Mass Production or Prototypes?

[HerbyF]

I think that if you are fighting in the colonies or on some far off planet, then your mechanical devices should be very limited. They would have been considered too great of a resource to be wasted on the colonies. If an expedition had more than one they were probably cobbled together with borrowed parts. I have a pair of walkers with the same platform, but one has a heavy casement & a gun mounted in the turent, the other has a light turent mount & a gardener gun barrel sticking out one of the windows. These are really just mobil guns, if they are not supported, They a vulnerable to infantry carried hand torpedos & satchel bombs.   

[Red Orc]

This is a really interesting topic and one I'd never really given much thought too.

As a gut feeling, I'd say the more experimental a thing is, the fewer there should be. A giant steam tank, for instance, should be a unique piece - unless there's a Mk I and a MkII for instance, but I'd say that they should then be significantly different anyway. Probably the same goes for walkers - using more than one I would say should really mean that they should be different.

Something like those bicycle-mounted Victorian troops though should be easy to justify in bulk.

But some other things I'd be prepared to allow a certain amount of 'mass production' - if we take railway engines as an example (because it's a very good comparison with things like smaller steam tanks) then there was a large degree of standardisation between different models in the same class, but also differences. So having a group of armoured steam wagons, let's say, wouldn't necessarily contradict the idea of being built in small coachworks (or shipyards maybe) to a standard pattern, with minor changes.

In my VSF world, most of the British Army's superior equipment is coming from the (Vickers) Armstrong works on Tyneside - a model of Victorian engineering long before Fordism came along; Lord Armstrong was also something of a character, and a perfect Victorian industrialist for gaming purposes (look him up on Wiki if you don't know about him) - he had the first house powered by electric light for instance, Cragside Hall, a mad little Ruritanian chateau-cum-hunting lodge in the Northumberland hills. Was he mining Unobtanium up there? Were underworld beings helping him out with his machines? Of course, this is VSF!