Capital manufacturing update: Full stop

The effect of this notion? I very much fear, 'twill make doubtful all things which were formerly clear

-Schrodinger's Cat, by Cecil Adams


In my december monthly financial report I mentioned that something had gone horribly wrong with my spreadsheet. Today, we discuss what.

Basically, component quantities.

When crucible hit, drone bays were removed from dreadnaughts. Then, for each 5 drone bays which were removed from a dread, 1 was added to the carrier of the same race. What I didn't notice was that the changes didn't stop there. Possibly I should read the patch notes more closely next time.

Since I build components for runs well ahead of where my blueprints are, it took a while for the effects to be seen. In Mid-late december I found myself running short of components when I shouldn't be running short of components. This prompted me to check my blueprints against my spreadsheet, and what I found was that different components had been added to dreads, in numbers which I suspect are equal to the number of drone bays removed. This is what was causing me to run short.

This prompted a full check of all my other blueprints, and I discovered that carrier components had also changed, but only a little -- they had two or three components removed total, of similar types to those added to dreads. I suspect that the number of components removed from carriers was equal to the number of drone bays added, though I can't prove it.

So I had to:

-Change the base component quantities for each carrier and dread on my spreadsheet, and make sure they gave the correct answer for the materiel level of my blueprints.
-At this point my spreadsheet was chill, so I just had to update ship prices and margins on the little thingy what tells me which ships are better but doesn't really affect what I build.
-With that done, I still had little idea how many components of each type I had too many or too few of, so I put a hold on new runs and and waited for ship builds to catch up so I could see where I stood in terms of components.
-I was short of some components, so I had to build the ones I was missing. Minerals for this ran around 520 million, which I've subtracted from my monthly profit spreadsheet as a correction. I also ended up with 5 extra components of different types.


By the way, if you think capitals are really expensive right now? They aren't. Other than chimera, archon, and revelation, margins are looking frankly depressing.