Author Topic: Factory Output  (Read 12433 times)

Kasaga

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Factory Output
« on: 21 April 2018, 12:33:19 »
Looking for an idea of how many say Light, medium, heavy, assault BattleMechs, vehicles, Aerospace fighters and Battle Armor are produced in a production run according to the rules if there are any.

Otherwise to me with all of the factories in the inner sphere or even 1 nations factories should be able to replenish their armed forces in a short span of a year or two if they produce anything in the numbers of say the US in WW2.  or the Soviet Union during its history. 

I know the more complex the smaller the run.  Any ideas? I need this for my FanFic for the rebuilding of a power that is about to get curb stomped.

idea weenie

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #1 on: 21 April 2018, 17:20:08 »
What era are you looking for?

Star League?  You can have a single factory that outputs ~1 Mech/hr (a Battletech version of Willow Run) or ~8700 Mechs per year.

3025 era?  IIRC it was a total of ~1000 Mechs per year among all the Successor states.  FedSuns book mentioned a fully automated plant that built ~120 Valkyrie Mechs per year, and all the technicians and maintenance people dreaded the day when something in it would break that they couldn't fix.


For a Periphery power, have them develop a Mech assembly line that builds Primitive tech Mechs, protected by Commercial armor, at a rate of ~1 per day.  The planet is proud of its accomplishment until raiders stop by with modern Mechs and use the cheap Mechs as target practice.  The problem is there are a lot of cheap Mechs and local artillery is getting close to the raider dropship, so the raiders have to leave fairly quickly.

At the very least, it would give a reason for the Raiders to have the Battletech equivalent of Favored Enemy (+2 Gunnery when engaging that Mech type, instead of +1 Gunnery overall?).

Alexander Knight

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #2 on: 21 April 2018, 18:00:48 »
By 3025 the annual production of the Houses and the Periphery was around 2,000-2,500

Tyrchon

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #3 on: 21 April 2018, 19:27:23 »
You also have variance when looking at the different factories/companies themselves.  We know that Corean Enterprises was able to maintain a production rate of 130 Valkyries a year from their automated factory on New Avalon throughout the Succession Wars era.  Defiance Industries also began producing the Valkyrie in 3025 but at a considerably slower rate that never grew to match Corean's efforts given some random bits of fluff text.  However, Defiance was able to produce more Mechs overall as their factories had far more lines producing different Mechs than Corean so not producing the same number of a specific mech didn't seem to bother them.

Kasaga

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #4 on: 22 April 2018, 12:17:07 »
Ok so Star League Era, Hegemony based production from a Castle Brian fortified facility.  Has never been attacked. [EDIT] Star League Era, Hegemony constructed Facilities that remained hidden throughout the SL Civil War and succession wars by my Hegemony-in-Exile A Faction.  Just FYI [/EDIT]

Most of my ‘Mech and combat vehicle factories are like this.  A couple of Aerospace fighter and DropShip plants are like this as well.  Expect Heavy Automation.  Currently producing advanced Royal grade BattleMechs but about to transition OmniMech production.

This is the ball park I’m working in. 

Would also like to look at PA(L) and Battle Armor production. 
« Last Edit: 22 April 2018, 12:19:36 by Kasaga »

Korzon77

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #5 on: 23 April 2018, 23:51:00 »
How many do you want?

I'm seroius-- Btech's economics and production are all over there, with the overriding of "for the purposes of plot."   If your production line is churning out 100 Royal Mauraders a year, congrats--you're probably swinging in the Ballpark of the Tauran Concordat--and you can expect lots of people to want to dispute your ownership. If you're churning out a dozen or so a year? Still important but much less highprofile--you can sell it as "I found these in one of those SLDF caches they left all over the place."

But really, go from the numbers that will serve your game, and then develop the rationale for those numbers.

Kasaga

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #6 on: 24 April 2018, 08:26:11 »
How many do you want?

I'm seroius-- Btech's economics and production are all over there, with the overriding of "for the purposes of plot."   If your production line is churning out 100 Royal Mauraders a year, congrats--you're probably swinging in the Ballpark of the Tauran Concordat--and you can expect lots of people to want to dispute your ownership. If you're churning out a dozen or so a year? Still important but much less highprofile--you can sell it as "I found these in one of those SLDF caches they left all over the place."

