WesWorld

Whats Wrong With Wesworld -> Life Cycle Cost

A typical Life-Cycle-Cost for a warship is as follows (from Cost of Seapower (Pugh)):

Development 2%
Procurement 23%
Maintenance 21%
Operate 37%
update 13%
Fuel 4%

This is the breakdown of a ship over say a 20 year life. We only take into account the Procurement section and possibly update. Using the above our 10000 ton ship should cost 16% (1600tons) per year to run but about 4 times the outlay over 20 years.

Cheers,

Development could easily be taken into account by having an additional cost for the first ship of a class, which would encourage countries to buy a fleet of classes, rather than a fleet of samples.. While the CT is in force, limiting everyone's ability to operate large fleets, I expect the lack of maintenance is not critical, but once it ends (one way or another), then maintenance would certainly be a useful thing to keep fleet sizes somewhat realistic.

I think that's how they do cost things out nowadays, at least for the USN - lead units include developmental costs.

Whether or not the treaty's in effect, the situation is equally unrealistic.

So, if I read this correctly, a 10,000 t ship would actually cost (if we stick with the tonnage bit)

-Lead unit costs 10,900 t to build; the rest cost 10,000 t

-Maintenance looks to be about 5% annually over a 20 year life span, so about 500 t

-Operating and fuel costs are about 9% annually, about 900 t

-Updates - about 60% of build cost, split into two or more refits (I think our once every 15 year schedule is rather optimistic), so an average of 3% or 300 t per year...yup, Roger's right on that.

Question is - and I know Roger's put some ideas forward on accounting for this kind of thing - can we introduce such matters into Wesworld without really distorting the status quo, historical or otherwise?

Well we could do wht we are doing in Navalism. Paying a certain amount for mantainance.

And make things overly complex? I´m not sure if the Navalism way of doing things is what I want to see here....really.

That being said I´m not shooting down a useful proposal if there is one. I also think we need some rule to take care of maintenance etc.

Well I can tell you from playing Rohan in Navalism. I have as many heavy factories as Chile (7) and a large predreadnought era fleet. It takes about half of my production to maintain the fleet in peacetime, and pretty much all of it in wartime. As you would suspect I'm making efforts to expand my industrial base from 1900 - 1920 to get more in line with what the nations of Wesworld have at this time.

On the face of it you should have 4 times the amount of tonnage to spend each year.

In reality defence budgets may go up 5% per year but costs escalate by 9% per year. This is why there are few fleets with carriers anymore - the capability just gets too expensive and then you just find another way.

I agree with Hoo, it shouldn't be complex. However, this in conjunction with using the costs from springsharp rather than light displacement is badly skewing the navies around here.

Cheers,

Probably most difficult: How to get an idea of our powers budgets, especially those that have no counterpart in the real world?

You'd work out an equivalent based on number of factories to keep it fair. It would alter the ton output to a $ output that you use to build ships and maintain them. Its just that what use to buy a light cruiser is what you spend on a destroyer. But thats how it really is.

Cheers,

Bump.

Issue of cost. The key point is that building the ship is only 25% of the cost. The other 75% is waht we use the CT for - a cap on numbers.

Cheers,