Military Production should behave like Social Production

Allan,

I think you will find many people who will dissagree with you on this, including Brad. (And me, of course). This isn't a matter of "being consistant" between these two production types. The production of a social project can be stopped and another one started without loosing the work done on the first project. Then you can switch back to it later and continue from where you left off. This is practiacl in a "real world" sense because a social project improves real estate, that is, it takes up land. If another social project becomes critical the first one sits on the land it was started on while the other one is being buit (on another piece of land). The support for building ships, however, is much different. They are, in our real world, built in docks. Switching to another ship before finishing the current one requires dismantling and salvaging the current ship. The salvage then goes into building the new ship. I have seen Brad discuss the rationale for not penalizing someone for changing ship porjects, but I think it boils down to simpler code not to.

I wasn't aware of the mothballing of social projects. I'll have to keep that one in mind when I play.

Though I could see a rationale for the ship salvage being used for the new ship. I still don't see how that could be converted on a 1:1 basis to a new ship. Plus it raises the question of what happens when you take a Constructor and build a Star Fighter, where does the excess go?

As for Dry docks allowing some kind of modular construction. The design requirements of say a Battle Cruiser vs a Freighter are vastly different. As a matter of fact modern ship building is very much a custom process with each steel plate and fitting often unique on a given vessel.

I must admit the current scheme works well when the computer AI decides to crush you and you need Navy in a hurry.

Allan,
you may be interested to know that the latest space exploration missions are trying to use the same modules more and more to cut down on costs. It will probably become even more common in future.
As for changing ships causing a production loss (not a 1:1 conversion) I would totally agree. Probably fairly straightforward to code, but coding the AI to be aware of this and knowing when to change may be much harder. It's fairly easy for you to decide that you really need that battle cruiser and that 80% complete constructor needs to be changed. Getting the AI to make the same decision intelligently would be much harder.

Paul.