Player HQs - Ship Construction Facts and Fictions

[Reven]

Even as many years as it has been after X3AP there are still some misconceptions about building ships at the headquarters. This is judging from the information on the PHQ at X3Wiki and in different posts here. My intention here is to write a guide with the information needed to set up a headquarters to be able to 1) build and repair the largest ships they are capable of, and 2) do so continuously. I'm going to start from basic principles, in case people who are still new to the game come across this.


Player Headquarters Capabilities
The PHQ is capable of:

1. Reverse engineering a ship. Tthis takes a ship, in any state of repair, and over time strips it down and converts is to a blueprint that can be used to later construct a new ship. The time taken for the teardown is the exact same amount of time it will take for the PHQ to later build the same ship from blueprints. The ship is sacrificed in this process.
2. Constructing a ship. This takes ship-building materials (see below) and credits and over time uses them to construct a ship. You can construct any ship for which you have the blueprints.
3. Repairing a ship. A ship with hull damage can be repaired. For a ship with essentially 100% damage (1 hull point left) this will cost 50% of the time, credits, and ship-building materials that it would take to build the ship new. This amount is pro-rated linearly with the amount of damage:
   
   RepairResourceAmount = BuildResourceAmount * hull% * .5
   
   The above formula works for wares, credits, and time. Any ship you own can be repaired, whether you have the blueprints for it or not.
4. Recycling a ship. This takes a ship, in any state of repair, and converts it to ship-building materials. For a ship at 100% hull, you will get about 80% of the materials back that it would take to build that ship. That amount is linearly pro-rated depending on the hull damage:
   
   RecycleResourceAmount = BuildResourceAmount * hull% * .8
   
   The above formula works for wares and time. You get no credits for recycling a ship. You get nothing for any equipment or extensions that are left on the ship when it is recycled.

There are two styles of player headquarters. The Commonwealth and Terran. The practical differences are noted below:

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                Commonwealth HQ    Terran HQ
Ware Capacity           500,000      700,000
Capital Docks                 9           18
Medium Slips                 15    Unlimited
Fighter hangar        Unlimited    Unlimited

Fiction: The Commonwealth headquarters is incapable of building several ships because it cannot hold enough materials.
Fact: There is only one ship a Commonwealth PHQ cannot build, and that is the Valhalla. The Commonwealth PHQ is capable of building every other ship in vanilla X3AP, including the next largest ship to the Valhalla, the Aran, and all X3AP M2+ ships.

Resources and Ratios
The resources required to build or repair a ship fall into three categories:

1. Wares, specifically: Computer Components, Quantum Tubes, Crystals, Cloth Rimes, Microchips, Rastar Oil, Silicon Wafers, Teladianium, Ore, and Energy Cells. These are required according to a more or less fixed ratio. Green is x1, yellow x2, amber x3, and red x4. Energy cells are a special case. More on that below.
2. Credits. It costs less money to build than to buy, but how much less depends on the size of the ship. The largest ships cost about 10/23rds as much to build as buy (or, 2.3 times more to buy than build). This ratio improves as the ship size decreases. This, of course, does not factor in the cost of the wares.
3. Time. It takes time to build or repair a ship. How much time depends on the ship's cost. The exact relation will be discussed in ratios below.

There are two separate but related sets of ratios that determine exactly how much of the above resources are required to build or repair a ship:

• The Ware Ratio. All wares, with the exception of energy cells, are required in ratios that are fixed with respect to each other. Those ratios are fixed and hold true for building and repairing every ship, with the only exceptions being those ships that are so small that there may be a fluctuation between 0 and 1 due to rounding errors. For our purposes they are inviolate. Energy cells are a ware, but they are not part of this ratio.
• The cost ratios. These are all the things that are dependent on the cost (to build/repair) of the ship. This includes, well, cost, plus the time required to build and the amount of energy cells needed. In general, the time and energy cell "efficiency" (the ratio of time and energy cell cost to the wares required) improves with the size of the ship. A ship that requires twice as many wares to build as another does not take twice as long to build and does not require twice as many energy cells.

These ratios are all summarized below:

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Ware                    Ratio    Size SizeRatio #PerHr* VolPerHour
------------------------------------------------------------------
Energy Cells            96.05:1*    1     96.05   1729        1729
Ore                     4:1         8        32     72         576
Teladianium             3:1         5        15     54         270
Silicon Wafers          3:1        18        54     54         972
Microchips              2:1         2         4     36          72
Rastar Oil              2:1         6        12     36         216
Cloth Rimes             1:1         2         2     18          36
Crystals                1:1         4         4     18          72
Quantum Tubes           1:1         5         5     18          90
Computer Components     1:1         1         1     18          18
Ware Total           114.05              225.05               4051
                             without EC: 126
Resource               Ratio
------------------------------------------------------------------
Credits                1:1
Energy Cells           Credits/295
Time (in seconds)      Credits/138.667

Wares are required based on the ratios given. Also shown is each ware's size (transport volume) and the size ratio, the ratio multiplied by size. It is the size ratio for each and the total size ratio that are important when planning how much space to dedicate for each ware in your HQ. The total size ratio, when multiplied by the amount of the 1:1 ratio ware needed to build a ship, will give you the approximate total volume of storage space needed to store the wares required to build that ship.

