Post by Pttg on Jul 18, 2018 19:11:41 GMT
Many materials are versatile enough to use in many roles. But what's the fewest distinct materials needed to build a ship? For this competition, perhaps the industrial-scale refineries used to make the gargantuan quantities of graphogel or whatever have been damaged by enemy attack and command wants to limit the number of separate lines needed to make a given ship class.
I have a few ways to score such a competition:
- Classes by number of materials. Players simply try to build a ship while staying in a price budget, and each entry is compared to only ships with the same number of materials.
- Price multiplier effect. All ships are given a price budget, but the final cost of the ship is calculated as (number of materials used)2 * (base cost of the ship). This means that low-diversity ships could be very expensive indeed.
- Fixed refinery budget. Simply dictating that ships have five (for instance) different materials available, and in true military fashion there's no bonus for coming in under budget.
- Different classes for different materials, but allow some exceptions. For instance, Gold-only, but the unremovable Al, reaction mass, and fissiles don't count.
In any case, stock and modded divisions would be, of course, separate. Mods also add a few materials that are extremely small variations from stock, such as tempered Al or tempered Cu. I'm willing to allow materials like that as free variants of the base materials because the important change emerges from the manufacturing process, not the refining one. However, I'm much more reluctant to count all allotropes of carbon as one "material," since it is so flexible. I'd like input on that.
Comparisons would be done through AI v AI fights, or else it could be more of a showcase than actual grading. A ship would count structural aluminum as one material, but none of the other "implied" or "mandated" materials would count (food, air, humans, and other such compounds aren't made through the standard manufacturing lines anyway). Therefore, a ship made with only aluminum would be a 1-material ship (well, station, since it most likely wouldn't have propulsion), even if it had a complete crew module. Good luck getting power generation on it, though...
So, thoughts on how this competition aught to be run?
