Shipbuilder's Guild

The shipbuilder's guild is one of the more recent organisations to have achieved member status of the Commercial Guilds which operate in the Eleven Cities surrounding the Sea of Jars.

History

Civilian ships of the Sea of Jars is the lifeblood of the Eleven Cities; the insular cities of Dypholyos, Dyqamay and Tyros in particular have populations that cannot be fed from the arable land on their islands and rely on reliable shipping to bring food into their communities. This need is perhaps less acute in the other cities, but all these communities are mercantile ports whose economies are more or less dependent on the sea trade.
This means that most of what the Commercial Guilds do is facilitate and supervise maritime logistics; indeed, most Guild members see domestic trade - that which takes place within one city - as either outside their purview or essentially beneath them. As such the organisation has an active interest in ensuring the reliability and efficacy of ships and shipbuilding in the Eleven Cities. For many years, therefore, there existed among Guild officers a vague sense that these matters should be the purview of a specific organised group within the Guilds.
This policy initiative was handicapped by intergenerational disputes within the Guilds as officers in various cities each championed local methodologies for the organisation and execution of shipbuilding. In Chogyos and Ramoros, for example, shipbuilding was already a largely corporate affair undertaken by the Guilds themselves via the application of indentured labour. The result was the growth of the notion of ships as commercial product, items of exchange in and of themselves. This methodology clashed with that practised in the northern cities, where the Commercial Guilds had a major presence but where ships were traditionally family affairs built by ancestors and passed down through generations, and each vessel was thought to have its own very specific identity. In eastern cities such as Pholyos and Loros, meanwhile, ships were widely regarded as manifestations of the captain's will, custom-designed and adapted for purpose. Although ship-masters could see the utilitarian advantages of standardised designs and construction systems, the romance of personal freedom on the waves stymied their implementation for decades.
To this day, in fact, the Shipbuilder's Guild is counterintuitively one of the least powerful and widespread such organisations around the Sea of Jars, its operations largely confined to a handful of shipyards, mostly in the western cities. These shipyards are efficient, however, and the standardised designs that come out of them are a common sight on the sea lanes between the cities.

Current activities

The Shipbuilder's Guild operates shipyards in Chogyos, Loros, Ramoros, Elpaloz and Oluz. Of these, the facilities in Chogyos and Ramoros are the largest and most efficient, being able to construct a good-sized trade vessel from scratch (given the right materials) in as little as three days. That in Elpaloz can usually manage the same feat in four or five days, while those in Loros and Oluz are rather less efficient, seldom managing to work faster than the independent shipbuilders who continue to operate in both cities. Collectively these five facilities have produced perhaps three out of every ten civilian ships on the Sea of Jars today.
Most people who deal with the sea can usually tell a guild-built vessel by sight, particularly if they have the opportunity to examine it at close quarters. Although the ships that come out of these yards are all unique, they are built to a system of metrology designed to produce robust, sound ships substantially lacking in the sorts of individual features - and hostile to the sorts of customisation - which captains use to improve the performance of their vessels. The guild assumes the chief onus of ensuring an effective ship at the cost of responsiveness to the capabilities of a skilled captain or crew, who are generally seen by guild officers as little more than a form of rather noisy, labour-intensive obligate cargo (most of the aforementioned officers are bureaucrats with only a layperson's grasp of sailing). The received wisdom is that, a guild-built ship will probably outperform one built by independent contractors in fair conditions - calms seas, good winds and clear skies - but that in adverse conditions, or situations calling for bursts of speed or agility, the individual strengths of an independently-built ship will win out over those produced by the guild.