Suborbital to Willamette: Basic ColonizationNow we're going to put all the previous lessons to work. To colonize Mars, we're going to need to create a population there, create 2 new ship designs, and set up some task group orders. We'll also need some Infrastructure so our colonists can survive the hostile environment.
First things first: we need a cargo ship to haul infrastructure, and a colony ship to haul people. Fortunately, we already have all the technologies for both.
Open the Class Design screen (f5). You should see our existing Magellan-class design. It's not much use to us at the moment, so click New. This gives a blank design named the "Victory-class Cruiser". Let's change it to the Albatross class Freighter. Remember that Rename is at the bottom left, and you change the hull type at the top. Once that's accomplished, switch to the design screen.
Birds of Burden: Ship Design Part 2The first thing to do is to give it 10 Prototype Atomic Rockets. This may seem like alot, but colonial infrastructure is not lightweight! You can add ten of a system at a time by selecting the "10" bullet under the components list, then double click the component in question. Once you do this, select the "1" bullet and scroll down to the Transport & Industry category of components. We want 1 "Cargo Hold - Standard" and 5 "Cargo Handling Systems". The Cargo Hold - Standard gives your ship 25000 cargo space. This is enough to hold 1 standard facility such as a mine, or 10 points of infrastructure. Certain facilities such as Research Labs and Terraforming Plants take up more space. The Cargo Handling Systems affect the Load Time stat at the bottom left. Load Time is how long it takes your ship to load or unload goods at a planet without a commercial spaceport. Neither Earth nor Mars has one, and it would take 10 days to load or unload. With 5 handling systems it should only take 10 hours.
This leaves us with a 39,450 ton design. Go ahead and add 10 additional Fuel Storage components, which brings us up to the nice round number of 40,000 tons. The 550,000 fuel capacity also gives us almost 19 billion km range, which is enough to go most anywhere in the Solar System and back without refueling. This design should get the job done without too many headaches.
You'll note we didn't adjust the Deployment Time. A Freighter doesn't do anything that is affected by morale, so there is little downside to exceeding deployment time. 3 months minimum is still required for a design to count as Commercial, however.
Now of course the most important part, the auto-name type. Switch to DAC / Rank / Info and select Birds for the naming type.
The final thing we want to do is go to the series of check boxes at the top right and mark "Conscript". Conscript means that the ship doesn't draw from the naval academy pool of recruits. This causes a penalty to its Grade, reducing the effectiveness of its weapons fire. But we don't really care about that, do we? No need to use military personnel on a freight shuttle.
Alright, now we have a freighter! It should look like this.
Albatross class Freighter 40,000 tons 185 Crew 638 BP TCS 800 TH 1000 EM 0
1250 km/s Armour 1-104 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
MSP 10 Max Repair 25 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 2
Cargo 25000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 25
Prototype Atomic Rocket (10) Power 100 Fuel Use 13.26% Signature 100 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 550,000 Litres Range 18.7 billion km (172 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
Stacked like SardinesNow for the colonist transport. For this walkthrough, the design will be substantially similar to the Albatross, so to save time we're going to use the Copy function at the bottom left. This will create a design named "Albatross - Copy" with the same components as the Albatross.
Once you're back in the design view, remove the Cargo Hold - Standard and add 10x Cryogenic Transport modules. Make sure you arn't adding the "Small" or "Emergency" versions, as they are much smaller and slightly less efficient. A Cryogenic Transport module consists of 10,000 cryo-tubes capable of keeping their human cargo alive indefinitely. 10 modules gives our colony ship a capacity of 100,000 people, and clocks our ship in at 40,100 tons. The slight discrepancy is because the Cryogenic Transport modules have increased crew requirements compared to the Cargo Hold. To compensate, we'll remove 2 Fuel Storage modules. We get a nice round number again, and we don't need as much range on this ship anyway - the inner system is far more hospitable than the outer gas giants.
We don't really want the ship to be named Albatross - Copy so we need a new name. Each of these ships carries as many people as a city so we'll call it the City class. Change the hull type to "Colony Ship". Then go to the DAC / Rank / Info tab and change the Name Type to Cities.
You may note that in the "Eligible Additional Classes" box below Name Type it says Albatross. This is because the shared components and identical size make it relatively easy to install a cargo hold in lieu of the cryo-units. This means that a shipyard tooled to produce the City can also produce the Albatross. You'll note, however, that if you select the Albatross from the Class list at the top that you can't build a City from an Albatross yard. This is because of how the game determines refit costs.
Your final City-class should look like this:
City class Colony Ship 40,000 tons 280 Crew 1595 BP TCS 800 TH 1000 EM 0
1250 km/s Armour 1-104 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
MSP 25 Max Repair 25 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 0
Cryogenic Berths 100000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 25
Prototype Atomic Rocket (10) Power 100 Fuel Use 13.26% Signature 100 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 450,000 Litres Range 15.3 billion km (141 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
You might note that it costs almost 1600 BP. The Albatross only costs 638 BP. Colony ships are expensive and time-consuming to construct, and shouldn't be built on a whim.
Where's the beef?Now that we have 2 valid ship designs, lets create several of each. Close the Class Design window. Open Fast OB Creation, located in the Spacemaster drop down of the basic menu. The Albatross should be selected by default, as it is the first ship alphabetically. Go to "Task Group" on the left and select the Cargo Task Group, then change Number to 5. Click Add. You should now have 3456 ship points remaining. Admire the mathematical coincidence, then change Task Group to Colony Task Group and Class to City. Change Number to 2, and click Add. That should leave you with 266 Ship Points. Close the Fast OB Creation window.
That gives us a good basic hauling capacity, but we're going to need more in the future. Open Population and Production and go to the Manage Shipyards tab. Use SM SY Mod to add another shipyard. Select the new yard, and click Rename SY. Call it Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Select the shipyard again, uncheck "Military SY" in the SM SY Mod panel, change capacity to 40000 and slipways to 2. Click Update.
Now use the Task Type drop down to select Retool for Selected Class. Select the "CS City" from the new drop down. Now that it's been tooled, select the shipyard again and construct 2 new Albatross-class Freighters. They should be done by early 2026.