs and shipyards go, I think it would be very wise for us to build a shipyard ASAP while we research our way down the Laser and Frigate tree and get a PMC license. That way, we can build warships of our own by hiring our own PMC to defend our assets. Half a dozen laser-armed, Arc-powered, repulsor-driven frigates with our alloy hulls and crewed by people who can mentally link into the ship will eat just about any reasonable strike force for breakfast short of a dreadnought.
OK, assuming the last is true, I can understand why we have to research it from the ground up... although we did buy the Ground Vehicles design and Revy promptly popped out an upgraded Mako without any research dice spent. It appears that the new "Tiger" design will be free as well, we just need to R&D the components...
OK, assuming the last is true, I can understand why we have to research it from the ground up... although we did buy the Ground Vehicles design and Revy promptly popped out an upgraded Mako without any research dice spent. It appears that the new "Tiger" design will be free as well, we just need to R&D the components...
Thinking out loud here so please bear with me:
- Eezo cores take an electrical charge and generate a field lowering (or increasing) the ships mass.
- Some of the electric charge flowing in stays around as a static charge that will eventually flash fry the ship.
- For some reason at the moment a core in use cannot be discharged
- The First Core is active and builds up charge.
- The First Core is stepped down and discharged into capacitor banks while the Second Core takes the load.
- The charge from the capacitor bank is used to provide some of the power required to power the Second Core discharging the capacitor bank.
- The second core builds up charge.
- The Second Core is stepped down and discharged into capacitor banks while the First Core takes the load.
- Repeat
That's what the quote says...
I'm guessing you read that before I fixed the typo?
My answer to these two ties together. Our labs are giant weak spots for us. On Mindoir we know everyone and have some pretty impressive security. Off world we don't really have that advantage and there is a good chance Revy won't be there to personally oversee it.
Therefore we want as much protection as practical. After all unsecured information and copies of whatever we're working on are stored in our labs.
I like that idea.
I thought everyone would.
IIRC we we're told we needed full labs and factories, no mention of shipyards, to expand off Mindoir. However there was also talk about how without a Research Hero the labs and associated teams would be a lot less effective.
After all Revy is the one inventing all these ideas, the researches are just refining them. Like with that video game; Revy designs the core idea/device and her teams finish off the boring stuff.
Not having Revy on-site makes that a lot more difficult, especially since if a researcher get stuck they can't just go and ask Revy for help.
Having a Research Hero helps fix most this. At least that's what I remember from the discussion on this. Who knows how that may or may not have changed since then.
The Tiger is our upped Mako, it's being paid for by considering our design specs as Omake.
Yeah.
My point was that we don't need a PMC to provide security for our own Labs. We only really need a PMC if we want to sell security services to others.
For example, a colony near the Terminus System decides they don't want to take any chances, and contact us to hire a few teams to supplement the Alliance Garrison there. That's the sort of thing the PMC is for.
Hm, that would make sense to some degree. Guess we'll have to wait until we're actually ready, then see what Esbilon says.