Mobile Ship Yard

posted on May 29th, 2009, 6:26 pm

good points! however there was a good solution to this that someone put on the armada 2 files site:
http://armada2.filefront.com/file/Ambush_Class_Offensive_Yard;81198

This the one I was talking about.  Thanks for helping prove my point.

posted on May 29th, 2009, 8:05 pm

Yh that looks kool shame that a2 animation will eventually halt (wen ppl with 3d max 5 eventually move to vista or win7)
but anyway mobile facilities are a good idea and make sence

posted on May 30th, 2009, 6:07 pm

Romulans?  To easy to disrupt supply lines, too hard to hide something that large, so it's too vulnerable to attack.  That's not the kind of thing they've ever been fond of.

well I agree with you in anything but this. If one wa able to cloak something that is nealry 1,3 km in length ("Warbirds were roughly twice as long as a Federation Galaxy-class starship with a lower overall maximum speed. (TNG: "The Neutral Zone", "Tin Man"), citing memory alpha), then they will be able to cloak something which is slightly larger too.

A mobile yard which is just capable of building construction ships, scout, a few destroyers, and repair issues is quite realistic, as romulans will cloak their supply ships too.

Interesting question arises: Why are their no material depot in FO? The mining facilities ar rather small to house the resources for several battleships. (Not aiming to create a feature rrquest here).

posted on May 31st, 2009, 4:18 am

Star Trek has always been a little wonky about the cloaks.  One minute they cite massive power consumption for why you can't shoot with them up, then they cite resonance effects with the shield for why it can't be up.  One minute they claim that something is too big to cloak, and then they cloak something huge.

However, more on point...would you ever, taking a detached view of things, and looking at it from 'character' rather than 'it's an RTS', order the commission of something that meets the following specifications.

1 - Masses equal to a light orbital shipyard, and requires 33% more duranium and tritanium to construct.
2 - Requires both shipyard staff and ship crews.
3 - Must have either a logistics supply train running to it, or increase it's size again for raw-material storage.
4 - Requires addition of crew-training and accomodations for crew who are nothing more than passengers (placing further drain on this vessel's resources) until their ship is completed.
5 - Requires signifigant protection from the fleet.

I wouldn't.  I'd tell them to build a normal shipyard, because this vessel meets no qualification of a valuable, useful, or even viable ship.  Every function it fills is easily filled by pre-existing items, and usually better.  (Building a construction ship?  The flying shipyard is going to need protection, so it's better to just build a construction ship, and use the same ships you would have used to guard that shipyard, to guard the construction ship on it's way to do whatever it is you need done.)

posted on May 31st, 2009, 10:11 am

Well, why are shipyards not movable? In games stations are stationary, because we want them to be fixed. The eraudi-shipyard may have he mass of three souvereigns, estemated in connection with the volumina. You also know the tiny, nearly invisible impulse drive of a Sovereign. If you add those to a yard (one will not even notice), you would have a yard with one third of the acceleration of a sovie.

So in principle it is possible to move a yard anywhere we want. Question is the supply routes. Normally one does not obtain the resources for a yard from a single star-system, so there are always supply routs between places from outseide a map to a yard. A fact that is completly neglected in our beloved game. We only care about dilithium, a resource which is needed in really small quantities, because as far as I know, only the warp core consists of it, and tritanium, which forms the outer hull. Inner structures consist mostly of duranium. Further these statements are only fully valid for the federation. Concrning ST-Online, the klingons do utilize a different hull material, and there's no use for dilithium for the rumulans, because they have no warp core. So when we want to have a ST-realistic resource system and take supply routs into account we have to overthrow the whole resource system of FO. So we may assume that the resource carriers will make their way warped, and are thus not being attacked.

The last interesting question is, would one build a yard in a dangerous area? Well would the federation build up a yard in a star system where we have war? Certainly not, but in FO we do, as well as we build a science center in a battlepit. So how far is the step to mobile yards? For a race that can hide buildings it is of no question that one could take this option into account.

I personally dislike the idea of mobile yards, because it oberthros the pinciples of FO, but is is not argueable that they souldn't be there in FO from the point of realism. Otherwise we have to recreate FO principles from scrach, which is no option.

[Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana ... this is my post nr. 400]

posted on May 31st, 2009, 11:48 am

Actually, the Sovereign has massive impulse engines, compared to ships like the Galaxy class or the Prometheus. The only Federation ship with larger engines, IIRC is the Excalibur.

posted on May 31st, 2009, 12:56 pm

Well you are right. The galaxie's engines would do the job too. Nevertheless even the sovies engines are small compared to those of an StarWars ISD.

posted on May 31st, 2009, 3:05 pm

In the shows, every shipyard is in orbit of a habitable world, or close to a major starbase.  I have to say that regarding the supplies?  It's a hell of a lot easier to get supplies to a station that you know exactly where it's going to be.  Provided you don't have nav-glitches, you could drop out of warp damned close to it. 

But considering that it's not going to be able to build -any- faster than a normal base, and likely slower?

And that it would logically eat up enough Di/Tri/Sup that you could have built a Dommie Dreadnought and had resources left?

Why would anybody want this thing?

posted on May 31st, 2009, 5:09 pm

In the Series DS9, the Cardie station Terrock Nor (Federation  Designation { Deep Space 9 ))was moved only using the orbital thrusters on the station in conjunction with a low grade warp feild bubble.  So In theory  a small ships engine could be used  to move a large yard  for game play.However the ship would not be capeable of Warp .(since there is no warp in F.O.) Not a big problem. In other Armada Mods there are Space stations that are moveable  like the old Noxter Queen was. So the Idea is not a totally  screwball  Idea. Just one of preferences. In my humble opinion. I allso concur that one would have to  protect such a tempting target from attack, and the Supply trains feeding  them also.

posted on May 31st, 2009, 5:14 pm

Trek stations are equipt with thrusters only to maintain stability, something the game doesn't need to worry about.

posted on May 31st, 2009, 9:14 pm

This was also in FF.  What if you were able to, very slowly tractor your stations into dofferent positions?  It would be more realistic.

posted on May 31st, 2009, 10:35 pm

I remember that DS9 episode.  O'brien was terrified that it was going to destroy the station.

posted on June 1st, 2009, 1:05 am

So they do it VERY slowly

posted on June 1st, 2009, 1:06 am

Is that the only example of stations doing that? Because several things about it make that one different to average 'day-to-day' use.

posted on June 1st, 2009, 1:08 am

maybe it would shutdown all actions on the yard, it wouldn't be able to build or repair, but you might be able to save space by altering its position a little.