International Collaboration Projects

[stormbind]

Tornado, JSF, Eurofighter, Concorde, CVF, ESA and many other projects are cross-civilisation projects. Many of those assumed not to be actually are.

I watched a documentary about Eurofighter some years ago but will come to that in a minute.

International Collaboration projects are difficult to manage and plagued by political & economic incompatibilities. They often go over-budget and take longer than anticipated.

It is estimated that if the UK had developed Eurofighter by itself (without Germany, Italy, France, Spain meddling) then it would have been finished six months earlier and cost the British tax payer half the amount!

However, civilisations (especially the UK) persist in venturing into collaboration projects. Infact, every project I listed at the start of this post involves the UK - it is probably why I happen to know about them.

Collaboration projects are influencial elsewhere aswell: UK universities contribute to NASA projects, some UK universities even maintain large campuses overseas to expand their student-base (i.e. China).

There is obviously a powerful force driving this seemingly flawed collaboration!

Please list the benefits of international collaboration projects, so that I can then advocate supporting them in CivIV

 

[Darwin420]

Maybe they'll expand the 'Alliance' concept so that you can form treaties that share certain resources, which could simulate international collaboration.

Or maybe give us an option to 'Build International Space Station' .. then you can have all civs involved spend massive amounts of money to provide sub-par modules for an idea that's doomed to failure, and most likely will never be completed...

heck, why not?

 

[searcheagle]

It looks like there will already be "shared research" in Civ 4. So, your idea may have been granted prior to request!

 

[stormbind]

Sounds great!

So just to clarify: these would be an alternative means of getting resources (like coal) or technologies out of rival civilisations?

Did you know that Germany wanted to write the flight control software for Eurofighter, but they had not done anything like that since WW2! In contrast, the UK has been doing it and supplies the RAF, USAF and most other nations with flight control software. The cost (and time) of paying for Germany to acquire the skills and technologies to complete it's portion of the project was certainly not an excersise in efficiency by any stretch of the imagination. France pulled out of that project which caused other projects to need redesignating which was more money and time down the drain. Germany made sure that would not happen again by making everyone agree to pay a massive fine for withdrawing. Ironically, Germany later wanted to pull out because it complained that the UK behaved like money was unlimited, but could not because of it's own rule

The idea of paying through the nose to give away technologies, and lose future business, is utterly bazzar - but it is what they do!

Are there any more ideas for why civilisations would embark on these projects?

 

[stormbind]

It looks like there will already be "shared research" in Civ 4. So, your idea may have been granted prior to request!

Oh cool! I did now know that