Stay until full

[ataxx (OP)]

Maybe i am missing this.  but is there a way to make a cargo ship stay at a place loading minerals, until it fills up all of its cargo space?  Thanks.

[Nathan_]

Load when X available is probably the closest to what you want. Another thing to try is slowing down your cargo ship. fuel is saved, and more time is spent mining between delivery runs.

[sloanjh]

Load when X available is probably the closest to what you want. Another thing to try is slowing down your cargo ship. fuel is saved, and more time is spent mining between delivery runs.

Just to be clear, the fuel needed for a particular ship to go a distance D is the same, no matter what you set its speed to, since the fuel consumption rate is proportional to the speed (so it's consumed more slowly for a longer period of time).  The advantage of slowing down is, as you point out, there will be more cargo carried by the ship (assuming that it's not running full).

John

[Thiosk]

Isn't there a "when X is available" option?  So you could have a command
go to luna
load duranium when X is available
load all minerals
go to earth

that way it takes all the minerals, but waits until a certain threshold

[TheDeadlyShoe]

That's pretty much what I do. It's a perfect use for old freighters. The trick is to use the mineral with the highest accessibility, and make sure X is low enough that your cargo bays are not overloaded.

[sloanjh]

That ("Load when X available") is what I do too, except it's not   In reality, I just use mass drivers for in-system mineral transport.  Only for transporting minerals from one system to another do I use freighters, and when I'm doing that I usually just schedule the routes so that they never run empty.  But in the old days before mass drivers "Load when X available" was the way to go.

That was the second time I'd seen the "slow down to save fuel idea" - just wanted to make sure that people reading it understood that going slow in and of itself doesn't save fuel on the trip; it's just a different (and less precise) way of doing "Load when X available".

John