Energy cells are included twice. They are based on the cost ratios, but since they are actually a ware and produced by a factory, they are important to include with the wares. The ratio given, 96.05:1, is the ratio required to build the Valhalla and Aran. This is the best energy cell ratio - as the ship size decreases, proportionally more energy cells are required. However, while a smaller ship may require proportionally more energy cells than a larger ship, it will never require actually more energy cells than a larger ship. Thus, if you set up your headquarters to be able to build the largest ship it can, this is a good ratio to use to plan your storage space and give you as much space as possible for other things.

The number of wares required per hour is included in the chart and useful when planning factories to produce the wares you need. These numbers per hour are rounded slightly, and based on the ships that are most time-efficient to build (large ships). Thus if you make factories to produce the required number per hour for the largest ships, this is then sufficient to build any ship class with 100% duty cycle.

Fiction: Microchips and quantum tubes are very very difficult to produce in enough quantity to build ships.
Fact: People look at the total microchips (and to a lesser extent, quantum tubes) required, and the fact that a microchip factory only produces 10 per hour, and they balk. While Microchips are a limiting factor, looking at the numbers required per hour, you can see that it only requires four microchip factories to keep pace. Put another way, if microchip factories were available in large (x5) size, only one would be required. This means only 1 large-sized food factory and it's supporting bio source is required to support all the microchip factories required to build ships ad infinitum. And for quantum tubes, only one factory is required to keep up with ship production. It is true, though, that there may be reasons to have more microchip factories. More on this on factory layouts, below.

Also given in the chart above are the volume per hour. This is the total number for each ware required per hour times that ware's size. This is useful for planning transport for your items.

Optimizing HQ Storage Space
So you have either a Commonwealth or Terran player headquarters and you want to set it up to build the largest ship it can, but leave space for other things too - like the equipment needed to outfit those ships you are building. How to plan?

You want to take the largest ship you intend on building. For our purposes here, I am going to assume the largest ships possible for each HQ to build, the Aran and the Valhalla. What you want to get is the number of 1:1 wares required for that ship. In the Aran's case, that is 1952. Multiply that by the size ratio total, which is 225.05, that gives a total ware volume required of 439,298. This means you need to dedicate 439,298 units of volume in your PHQ to ship production wares in order to build an Aran and any smaller vessel. Since I like the numbers to work out neatly, I round mine to the nearest hundred to get this ware storage layout:

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Ware           Commonwealth    Terran
-------------------------------------
Energy Cells         192000    240000
Ore                    8000     10000
Teladianium            6000      7500
Silicon Wafers         6000      7500
Microchips             4000      5000
Rastar Oil             4000      5000
Cloth Rimes            2000      2500
Crystals               2000      2500
Quantum Tubes          2000      2500
Computer Components    2000      2500

Total Volume:       450,000   562,500
Left over:           50,000   137,500

These were obtained by taking the largest ship each HQ could build, rounding up the 1:1 ratio ware requirement to the next even hundred, and multiplying that by the total ware size ratio of 225.05. This gave the total ware volume needed, which was tweaked slightly by manually rounding the energy cell requirements slightly.

The Terran PHQ can build the largest ship in the game and still have 137,500 units of space for equipment. The Commonwealth can build everything except a Valhalla and still have 50,000 units of cargo space available. This is nothing to sneeze at. If you focus that cargo space on the wares that no other station can hold in totals of more than a few, then this space is more than ample to outfit your large ships with everything they need.

Factory Planning:
So we have a couple good layouts for our player headquarters, and perhaps you have even used the dockware manager to set limits up for your PHQ so that it's ready to accept ship materials. Now we just need to produce them.

Looking at the ratio chart, and the number required per hour, it's easy to see that the per hour requirements are actually quite modest. A single factory of the smallest available will supply all the rimes, rastar, teladianium, computer components and crystals you need. One modest medium ore mine will give you all the ore. Three items warrant specific mention: quantum tubes, microchips, and silicon.

The direct silicon requirements for ship building are quite small. It's the indirect - the silicon required for the quantum tubes, chip fabs, and the computer plant that ups the ante. First we need to decide on the number of quantum tube fabs and chip plants.

The actual requirements for microchips, at 36 per hour, can be supplied by four chip plants. That will give you all you need for building ships. IF you also want to be able to simultaneously repair ships, then you need to double this to 8 chip plants. Whether or not this is necessary depends on the duty cycle you want from your headquarters. If you plan on employing your PHQ with 100% duty cycle for construction, and also for repairs, that doubles the resource needs. It only takes half the resources to fully repair a ship, but it also happens in half the time, so a 100% repair duty cycle requires the same number of resources as a 100% construction duty cycle. This means 8 chip plants and 2 quantum tube fabs.

