User blog:FargoneSeven/NEW SHIPBUILDING SYSTEM (Proposal as per Admin meeting)

One of the many things brought up in the admin meeting was a suggestion for a new ship building system. The goal of this new system would be to add a new element to RP and to balance certain aspects of ship production. I've gone and built on the suggestions brought up (see my secondary aspects), but the primary points are basically what was discussed durring the meeting.

Ship Modules
These are the individual components of a ship. Everything is built first, and assembled later. This adds a layer of realism to roleplay, and beefs up RP with some more interesting mechanics such as comerce raiding and sabotage.

''The main components of a ship can be boiled down into three groups; structural components, weapon systems, and ship systems. ''

Structural Components: Everything that isn't a weapon or advanced piece of tech falls into this category, from nuts and bolts to thrusters and armour plate. To keep things simple, we won't actually build each piece individually but instead lump it all into one module, the mighty Structural Component. This marvel of technology will be the basic building block of every vessel ever built (its essentially a 1x1x1 block ingame). These are produced at factories from raw materials and later assembled them at a dedicated shipyard (in order to build the hull of a vessel.

Weapon Systems: Anything with offensive capabilities, from railguns to missiles to lasers. These are expensive, and take longer to build than the humble SC. They must be installed before a vessel is combat ready. A baseline could decide the price of the thousands of types of weapons currently in service.

Ship Systems: These are things like warp cores and slipspace disruptors, and are by far the most expensive and time consuming modules to produce. It is these modules that make freighters targets. Why wait a week for a batch of slipspace drives when you can go steal them from your enemy and have them by tomorrow?

Production Ratings
Each and every refinery, factory, shipyard, and research base gets its own production rating. These ratings are based off of the size and location of the facility and dictates what that facility is capable of doing. Ship modules, construction times, and research projects all have their own unit cost that must be met for the project to complete. In order to keep things simple, one Universal Unit (UU) (its a working title, please, feel free to suggest better ones) will be used.

You can combine all of your production into a National Production Rating (NRP) and all of your research capabilities into some other clever acronym and do it that way, if you please.

Economics
In order to keep things real (read: remotely possible) we need an economic system to pay for everything. Construction cost money and time, and research costs time and money; this isn't a ruberducking game. Civil centers (cities) make money, and the larger the center the more it makes. Your treasury stores all of this money, be it cR, YID, or good old dolars. You can loan money too, but just make sure you don't end up like the United States (IRL).

TLDR
Implement a module system for weapons and tech (to beef up RP and to make things a bit more interesting), make a universal production rating system (to stop number spam), and implement an economic system (to keep it all payed for).

Other Points
These are things we touched on but I won't go into detail about (there are more but I can't recall)
 * Ship number cul
 * RoE Etiquette
 * More RoE
 * Perma admins and admin rotations

Anyways, let us know what you think of these possible implementations. I know they'll be difficult to implement in the short term, but in the long run it'll really smooth things out and prevent a lot of headache.