But really, go from the numbers that will serve your game, and then develop the rationale for those numbers.

Alright I just didn’t want something that couldn’t possibly happen in the universe is all. I was hoping factory output would have been covered in one of the operations books but didn’t as far as I know.

marcussmythe

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #7 on: 24 April 2018, 08:33:44 »
As I commented in another thread - the typical succesor house has what, about a trillion people?  We know what military equipment costs in Battletech.  We know thst a 1 CBill per year raise in taxes per human being would raise 1 Trillion C-Bills.

Consider the size of mech forces in the BTech Universe.  Consider what a Trillion CBills would buy.

Consider the size of the Clan Populations and the military forces those supported, able to walk all over star nations with populations several -thousand times their own.

Abandon reason, logic, and sense, and embrace that ‘whatever makes a cool story about stompy robits’, operating in numbers small enough that the forces you can put on a table have strategoc significance, is what is going to happen.

And please, remember the Catgirls.

Kasaga

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #8 on: 24 April 2018, 09:46:06 »
hahaha ok Marcussmythe

Iracundus

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #9 on: 30 April 2018, 20:56:25 »
The matter is not just purely a matter of C-bills.  Currency is just an abstraction of the resources society can bring to bear.  No amount of money would have enabled an ancient Roman to demand a laser, or to demand a ridiculous rate of trireme production. 

Similarly, Mech production is bottlenecked by the technological level and the production rate of the Mech factories.  They can only turn out so many per unit time.  Expanding them or upgrading infrastructure in general IMO is made far too easy and quickly in the ISaW rules.  Upgrading a world should take far more than spending a burst of RP and 1 turn (i.e. 1 month).  Also unless the component parts are being constructed on-world, they will need to be shipped in from wherever they are made.  Similarly, construction of new units should be more than just forking over the RP and the unit magically existing within 1 turn. 

A House Lord making the demands for such infrastructure upgrades should have to do more than just fling RPs or C-bills around.  The resources and parts have to be sourced along with maintaining the supply chains.  All this takes lots of time and is also susceptible to Comstar and enemy intelligence.  Upgrading should require sustained RP investment over many turns, and they will need even more time to make back their cost of invecstment, which is why it is so hard to do under the pressures of the Succession Wars.

Vehrec

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #10 on: 30 April 2018, 22:40:21 »
It's important to remember that capital outlay for a new factory is HUUUUUGE.  You want to build 80 atlases a year?  Well don't expect to turn a profit soon, because I'm sure that tooling up that factory will cost you in the range of 15-20 BILLION c-bills, using the rule of thumb that 5% returns on Capital are the expected norm.  And that's if you can find a buyer for the 1600 atlases you'll need to sell to get your creditors off your back.  And that the Atlases don't have any cost for their components at all, which is frankly highly questionable.  If you're only looking at a 5% margin on your Atlas production, then you're only pocketing 38.5 million C-bills a year for a factory that produces 80 of the largest Mechs in the inner sphere.  This is actually a pretty lousy way to make money, I'm gonna retool my factories to make Widgets and Gadgets for the civilian market.
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Iracundus

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #11 on: 30 April 2018, 23:50:51 »
It's important to remember that capital outlay for a new factory is HUUUUUGE.  You want to build 80 atlases a year?  Well don't expect to turn a profit soon, because I'm sure that tooling up that factory will cost you in the range of 15-20 BILLION c-bills, using the rule of thumb that 5% returns on Capital are the expected norm.  And that's if you can find a buyer for the 1600 atlases you'll need to sell to get your creditors off your back.  And that the Atlases don't have any cost for their components at all, which is frankly highly questionable.  If you're only looking at a 5% margin on your Atlas production, then you're only pocketing 38.5 million C-bills a year for a factory that produces 80 of the largest Mechs in the inner sphere.  This is actually a pretty lousy way to make money, I'm gonna retool my factories to make Widgets and Gadgets for the civilian market.

