This all gives me an idea concerning what goes on at IN Depots.

Along w/ storage there's also salvage & rebuilding/refitting going on too.

PC's could in on the 'action' w/ the intent of coming out of it w/ a ship of their own, one way or another...

--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 11/4/14, Grimmund <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] Reflections on LBB2v2 versus HGv2 for drives
 To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
 Date: Tuesday, November 4, 2014, 8:25 PM

 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