Station income and manufacturing

[millpond]

Whilst reading nulls post about manufacturing and prototyping, I realised that the job of equipment manufacture sounded a little under-fleshed, so my proposal is thus:

Have equipment manufacturing technicians not directly create the objects themselves (although this is still certainly an option), but rather have them set up assembly lines to do mass production for them.

(Mock up of assembly line)

This makes the station more realistic in its main money generation, plus also allows for a reasonably reliable income, even when running off a skeleton crew, as it wouldn’t necessarily take much effort, if any, to keep it running once started (This also allows for interesting sabotage options). Obviously, however, these assembly lines would have to be designed and built from scratch and there is also the issue of balance, as it may be too easy to just ‘print money’. A potential solution to that would be to introduce:

Market Saturation

This would force the price down of an object the more it is produced, eventually to the point where the cost of manufacture would exceed the amount you’d get back from selling it. This forces the EM’s to keep refreshing their machines, and would keep the gameplay fresh and interesting.

This could be expanded upon further – it is just an idea, but I think it would add some interesting gameplay to what might otherwise be an uninteresting job.

Let me know what you think.

[Nullbear]

I think market saturation is a great idea, And so is customizeable assembly lines. I dont think it'll be something you'll start off with, though, but still an early game development. (Get the station set up, THEN set up an assembly line.)

Several machines will probably have to be very specifically created, For example, for making batteries, You would need to feed in a particular kind of metal, and a particular kind of chemical, in order to have a consistent product. These machines wouldnt be very flexible, but would be fast.

The other alternative, IS to have a build-all machine (What you're going to start with) That needs to be manually set up for each prouction, and is slower to produce.

[millpond]

Yes, thats pretty much what I was thinking. You would obviously need solid infrastructure first before you get the kind of specialised mass production this would entail, but early game you could use a build all machine that would be inefficient and slow.