This is pretty much given in the writeup for Ceres Metals.  Although they may be the biggest integrated military manufacturer in Capellan space, they make far more profit off of civilian goods.  They probably see the military division as a sort of cost of doing business in the Capellan Confederation:  In order to get access to the civilian market, they have to do the state's bidding by meeting its military manufacturing demands. 

I see the same for a lot of Jumpship and Dropship traders for example.  In order to be allowed to trade the higher margin profitable goods, they might have to accept doing some low profit jobs for the state, such as the previously analyzed rice from Kaifeng to Sarna route.

Kasaga

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #12 on: 01 May 2018, 07:23:24 »
I get what all of you are saying.  I'm just trying to figure out how many 'Mechs can be assembled on a single production line a year.  That way I can plan out my factory complexes and begin writing the fluff for my industrial sector for my Terran Hegemony-in-Exile. 

Vehrec

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #13 on: 01 May 2018, 09:21:19 »
Well of course it depends on the factory in question, but here's some rough eyeballing it figures.  Though rather than tons-per-year or Mechs-per-year, maybe cost should be an issue?  Regardless, here's my estimates.

Tech level C: Hand built by top scientists in experimental laboratory-factories only, 300 tons per year max
Tech Level D: Succession wars/Age of War factory, 3000 tons per year maximum (30 Mackies or 150 Wasps)
Tech Level E: Star league or post 3050 Inner Sphere facility, 6000 tons per year (60 Atlases or 300 Locusts)
Tech level F: Clantech or Comstar/WoB, 9000 tons per year, (90 King crabs or 450 Mercuries)

It might be advisable to build the largest and most expensive single component(Fusion engine) in a separate facility, especially if you're using it for multiple designs or if you're using XL engines which have quality control issues in the fluff.
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Kasaga

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #14 on: 01 May 2018, 12:29:50 »
Well of course it depends on the factory in question, but here's some rough eyeballing it figures.  Though rather than tons-per-year or Mechs-per-year, maybe cost should be an issue?  Regardless, here's my estimates.

Tech level C: Hand built by top scientists in experimental laboratory-factories only, 300 tons per year max
Tech Level D: Succession wars/Age of War factory, 3000 tons per year maximum (30 Mackies or 150 Wasps)
Tech Level E: Star league or post 3050 Inner Sphere facility, 6000 tons per year (60 Atlases or 300 Locusts)
Tech level F: Clantech or Comstar/WoB, 9000 tons per year, (90 King crabs or 450 Mercuries)

It might be advisable to build the largest and most expensive single component(Fusion engine) in a separate facility, especially if you're using it for multiple designs or if you're using XL engines which have quality control issues in the fluff.

This works for me. Now this would be for one production line of a ‘Mech? So if I run same four lines of an OmniMech and 2 of another it would increase?

Alsadius

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #15 on: 01 May 2018, 13:09:24 »
That sounds like "per factory", for a typically-sized factory that a successor state might have a few dozen of, and a periphery state would have a few of. Something like Hesperus II or pre-Amaris Terra will be much larger, of course. This is an interesting fan project listing all factories in 3067 - you may want to use that for calibration.

Kitsune413

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #16 on: 01 May 2018, 14:28:51 »
Looking for an idea of how many say Light, medium, heavy, assault BattleMechs, vehicles, Aerospace fighters and Battle Armor are produced in a production run according to the rules if there are any.

Otherwise to me with all of the factories in the inner sphere or even 1 nations factories should be able to replenish their armed forces in a short span of a year or two if they produce anything in the numbers of say the US in WW2.  or the Soviet Union during its history. 

I know the more complex the smaller the run.  Any ideas? I need this for my FanFic for the rebuilding of a power that is about to get curb stomped.

Some of the old house books listed their exact mech production numbers. I think you can look at Strategic Ops and its rules for running entire houses has rules for building regiments...

The real answer to your question? It depends on the techbase. In the Jihad smaller powers were pumping out primitive tech because they could. The more advanced the unit the less output you're likely to have. But you also have to have the stuff to build it.

How many fusion engine plants have you got going? How many different models of mech? Who's making the chassis? Where are you getting the guns from? The armor?

