WesWorld

I've pointed out the cost skew in Wesworld ships in the past (BB are about right, DD are 33% of the real cost).

Anyway, a simple solution is at hand. We use tons for money and to fix the rate of construction. If we equate things to $ or £ per ton and can calculate the tons per day rate, we can use the $ or £ value for ship construction. You can only spend so much per quarter on a given hull - just as you can for tons into a hull as we currently have.

How many tons of steel are used in construction is irrelivant. A 2,000ton gunboat is 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of a 2,000ton destroyer. A 2,000ton DD can be upto 2 times more expensive than a 1,300 ton DD.

If no one has objections I could start testing this with Greece's 1930 reports.

Cheers,

I´m not sure if I fully understand your proposal.

Could you please post an example? Thanks.

It sounds like you've put some thought into this, so I don't want to seem like I'm dimissing it out of hand, but if the overall effect of this new system would be to make smaller ships like Destroyers suddenly more expensive, would make it a bit unfair towards newer players like myself, Doug Wise, and fyrewulf, who don't already have a decent amount of destroyers built using the 'cheaper' system...

That'd be my primary concern, as I read things now.

I think it probably would make DD's more expensive, but there's always the possibility of purchasing used DD's, which most smaller navy's did anyway, with the handfull of new builds.

Personally I'd like to see a rule that gives a nation an overall amount of money to spend in a quarter, that would be based on population (taxation base) and modified by the number of factory's available. Perhaps another modifier would be used as well.

Here in lies the rub, everyone here likely has an idea as to how we can create these cost rules.

Its taking the cost of a design as the yardstick - not how big it is.

1. Take the cost of your design in £ and divide it by the full load displacement for your ship. This gives you the cost per ton. This will be about £100 per ton for a BB and £300 for a DD.

2. Because we are using full not light displacement we can cut back the 9 month value to 8 to compensate. This gives us the tons per day figure we are familiar with. Multiply this 'tons per day' by the cost per ton and then by 90 days for the cost per quarter.

I estimate that 1 ton in the current system = £267. Greece has a capacity of £4,000,000 per quarter. This is estimated from a few years of steady construction and the value of that construction. We may want to round off to £250 per ton.

This changes the yardstick to designing to a price rather than designing to a size.

Cheers,

1. How to account for inflation

2. How to account for refits

3. Full load displacement means paying for oil fuel, ammunition and feed water. Granted, its one way to account for them, but a central "quartermasters stores" would make more sense. But that gets really confusing.

Thanks alt_naval.

Do we know that SS calculates costs on the basis of full displacement?

How to define how much money a power can spend per month/quarter? A countries factories define maximum tonnage output but this is not linked to the maximum amount of money that can be spend. Or am I wrong?

What percentage of a nations economy (on average) goes towards naval expendadure?

Naval Spending: That usually depends on the nation.

I would say this could be a good start of a useful system if we were starting from the beginning, or if we could figure into acount the cost of ships built before the change over and retroactively charge the correct amount to the nations that built these ships (in the form of a debt perhaps).

However this system could likely effectively knock out all player nations under 10 factories and maybe even those at 10 or 11 factories, from any capital ship construction or even cruiser construction, which would in effect make the treaty requirements on the lower end nations (such as the Philippeans, India, Greece, Canada, Australia) useless as they would have no means other than purchasing older vessels to fill the treaty quota. (I say could because I've not actually sat down and done the math for this theory of mine.)

I hope I'm just being pessimistic on the above paragraph. Once we settle on getting any little bug out if it, I think we could use this sytem in the next version of Wesworld.

I'm sure some sort of compromise can be sorted out, a drastic change is not required, just something to prevent nations from running wild on spending.

I'm willing to see what we come up with first before I start raising alarm bells.

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1. How to account for inflation

This is built into springsharp but it is very simple.

Quoted

2. How to account for refits

Because this established a ton to money relationship we can use the current % rules. Refits should be part of a life cycle cost, I have ideas on this but I wont confuse them with this at the moment.

Quoted

3. Full load displacement means paying for oil fuel, ammunition and feed water. Granted, its one way to account for them, but a central "quartermasters stores" would make more sense. But that gets really confusing.

The last thing I want is complexity. This proposal would swap money for tons - not run both.

Quoted

Do we know that SS calculates costs on the basis of full displacement?

I don't know exactly what it does. I've only seen this calculation done on full load numbers. An aircraft carrier has lots of big empty spaces but no one is describing them as cheap - you still need a big ship to carry that structure. I do know that SS calculates the right cost based on engines, gun and armour being more expensive than hull which is why I'm floating this suggestion.

Quoted

How to define how much money a power can spend per month/quarter? A countries factories define maximum tonnage output but this is not linked to the maximum amount of money that can be spend. Or am I wrong?

I'm just equating money and tons in a similar proportion to how we have been doing this. Factories will make money just as they made tons so its the same thing, things just cost differently - or rather they cost more accurately.

Quoted

What percentage of a nations economy (on average) goes towards naval expendadure?

GDP on defense is in the 1-6% range in peace although I think it rose to 10% for the US in the 1980's. Japan was spending 30-40%. Accurate figures on GDP etc for the era we are talking are hard to come by.

Quoted

Will that work retroactively?

I'd work on it going forwards rather than backwards at this stage.


Naval Spending: That usually depends on the nation.

Quoted

I would say this could be a good start of a useful system if we were starting from the beginning, or if we could figure into acount the cost of ships built before the change over and retroactively charge the correct amount to the nations that built these ships (in the form of a debt perhaps).

However this system could likely effectively knock out all player nations under 10 factories and maybe even those at 10 or 11 factories, from any capital ship construction or even cruiser construction, which would in effect make the treaty requirements on the lower end nations (such as the Philippeans, India, Greece, Canada, Australia) useless as they would have no means other than purchasing older vessels to fill the treaty quota. (I say could because I've not actually sat down and done the math for this theory of mine.)

I hope I'm just being pessimistic on the above paragraph. Once we settle on getting any little bug out if it, I think we could use this sytem in the next version of Wesworld.

I disagree. Large ships stay the same its just that small ships are more expensive in proportion. We currently have 1 30,000ton BB : 20 1,500ton DD : 50 600ton TB. It should be 1 30,000ton BB : 7 1,500ton DD : 13 600ton TB. Economics point to 600 ton ships being a bad buy and guess what, the Italians, Japanese and French all found that out. A modest 1,300ton DD could be the sweet spot for Destroyers and this is what GB settled on in the inter-war years. France must have paid through the nose for the contre-torpilleurs (sp?).

Cheers,