General suggestion for summary functions

[marchtaylor]

Rather than make a changes myself and push, I thought I would simply propose a very simple suggestion regarding some of the summary functions; specifically regarding the economic parameters.

I have only recently been looking into the economic outputs in detail. I currently do not use a covars object, but have only used the vcosts and fcosts. The summary functions look for additional variables in the covars, and set these to zeros when null. The problem with this approach is in cases where the covars are multiplicative and not additive. I think the multiplicative case may only apply to covars$NumbVessels, which are used in the totfcost_flbeia function: return(fleet@fcost * covars[["NumbVessels"]][flnm, ]). In my case, since I do not define this covar, I get zero total costs.

I am suggesting a change to the fltSum function, so that when multiplicative variable covars are missing, they should be replaced with 1.0 instead of 0.0.

e.g. create an empty FLQuant with 1's is needed, in addition to the one with 0's:

  FLQ0.dimfleets <- FLQuant(0, dimnames = c(fleet = list(names(fleets)), ### 0.0 as default for additive factors
    dimnames(fleets[[1]]@effort[, , ])[2:6]))
  FLQ1.dimfleets <- FLQuant(1, dimnames = c(fleet = list(names(fleets)), ### 1.0 as default for multiplicative factors
    dimnames(fleets[[1]]@effort[, , ])[2:6]))

and use FLQ1.dimfleets in place of FLQ0.dimfleets for covars$NumbVessels when NULL:

  if (is.null(covars$NumbVessels)) 
    covars$NumbVessels <- FLQ1.dimfleets # changed to 1.0 multiplier (multiplicative in totfcost_flbeia)

It could be that a similar change is required for vesselStkSum.

Thanks