You can look at the objective raids book to get an idea on how they source parts. My knee jerk reaction is to just assume you're screwed though. Check out the Kell Hounds with their stuff? Check out the Clan Wolf Occupation zone. They were pretty screwed too.

My knee jerk reaction is just to assume you're screwed and to look into SRM carriers.

Or hire mercenaries.

The Magistracy of Canopus had three mech regiments get mauled in the andurien crisis and it took them like ten years to get them back up to full strength.
« Last Edit: 01 May 2018, 14:33:41 by Kitsune413 »
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Kitsune413

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #17 on: 01 May 2018, 14:35:57 »
Looking into the Magistracy's stuff, in 3025 (I don't know what time period you're playing in) Majesty Metals and Manufacturing was getting out 60 mechs a year. Mostly 20 ton mechs. But 10 shadowhawks.
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Kasaga

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #18 on: 01 May 2018, 14:39:59 »
No my production capacity for the components such as engines, weapons, myomer, electronics and so forth. Assume component production will meet demand. Just wondering is a tech base F builds X number of BattleMechs/OmniMechs per year per single line of assembly. I’m going to go through some of the old house books. Consider my faction as having factories like the Valkyrie plan on new Avalon with automated systems at the Terran Hegemony’s height of power during the Star League.

idea weenie

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #19 on: 02 May 2018, 21:02:40 »
No my production capacity for the components such as engines, weapons, myomer, electronics and so forth. Assume component production will meet demand. Just wondering is a tech base F builds X number of BattleMechs/OmniMechs per year per single line of assembly. I’m going to go through some of the old house books. Consider my faction as having factories like the Valkyrie plan on new Avalon with automated systems at the Terran Hegemony’s height of power during the Star League.

One thing to go with instead, since you have the component manufacturing set up, is calculating the time to assemble a Mech in a Mech Bay.  That will give you a minimum production rate for a single assembly line.

There is no hard rule as far as how many Mechs built per assembly line.  You could have a fully automated factory where each Mech is made efficiently and comes out the other end ready to fight with less than a day between each Mech exiting the plant.  You could have a bare bones facility that has excellent technology, but only a little bit of it and the local units get a Clantech Omnimech that the local forces then have to put weapons on.  It produces 1 per week.

If you really want something like the Valkyrie plant but with Star League tech, I'd tend to go with ~10* higher rate of production, so you have ~3 Mechs being produced per day.  If you want really scary, go with  modified Willow Run facility that builds 1 Mech per hour (or ~8700 Mechs per year).  The nice side is that your pilots know what the Mech can do, so there is little/no retraining needed.  The downside is that if there is a flaw in the Mech design, or it has a design/tactical weakness, your entire force has that flaw/weakness.

Kasaga

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #20 on: 03 May 2018, 06:31:17 »
Yeah willow run will be to high. I’ll do some considering

smcwatt

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #21 on: 03 May 2018, 20:24:20 »
If I recall correctly, the 3025 production figures for FWL were approx 500 mechs a year, ranging from about 3 dozen of each bug to eight Warhammers. That is about five regiments a year, or twelve years of constant production with no losses due to maintenance or vehicle kills. Even post Helm Core, annual Mad II production was barely into double digits (Objective Raids).

SMc

Kasaga

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #22 on: 04 May 2018, 14:13:39 »
thanks that helps a lot.

truetanker

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #23 on: 07 May 2018, 22:48:32 »
They probably see the military division as a sort of cost of doing business in the Capellan Confederation:  In order to get access to the civilian market, they have to do the state's bidding by meeting its military manufacturing demands.

Sort of like the color diagram from the old Liao Sourcebook, where we see a couple hundred Liaoese carrying a 50 ton copper nail, because it met the quota needed for the year.

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #24 on: 18 May 2018, 00:48:56 »
Well of course it depends on the factory in question, but here's some rough eyeballing it figures.  Though rather than tons-per-year or Mechs-per-year, maybe cost should be an issue?  Regardless, here's my estimates.

