Author Topic: How to leave a terraforming platform on station, long term?  (Read 1387 times)

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Offline Panpiper (OP)

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I'm thinking about having my homeworld spend a couple of years building a roughly two million ton terraforming mobile station.   As I've got it currently designed, it could terraform 10% of an atmosphere per year, which looks pretty attractive to me.   However the ship will be awfully slow, at ~1000K KM, so having to bring it back for refueling, shore leave and what not would be prohibitive.   Would the ship use fuel while parked in orbit doing the terraform thing? Does the "deployment time" on a civilian ship matter one iota? I am considering putting an orbital habitat and recreational module on the thing.   (I assume it will give 'shore leave' to its own crew?) Given the size of what I am building, it does not add much to the cost at all, and only slows it down a tiny bit.   Is this utterly redundant? Would I gain anything by doing this other than RP flavor?

I realize in theory I could probably use tugs to move multiple, smaller, shipyard produced platforms, but I am already finding the micromanagement a tad overwhelming without adding more of that.   Having a single big ship that I move once, wait till it's done, then move on to the next, seems the least tedious way to handle it.     

Actually it just dawns on me now that I have several quarter million ton fuel harvesters working Jupiter, and they'll be dumping fuel on Mars, my first destination for the terraformer.   At least at first, I guess fuel won't be a problem.     
« Last Edit: July 10, 2018, 08:37:54 PM by Panpiper »
 

Offline DocSpit

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Re: How to leave a terraforming platform on station, long term?
« Reply #1 on: July 10, 2018, 10:09:07 PM »
All civilian ships are not adversely affected by morale, no.   Strictly speaking there is no practical reason to worry about how long they are deployed or what their "deployment time" even is.   Feel free to set it as low as you want in order to save on hull space.   Maintaining their morale is entirely a role-play choice.   That being said, a planet only needs to have a population of 10,000 to serve as a valid shore leave destination and replenish morale.   So, if colonists migrate to the planet that you're terraforming, that could turn into a 'problem' that solves itself anyway.
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Offline Rich.h

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Re: How to leave a terraforming platform on station, long term?
« Reply #2 on: July 11, 2018, 07:40:56 PM »
The Shore leave issue is fixed easily by just having a recreation module onboard (commercial ships don't care much about this but for RP you can have it).

As for fuel you either have a harvester join the terraformer as a fleet and then send it off while you do the terraforming. Or alter the design to include a hanger and keep the fuel miner in there, if you go this route the thing becomes a military ship and so the recreation module now becomes a requirement for long term operation.

Remember though that doing this could well leave you with a 2-3 million ton cessel, and so you need to plan well in advance for jump gates as it will pretty much never jump itself anywhere (of course at this size the ship is likely to take a year or so to simply cross the distance of a star system).
 

Offline Panpiper (OP)

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Re: How to leave a terraforming platform on station, long term?
« Reply #3 on: July 11, 2018, 07:49:14 PM »
Quote from: Rich. h link=topic=10117. msg108874#msg108874 date=1531356056
Remember though that doing this could well leave you with a 2-3 million ton vessel, and so you need to plan well in advance for jump gates as it will pretty much never jump itself anywhere (of course at this size the ship is likely to take a year or so to simply cross the distance of a star system).

Oh oh. . .  Have I just screwed myself? I did start building the ship and it's about 66% done.  (A two million ton monster that takes my homeworld almost two years to build. ) I have a jumpgate network pretty much everywhere.  I have construction ships following my survey ships and they usually have jumpgates at least at the entry point in any system before the survey ships have finished surveying it.  I am perhaps misunderstanding your post, but is there a limit to how big of a ship can use those jumpgates?
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: How to leave a terraforming platform on station, long term?
« Reply #4 on: July 12, 2018, 08:32:59 AM »
No, the moment you have jump gates, tonnage is of no concern.
 
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Offline Garfunkel

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Re: How to leave a terraforming platform on station, long term?
« Reply #5 on: July 12, 2018, 11:00:32 AM »
Fuel is not a problem - staying on station consumes zero fuel. And if necessary, you can send a tanker to top up the tanks of your behemoth.
 
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