As a reference for ship maintenance:
The German Navy, by my calculation, was worth 797 million Reichmarks in overall shipbuilding costs, in the year 1898. In the same year, the Reichstag voted 5 million marks annually for maintenance (I chose the German Navy because it only came into existence a few years earlier; thus its assets are simpler to calculate).
A Hazeron year is 13 days. The German Navy's maintenance, in Hazeron terms, equates to 0.0005% of nominal building cost per real day. At this cost, a typical max-volume ship would cost about ¢9,500,000 per day to operate. For reference, my empire, which is not even slightly optimized to create cash, takes about ¢58 million per day in tax (20% income rate), excluding trade, harvester and other income. Perhaps this would be a starting point for discussion, remembering that other new costs are coming into play at the same time. (It is probably a bit too high? Not sure. These ships should be rare).
This does also suggest that a 1:1 cost for purchasing parts may be too high (maybe, maybe not), though if a clever empire, mid-sized as I currently am, manipulated prices, purchased in the right places, optimized taxes, conducted trade and harvesting and generally ran a good economy, they might be able to purchase a handful of very large ships per real year and operate perhaps between one and two dozen? That would be roughly on a par with most second-rank navies of our own world. If you needed to build a lot quickly in wartime, you might have to take a loan. Certain banks might get very rich on conflict, even provoke it...
It should be possible to sell retired ships for a reasonable lump of their cost. High purchase costs but short build times, together with a refund on scrapping a ship, would then allow players to experiment with prototypes and play with their new toys quickly, without being able to spam infinite numbers of them. Possibly a good dynamic and another balance issue helped.
This could conceivably help ease officer strain too, since there is no point having officers you can't pay for.
The German Navy, by my calculation, was worth 797 million Reichmarks in overall shipbuilding costs, in the year 1898. In the same year, the Reichstag voted 5 million marks annually for maintenance (I chose the German Navy because it only came into existence a few years earlier; thus its assets are simpler to calculate).
A Hazeron year is 13 days. The German Navy's maintenance, in Hazeron terms, equates to 0.0005% of nominal building cost per real day. At this cost, a typical max-volume ship would cost about ¢9,500,000 per day to operate. For reference, my empire, which is not even slightly optimized to create cash, takes about ¢58 million per day in tax (20% income rate), excluding trade, harvester and other income. Perhaps this would be a starting point for discussion, remembering that other new costs are coming into play at the same time. (It is probably a bit too high? Not sure. These ships should be rare).
This does also suggest that a 1:1 cost for purchasing parts may be too high (maybe, maybe not), though if a clever empire, mid-sized as I currently am, manipulated prices, purchased in the right places, optimized taxes, conducted trade and harvesting and generally ran a good economy, they might be able to purchase a handful of very large ships per real year and operate perhaps between one and two dozen? That would be roughly on a par with most second-rank navies of our own world. If you needed to build a lot quickly in wartime, you might have to take a loan. Certain banks might get very rich on conflict, even provoke it...
It should be possible to sell retired ships for a reasonable lump of their cost. High purchase costs but short build times, together with a refund on scrapping a ship, would then allow players to experiment with prototypes and play with their new toys quickly, without being able to spam infinite numbers of them. Possibly a good dynamic and another balance issue helped.
This could conceivably help ease officer strain too, since there is no point having officers you can't pay for.