Tech level C: Hand built by top scientists in experimental laboratory-factories only, 300 tons per year max
Tech Level D: Succession wars/Age of War factory, 3000 tons per year maximum (30 Mackies or 150 Wasps)
Tech Level E: Star league or post 3050 Inner Sphere facility, 6000 tons per year (60 Atlases or 300 Locusts)
Tech level F: Clantech or Comstar/WoB, 9000 tons per year, (90 King crabs or 450 Mercuries)

It might be advisable to build the largest and most expensive single component(Fusion engine) in a separate facility, especially if you're using it for multiple designs or if you're using XL engines which have quality control issues in the fluff.


That sounds like "per factory", for a typically-sized factory that a successor state might have a few dozen of, and a periphery state would have a few of. Something like Hesperus II or pre-Amaris Terra will be much larger, of course. This is an interesting fan project listing all factories in 3067 - you may want to use that for calibration.



If I recall correctly, the 3025 production figures for FWL were approx 500 mechs a year, ranging from about 3 dozen of each bug to eight Warhammers. That is about five regiments a year, or twelve years of constant production with no losses due to maintenance or vehicle kills. Even post Helm Core, annual Mad II production was barely into double digits (Objective Raids).

SMc


The actual total is 486 & doesn't include other fluff where they do limited production runs of the Guillotine-4N to keep it in limited use during the Sw.

Those factories are often damaged from the SW & only partially working, but, have from 1-4 mech lines each & produce from 9-70 mechs per year at each factory.

But my favorite bit of fluff is from TRO3050U where you see the effect that the Helm Core has on rebuilding & refurbishing those factories.
The Vulcan line at Temetagi that was producing just 13 mechs a year was refurbished to produce the 5M variant & production kicked into full gear.
They were then cranking out 20/Month, that's 240/Year totaling 9,600 Tons of Mechs a year for the next 17 years till WoB sacked the facility in 3069.

They nearly doubled the annual production of the FS Valkyrie line in raw #s after the Helm Core fixed the line & let them increase production by 1,846%

Mind you now that factory also has Warhammer & Spider lines there & should give you some idea of what a SL era facility can do.

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pheonixstorm

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #25 on: 28 May 2018, 23:30:48 »
The fluff entries from TRO 2750 could also list useful information as well.

Since the writers don't tell this side of the story there is no telling what the real numbers are for an automated SL factory. For all we know they could have been producing an average of 100 royal class mechs per day in one factory.

Kasaga

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #26 on: 30 May 2018, 11:39:41 »
Yeah I like to think that an assembly line would push a BattleMech off of the line each Day per line (even though production is actually like 1 per month or so) since that’s how assembly lines work.

Wotan

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #27 on: 30 May 2018, 13:01:53 »
One side note - if you look at the Objective Raids and similar sources you see that on nearly no assembly line all parts are produced onworld. That means for each mech you have to import critical parts from several other worlds sometime many jumps away.
From my understanding the crush on the interstellar trade with the Amaris Civil war and later the SWs is one major reason why production numbers of existing lines decrease.

Alsadius

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #28 on: 30 May 2018, 15:53:11 »
Yeah I like to think that an assembly line would push a BattleMech off of the line each Day per line (even though production is actually like 1 per month or so) since that’s how assembly lines work.

That really depends on the assembly line. Boeing's factory is set up as an assembly line, but they sure don't produce a new 787 every day. Heck, some people refer to Newport News as an assembly line, and they produce one carrier every six years or so.

One mech per line per day is reasonable for a society that has the capability of building the factory from scratch - Mechs are big, but they're not so big that they'll take years. For a society that's lost the necessary tech and is just praying that nothing breaks that they can't cannibalize or improvise(i.e., 3025), much slower production rates would make sense.

pheonixstorm

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #29 on: 31 May 2018, 02:53:32 »
iirc there are a rare few factories that produce everything to build a single or multiple units. One such line is in Davion space near the Drac border.

idea weenie

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #30 on: 01 June 2018, 20:58:39 »
One side note - if you look at the Objective Raids and similar sources you see that on nearly no assembly line all parts are produced onworld. That means for each mech you have to import critical parts from several other worlds sometime many jumps away.
From my understanding the crush on the interstellar trade with the Amaris Civil war and later the SWs is one major reason why production numbers of existing lines decrease.