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Factory Requirements including Energy

Factory         Count Size ExcessOut
Food               x8 L
FoodBio            x8 L
Chelt Aquarium     x1 M
Rastar Refinery    x1 M    180/hr
Wheat Farm         x1 M
Rimes Fact         x1 M    300/hr
Computer Plant     x1 S     72/hr
Teladianum Found   x1 M    240/hr
Chip Plant         x8 S     80/hr
Quantum Tube Fab   x2 S     72/hr
Solar Power Plant* x1 XL 21632/hr
Crystal Fab        x5 L    237/hr

Silicon Mine     200* L    150/hr

The Solar Power Plant shown above is located in the player sector (Morning Star for me), with 600% output. More SPPs may be required if placed in a lower solar output sector. Crystal Fabs required should be relatively steady, but may require tweaking.

With just a little more silicon, you can increase the number of chip plants to 12 in the above layout - there is enough food and energy cell production in this layout to support 12 chip plants if you want. This will then give you at least 1.5 times overproduction in every ware of what you need for both a 100% repair and production duty cycle. You can then set yourself up to sell the overproduction. On my layout, I have two sets of Commodity Logistics delivery transports set up. One group that is set to take production from the ware production complex to my HQ and is configured to do that when the production facility is any more than 20% full. The second is set up to transport from the production facility to a trading station when the production is more than 80% full. This more or less automatically allocates the full production to the HQ when the HQ needs resources, and sells the extra only when the HQ doesn't require them. In this way, ship material overproduction 100% funds the credit requirements for ship construction.

Summary
Ship production is one aspect of the game I find quite interesting. I add challenge to the game by setting myself the goal of not buying any ship - all ships are earned through missions or captured and subsequently reverse engineered. A basic production setup has modest requirements, which you can then upgrade to support full self-funded 100% duty cycle ship building and repair 24/7.


[Edits]
- Added note about not getting credit for equipment left on a ship to be recycled. Thanks to Cpt.Jericho.

[Alan Phipps]

A very nice guide. For the Commonwealth PHQ if you don't want spare capacity of construction or other resources then there is a nice aide-memoire trick in that the basic resource numbers you can hold in the necessary ratios to totally fill the PHQ look similar in format and read the same forwards or backwards:

2222: Cloth Rimes, Crystals, Quantum Tubes, Computer Components.
4444: Rastar Oil, Microchips.
6666: Silicon, Teadianium.
8888: Ore.
213312: Energy cells.
plus 10 Nividium: (for Kha'ak small ships.)

[Cpt.Jericho]

Adding to point 1: All equipment left of the ship being reverse engineered is lost. So, rip out anything left in cargobay and all extentions if possible before starting the disassembling.

[Reven]

Adding to point 1: All equipment left of the ship being reverse engineered is lost. So, rip out anything left in cargobay and all extentions if possible before starting the disassembling.

Yes, I missed that in the guide. I've added it to the item about recycling. Thanks!

[Cpt.Jericho]

Personally I would have stated that any equipment left on a recycled/rev-engineered ship is destroyed. Just to make sure that new players are aware that that all equipment on board is, well, destroyed for ever and for good.
Also, a newly constructed ship is truly naked - nothing on it but the extentions that are part of the ship (Trade Software MK1 on traders etc.).

[Reven]

An implication that was lost on me when I wrote the guide, but which just dawned on me - if you factor time out of the equation, it may make sense to repair a ship before you scrap it. You have to pay some credits to repair, so I suppose it's like buying the materials. But from a materials perspective, assuming a ship at essentially zero health, repairing it costs 50% of its construction materials, whereas recycling gets you 80%.

[jlehtone]

You have to pay some credits to repair, so I suppose it's like buying the materials. But from a materials perspective, assuming a ship at essentially zero health, repairing it costs 50% of its construction materials, whereas recycling gets you 80%.

How does the credits to repair compare to the average value of that 30% of materials?

[Reven]

How does the credits to repair compare to the average value of that 30% of materials?

Working it out on a spreadsheet for the largest ships, it's about 18% more expensive to repair/recycle than just recycle. With an Aran you get 22.6 mil extra worth of materials for a credit cost to repair (from zero hull) of 27.6 mil. This ratio gets worse the smaller the ship gets.

If you have factories supplying your shipbuilding then the time alone to be repairing before recycling is likely aggravating enough to not want to bother. If not, if you are dependent on the market or on recycling captures for some or all of your shipbuilding materials, then it's an availability issue. Captures aren't necessarily cheap or easy, and the market only has (for example) 13 microchip factories. In those situations it may be worth it to pay the repair cost in order to get maximize the recycled materials.

[Cpt.Jericho]

Is the 22.6M credits the maximum price for the resources or the minimum? The game usually calculates with average prices when it comes to credits.

[Reven]

I used average costs in my spreadsheet.