So here is my analysis of a Warhammer 6R factory sited on Emris IV and the supporting factories producing the necessary components to supply the primary factory. It uses the latest version of the Industrial Rules (v1207.14).
Warhammer Industrial Analysis v3 (google docs)Main Facility:StarCorps Industries Warhammer assembly plant on Emris IV.
Products: Warhammer WHM-6R (100 per year), VOX 280 Standard Fusion Engine, Cockpit, Life Support, Standard Musculature, Actuators, Gyro and Heatsinks.
Secondary Facility:StarCorp Industries Warhammer assembly plant on Terra.
Products: StarCorp 100 Chassis, Leviathan Plus Standard Armor, O/P 3000 COMSET Communication System, and O/P 1500 ARB Targeting and Tracking System.
Vendors:Pandora 'Mech Works on Terra supplies the Donal PPCs.
Blankenburg Technologies on Terra supplies the Holly SRM-6.
Rebel Industrial Technologies on Mars supplies the Sperry Browning MGs.
Corean Enterprises on Stewart supplies the Martell Medium Laser and the Magna Small Laser.
Here's the breakdown. The mech assembly line consists of 7.58 blocks and runs two shifts (2 cycles). The line costs 6,657,592,829 C-bills to build and employs 665 production line, maintenance, and administrative personnel at an annual salary cost of 2,937,600 C-bills.
The 20 component factories (including vendors) consist of a combined 7.06 blocks and run one or two shifts (as appropriate). The lines have a combined cost of 1,064,095,805 C-bills to build and employ 553 personnel at an annual salary cost of 2,805,360 C-bills.
Interstellar transportation costs to deliver components to the main facility on Emris IV are an estimated 663,400 C-bills per year.
Sources: TRO 3039, Sarna.net, Objective Raids 3067, and FM Mercenaries revised.
NotesIn the process here are the questions and clarifications I ran into as well as some thoughts I had.
1. With multiple limited blocks (multiple small lines) at the same site can one On-Cycle Machinist and/or On-Cycle Engineer cover multiple limited blocks up to a combined total of 1 block? Some of the blocks needed to produce components for 100 warhammers per year are very small and if this was allowed the 11 secondary lines on Emris IV would only need 5 On-Cycle Machinists and 5 On-Cycle Engineers.
2. Cycles are described as 8 hour shifts and carry with them a weekly maintenance requirement in hours. You can operate a production line at up to 3 cycles per day (continuous 24 hour operation) but then you have to have a special off-cycle at some point to perform maintenance to the line. I'm not clear if these Cycles are 5 days a week or 7 days a week.
If they are 5 days a week then I have 48 hours of off-cycle time even if I run my factory 3 cycles continuously. If they are 7 days a week then I have 0 hours of off-cycle time per week if I run 3 cycles continuously and at some point I will have to run a special off-cycle to perform maintenance.
3. Unless you can run a factory continuously at a fixed number of cycles for an entire year it seems you'd get a difficult to calculate annual output. This way lies madness. Sure I can build out a 52 week spreadsheet tracking the number of on- and off- cycles each week and handle the variable maintenance but to parallelize this for multiple factories... I don't want to.
A quick check with my brother (aspiring engineer) says this is called Capacity Utilization Rate (
Wikipedia) and should be represented with a percentage of maximum output the factory is using. So the factory output values and personnel requirements should probably be calculated with this value in mind. This should work so that the factory still receives full maintenance while producing at 100%. Operating in excess of 100% (if possible) should increase difficulty of maintenance (time pressure and increased wear). Operating at less than 100% will leave additional time for maintenance and cause less wear to the equipment (easier maintenance checks). Under this concept having fewer or more maintenance personnel than required would also modify the maintenance checks. Also this eliminates the concepts of on- and off- cycles and lets you phrase your personnel requirements in terms of 100% utilization and thus your staffing level can also be a percentage during operation and maintenance related checks.
4. Administrative Personnel. It looks like you kind of pulled this number from FM Mercs. FM Mercs specifies 1 man-hour of admin work per 30 non-admin personnel so a regular admin (30 man-hours per week) can support 900 non-admin personnel. If we assume the same 30 man-hours of productivity you're assuming 1 hour of admin work per non-admin personnel per week. Eh. What you've got works. Call it good enough. Also FM Mercs specifies 320 C-bills monthly salary instead of your 640 C-bills/month. I'm sure they appreciate the raise. :)
5. Support Infrastructure. This whole bit is kind of confused. First the facility is blocks = hexes then after a bit of reading it becomes blocks x 1.5 = hexes. The description of what it contains and that it can be integrated or separate is also kind of confusing. It seems like this is to allocate space for non-production activities. This sort of space allocation makes sense for administrative and support activities. The way the "Establish the Facility Dimensions" section is organized could be improved and improving the way support infrastructure is explained should be part of this. My thinking is that this support building should be explained as a separate structure but can be integrated as a cost or space savings. Also, this should come up in some fashion when discussing orbital factories.
6. Storage/Warehousing. The amount of space provided by the support infrastructure allocation seems inadequate to handle storage of the factory's input materials and output product. Storing dropships or other huge objects in a building seems obviously inappropriate and so there should be some discretion here and different factories will use different levels of backstock. I guess what I'm looking for here is a rough way to chart my storage needs for input materials and output products roughly in terms of a percentage of my annual output. This also feeds into underground facility design and orbital factory design.
7. Tool & Die Shop should come up in Factory Design since it looks like this is not only an operation topic but also a type of factory you might design. I might want to design a traveling factory built into a dropship and this seems to be the way to do it.