Shipyards in Systems With Multiple Planets

[jscott991]

Is shipyard capacity and dock space calculated on a system basis or planetary basis?

This is hugely important in an Honorverse campaign because if it is on a system basis, Manticore's shipyards will be absurdly good (with tons of dock space and a really high capacity).

I am shocked that this information isn't explicitly provided in the Moderator's Companion, but the implication is that it is done on a system basis because that is how productivity is calculated, and all of the shipyard's statistics come down to output and utilized productivity.

[Charles Lewis]

It would depend on the style of game being played. If you play with the advanced map rules, where each system can have multiple orbital bodies, then you could certainly have shipyards scattered throughout a system. By default, though, each system is summarized into a single body for easy of play. For what you seem to want I would recommend the Commodore mapping system, and is in the fact the method I used for my various solo games.

[jscott991]

It's really strange that shipyards aren't mentioned in the advanced system generation rules even once. The closest reference is fixed defenses.

I'm going to track it on a planetary basis. Otherwise my Manticore will have shipyards with 13 docks each and a 225 capacity and that's just unbalancing.

[Tyrel Lohr]

When playing 1E campaigns with multiple planets per system, each planet is treated as its own system for the purposes of colonization and development. The reason that shipyards aren't mentioned in the Companion is because they are built at individual planets and thus use the colony stats for the planet they orbit to determine their construction capacity and dock space limits.

2E replaces the stand-alone shipyards with a distinct Shipyard stat at each colony that in turn, in combination with the Orbital value assigned to its system/planet, determines the total construction cost of starships that a colony can build each campaign turn. That eliminates a lot of the ambiguity inherent in the original rules.