Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: January 19, 2021, 06:52:08 AM »Strange that no one else seems to be building giga stations with tugs. I mean i prefer auto-mines for actual mining, mostly because it helps a lot with actually creating enough demand for expansion.
When i build stations tho', i go big. Since ground construction is so powerful, terraforming stations go with 100 modules, and that only because bigger stations will greatly overshoot when terraforming small worlds.
Mining on the other hand. . . I usually aim for stations that can mine most asteroids in year or two, meaning hundreds of mining modules.
Its so easy to build and tug stations weighting several millions tons with just ~50 000 ton tug. Speaking of easy, is it just me or is tugging much bigger object easier than in old Aurora?
I just dont ever use mass drivers as they feel just too. . . magical to me. I mean the catching part, not the shooting one.
Like others said, its mostly preference/role-play choice.
Small #s of giant stations are easy to manage and make better use of skilled commanders. But from an industrial perspective they are significantly worse than large numbers of smaller stations.
Why?
Two reasons.
1. Shipyards are much better at mass production than construction factories because they can simultaneously build stuff and expand their capacity (by adding slipways). In my last game, even devoting between 10 and 30% of my factories to expansion at all times, I had a single commercial shipyard that could outproduce ALL my factories. Combined. This sucker could spit out 7x100,000 ton stations every year.
2. Giant stations take a long time to build, and until they are finished, they are producing NOTHING. This is particularly noticeable for terraforming stations. Given the choice between building a ten module station or ten 1 module stations: the ten module station takes about 9x as long as the 1 module station, so it will be done before the ten solo module stations. But we get 8x build time output from the first solo module, 7x build time from the second, etc. before the ten module station does ANYTHING.
I agree that any station you will mass produce you want to produce in your shipyards... although building really large stations will be more efficient long term as you can get some really good commanders on those super large stations. It should not be too hard to at least build your Commercial Yards to about 500kt to 1 million in size to build multiple stations eventually.
Personally I tend to build my stations at around 500kt and expand one yard each for Orbital Mining stations, Terraforming Stations, Refueling Stations... all of the things you know you want to continue produce at all times.
It also does not take ten times longer to build a 1mt station versus a 100kt station in a yard... it is more like 50% extra time to build in the larger yard versus the smaller. The larger the yard the more BP per construction cycle you get but less BP per tonnage.
So over time you will benefit from larger station but it might take a few decades to notice the benefit. For mineral and fuel this probably will never ever be a problem either as it depend on if you are experience a shortage or not in the immediate term or not. You might have need to churn out smaller stations to cover deficiencies, it is possible.