Any ways to estimate how much fuel/maintenance supplies a ship will use?

[Iestwyn (OP)]

Well, my first Aurora playthrough in years ended before I transited a single jump point. I made way too many ships without thinking and ended up using all my fuel. There was enough left to move a harvester into place, but I decided I might as well start from scratch on order to try avoiding done other mistakes I made.

How do you get a feel for the costs of maintaining a ship? I clearly didn't understand the fuel and MSP demands of my fleet. Are there any mental calculations or rules of thumb, or do you just have to calculate it by hand using failure rates and consumption tech?

[db48x]

Ships use 25% of their BP cost in MSP every year while anchored at a maintenance location. Fuel usage is based on how far your ships travel and how fuel efficient their engines are. Surveying and freighters are likely to be your largest fuel users in the early game, followed by military expeditions in the later game.

You can save a lot of fuel on cargo hauling by accepting slower freighters. Increasing the number of cargo holds can increase throughput faster than increasing speed does.

You can save fuel on surveying by making your survey ships slower and more efficient, as well as by being more selective. You could just survey planets and moons, for example, and skip the asteroid belts and comets until you actually decide to put a colony in the system.

For military expeditions, using an carrier with efficient engines to move fast fighters or FACs around might be better than building lots of fast destroyers.

[Garfunkel]

Yeah, the best way to save fuel early in the game is to use super-efficient commercial engines for your colony ships and freighters - the ships that are likely to be constantly moving as db48x said. That means to make the engines as big as possible and with as small a power modifier as you can. That'll make for slow ships but their cargo doesn't care about a week or two.

You should then build a small number of fast freighters that do NOT handle routine hauling but are preserved for high priority missions, like getting a DSTS into that new system you discovered ASAP.

For maintenance, the first rule of thumb is to always have more maintenance facilities than you actually need, because your MSP demand grows faster than your facilities ability to produce them.