You should still be able to get similar speeds as the original, as long as you have a steady supply of components to be fed to the proper locations.  I.e. imagine a Marauder plant that used to have a linked PPC manufacturing center where the PPCs were built in a separate building and sent via railcar to the main mech assembly area.  However, the PPC manufacturing center got destroyed.  So now the owner of the factory has PPCs shipped in, a basic crane system used to load PPCs onto railcars, and the railcars come in are at the correct rate.  If the supply of PPCs gets disrupted, the factory will slow down/stop, but as far as the main assembly line is concerned, it is still receiving PPCs from the subfactory.

Of course, you might have a small file receiving errors from the PPC factory monitoring software (main factory can't make contact with PPC factory), so it adds a single line to an error file.  Each time it the factory builds a Mech it has another line in that file, and this causes a gradual slowdown in production (all of the error files are reviewed before commencing assembly, and the factory engineer know to press the 'acknowledge' prompt to get the factory going for each Mech).  So over time there is a gradual increase in time for each Mech to be made, too slow to notice, and nobody knows why (secondary diagnostic building was cannibalized to keep Mech factory going).

The other fun is a factory where a printer buffer problem is just waiting to show up.  (Short version.  Automated factory in US suddenly halted all production in middle of the day.  C-level types, Main Engineers, and similar high-ranking people are immediately called with orders to FIX IT!  On way by one of the interns spots a printer that is out of paper, and fills it up.  Printer begins printing again, and within a couple minutes the factory just starts back up again.  Turns out the factory computer wrote reports to that printer, and the printer ran out of paper.  Reports filled up printer buffer, until buffer was full.  Factory stopped until room was available in buffer.  Once the printer started printing, the buffer soon had room, and the factory started back up again.  New standing instructions were to make sure that printer always had paper.)

Col Toda

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #31 on: 02 August 2018, 05:02:33 »
A very long time ago I used the Bezerker fluff text as a guideline.  A small factory assembling 1200 tons of complex mechs using advanced tech . Reduce production by a factor of 10 .  Also increased by 10 for tournement legal stuff . So combat vehicles are not complex unlike mechs using tournement legal would have the same factory churn out 120,000 tons .A large factory i muliply the numbers by 3.  To determine choak point say each District has 1 large factory to make a particular componant like Gaurdian ECM so 2400 units from 3600 tons of production . While the same factory would churn out 180 units of Angel ECM during eras in which it was experimental tech . Since you have to put aside a least 1/3 of the units for combat replacement would mean you could not produce 1800 units with Gaurdian ECM or 120 units with Angel in a given year there . Quantity is a quality all by itself . So for every 1,000 tons Tournement legal combat vehicles you have 100 tons of tournament legal mechs , 10 tons of advanced tech mechs an 1 ton of experimental tech . Treating Clan tech as always advanced gives rise to invading Clans using inner sphere factories and equipment when the have to defend 200 times or more territory . It is also why in later ERA there just is not 1 tech base . If you can produce 100 Inner Sphere med lasers or 10 Clan ones while needing to defend 20 sta4 systems the math is easy . You have to compromise somewhere . This seems to fall in line from what I see fielded everywhere in any ERA . Does this seem correct to you ?

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Re: Factory Output
« Reply #32 on: 20 August 2018, 05:00:46 »
It's important to remember that capital outlay for a new factory is HUUUUUGE.  You want to build 80 atlases a year?  Well don't expect to turn a profit soon, because I'm sure that tooling up that factory will cost you in the range of 15-20 BILLION c-bills, using the rule of thumb that 5% returns on Capital are the expected norm.  And that's if you can find a buyer for the 1600 atlases you'll need to sell to get your creditors off your back.  And that the Atlases don't have any cost for their components at all, which is frankly highly questionable.  If you're only looking at a 5% margin on your Atlas production, then you're only pocketing 38.5 million C-bills a year for a factory that produces 80 of the largest Mechs in the inner sphere.  This is actually a pretty lousy way to make money, I'm gonna retool my factories to make Widgets and Gadgets for the civilian market.
Considering that that Atlas has a 100% mark-up over component cost, I'm guessing that the profit margin is higher.

 

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