On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 8:28 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 7:39 PM, Grimmund <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> . . . unless you are planning to build enough ships to reduce the
>> share of the architect's fee per ship to something manageable.  But
>> that's still a bad financial decisions.
>
>
> Does that still apply if you're a megacorp building the hulls in-house?

As an opinion?  Yes.

Even if you don't have to pay someone the fee, you're still going to
spend a lot of time and money developing the plans.

Unless you are a very small shop, your architecture department is
going to have to bill your production department for all those labor
hours and all that computer modeling time.  Even if the company eats
the cost internally, there is still an expense involved.

> I always assumed the standard design discount represented a megacorp pumping
> out pre-built cookie-cutter hulls and then calling on low-bid subcontractors
> to actually install the working bits of the ship.

I had sort of assumed that the "standard designs" were ships which
were designed by Imperial agencies, and the design was released into
the public domain (which probably caused some conservative Vilani to
have heart attacks at the thought of not collecting royalties...)

>The corp could easily
> stockpile not-as-yet needed hulls (especially in an orbital yard), only
> fitting these out when the current market called for it. Also, a certain
> precentage of these hulls (particularly along the fringes) would be
> "re-manufactured" models; hulls of salvaged or repossessed standard designs,
> with the old working guts removed and replaced with "as new" components.

Unless there is some odd economic downturn, it doesn't make a lot of
sense to sink money into producing things you have no need for and
don't have much of a market for.

The only exception to this is production of niche items (like, say,
tanks, or specialized trucks, or aircraft, or some other specialized
widget that requires a lot of infrastructure to manufacture) where you
need some low level of level of production to justify keep the
production facility open and the staff employed.  Otherwise, the
producer will shut down the line and build something else, and when
you need tanks again, you're going to be out of luck.

Dan

--

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine
kook." -Alan Morgan