Quote:
Originally Posted by Ostfriese
@Molon Lobe: Taiho should be under construction now. Historically she was laid down in July 1941, launched in 1943 and commissioned in March 1944. The first Unryus were laid down in August, October and December 1942, respectively.
From your experience with WiTP: how early can your opponent realistically get one of them (especially Taiho) into the fleet by speeding up the building process, and how hard will this hit other areas (like production of aircraft, escort ships, submarines, freighters and tankers)?
|
They can cut the remaining time to complete production in half by accelerating production. Accelerated arrival dates and daily shipyard point costs for carriers up to the Shinano are:
Junyo: 2/20/42 (cost: 168)
Hiyo: 4/4/42 (cost: 168)
Taiho: 1/27/43 (cost: 206)
Unryu: 4/8/43 (cost: 122)
Amagi 4/10/43 (cost: 122)
Katsuragi: 5/14/43 (cost: 122)
Shinano: 5/31/43 (cost: 314)
This is all on a per day basis. So he can accelerate production for 1 day and take 2 days off the time to complete, and then resume normal pace, and be on track to get it 1 day earlier than scheduled.
I don't believe it's practical to accelerate all of these. On 12/7/41, Naval Shipyards are producing 1384 points per day, and the unaccelerated production schedule costs 1123, so they have a surplus of 261 per day. So accelerating more than 2 of these means you will need to expand your shipyards or halt production on something else. Adding, say, 100 to their shipyard production capacity would cost 1000 Heavy Industry and 10,000 supply. After that's built, it would cost 300 HI daily to run that additional capacity. To put that in perspective, building a Zero costs 36 Heavy Industry, so the opportunity cost of that expansion is 28 Zeroes to expand plus 8 Zeroes per day to operate it.
Looking only at the per day cost, getting the Unryu on 4/8/43 instead of 8/7/44 would use up an equivalent amount of industry as producing 4951 Zeroes (122 shipyard per day--> 366 HI per day --*487 days= 178,242 HI; /36 HI per Zero = 4951 Zeroes)
EDIT: In terms of direct tradeoffs with other ship types, Merchants and Warships use different production shipyards, so you can't just halt a few tankers to get a carrier sooner--you still need to produce enough Shipyard Points at your warship shipyards. But operating those merchant shipyards costs Heavy Industry, so there is an opportunity cost to that similar to the example I did using Zeroes. A large tanker, for example, costs 30 shipyard points per day while it's under construction, so if you wanted to pay of the HI cost of accelerating the Taiyo by halting tankers, you'd could halt 7 tankers. But other warships you can more or less trade directly. Here are some example costs of those:
Type A1 submarine: 33 SY points
Akisuki class destroyer: 13 SY points
Yamato: 233 SY points
So, if you don't want the Yamato, you can halt that and use that to pay for accelerating a carrier or two.
By the way, producing one point of HI requires the consumption of one point of Fuel, so that's the other tradeoff lurking behind all of this (EDIT 2: To put that in perspective, using the example of the Unryu acceleration above, the fuel needed to support that acceleration would require 16 deliveries from a large tanker).