Another newbie...

[Paul M]

Uhm...a freighter with 2 million litres of fuel??  My tankers carry 500,000 litres.  It is also 117K tonnes.  The largest ships the NCC has are 45K tonnes.  The standard freighter is 30K tonnes, that has increased to 32K tonnes due to a combination of factors: the jump transports new generation jump engine and so on, this has resulted in the number of engines increasing from 1 to 2 (50 HS) which brings the speed up to some 6xx km/s.

That freighter also takes the gallicite required for 14 of the NCCs freighters.  There is currently 24 of those Transorts/freighters in service.  4 ICGs (12 ships) will move more than that single ship.  Fuel wise it uses more fuel than a full ICG (750,000 l) which have comparable range (24 billion Km or so)...and have 60 000 cargo and 20 000 passenger transport capacity plus are jump capable.  True it is faster but with the update the more modern ICG will have only a bit lower range, half the speed, but carry 60 000 cargo and 30 000 colonists--and the gallicite cost of that lone freighter is reduced to 7 of these newer ships (2 ICGs).  The Heavy Lift Groups have 80 000 cargo and 50 000 colonist lift, equivelent range but only move 461 km/s though again they have significantly lower fuel needs, with a comparable range.

There are very clear cost performance trade offs for having freighters that move nearly as fast as warships and have substantial cargo capacity.  Add in the cost and time of the yard to build them, the jump gates I assume they need and so on.

With the current tech...Earths refineries produce 5 million l of fuel per year, though they have been idling as fuel is coming in from civillian refinery ships plus the use of an extensive network of NCC owned refinery ships to delivery fuel where it is needed.  Standard civillian engines are down below 7% efficiency for the NCC.  The current reserve on Earth sits at some 10 million but goes up and down by +3 million -1 million.  Most colonies have several million l of fuel on hand.

[Father Tim]

Thanks for the answers!

So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?

BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .

I consider anything under 500 km/s "painfully slow" - my home system (note: I rarely start in Sol) has planets orbiting faster than 300 km/s.

Re: civilian contracts - the colony where you want something to end up 'demands' X number of that thing, and the colony where you want to send it from 'supplies' Y number and the smaller of X or Y gets moved by civilians at whatever rate they can manage, based on number of ships, amount of cargo space per ship, etc.

Also note, due to programming limitations civilians will only look for routes within four jumps of the 'supply' colony, and any jump points along the route will need jump gates or permanently stationed jumpships with orders to 'act as jump gate' (or something like that - last I looked it was a tick box on the TF orders screen).

[MarcAFK]

In just 2 years those Wyverns will be replaced with very similar ships, taking advantage of X 0.4 multiplier, 0.8 fuel efficiency, Ion engines, and half as many size 50 engines. ... It should look something like this:

Code: [Select]

Tiamat class Freighter    103,000 tons     321 Crew     1212.6 BP      TCS 2060  TH 2160  EM 0
1048 km/s     Armour 1-195     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 7    Max Repair 48 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 1    
Cargo 75000    Cargo Handling Multiplier 50    

240 EP Commercial Ion Drive (9)    Power 240    Fuel Use 4.05%    Signature 240    Exp 4%
Fuel Capacity 1,550,000 Litres    Range 66.8 billion km   (738 days at full power)

CIWS-80 (2x2)    Range 1000 km     TS: 8000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposesBy taking out 1 cargo bay and an engine I can cram an efficiency 5 Jump drive into it with a slight speed cost.
Also, what? My tankers are tiny and hold slightly more than yours:

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# Hyundai Hippo class Tanker    50,000 tons     202 Crew     4042.6 BP      TCS 1000  TH 1600  EM 0
1600 km/s     Armour 1-120     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 51    Max Repair 25 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 6   

25 HS 100 EP Commercial Nuclear Pulse Engine (16)    Power 100    Fuel Use 11.93%    Signature 100    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 28,590,000 Litres    Range 862.7 billion km   (6240 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

[Paul M]

My tankers can self jump and are under 12 000 tonnes, they currently zip along at 2000 km/s with NP engines.   The entire stock of fuel on every planet in the NCC's space would barely fill two of those tankers...Earth has 10 ML, Faewald 15 ML, Forge 9 ML, Possidean 9 ML, Bifforst 13 ML, and Rossetta has 10 ML; total: 66 ML.  That is probably a slight underestimate.

I find it humorous that you consider a 50,000 tonne ship "tiny."  It is a differnt scale to what I consider "tiny" that is for sure.  The largest ship the NCC has is 45 000 tonnes.  They are currently building a military yard that can handle up to 12 000 tonne warships.  The ships you have cost more (in critical galicite) than 3 smaller ships that can carry more and don't require a jump gate network.  Their sole redeming feature is they are faster (by a factor of 2 or 3 depending on which version of my ships you compare to).  But if I have more ships on the route then the speed of delivery is the same.  Plus I'm not sure why it matters how fast something is delivered.  For military sitatuations speed is critical but for most other reasons if it takes 3 months or 6 months to get a factory from earth to the colony what changes?

There are additional expenses associated with those ships: ship yards have to be bigger, the larger the ship yard the more it costs to do things like switch classes and so forth.  The more population require to use it as well.  Each refueling sucks an pretty substantial amount of fuel out of the farm.  The Tribals and the Magazines draw down that sort of fuel...which makes them coming in to tank up "exciting" and one reason for a long time they were limited in what they did.

I've come out of a two decade long fuel crisis, and have dragged myself out of a galacite crisis and mostly out of my boronide crisis to face the fact that my main stay mineral production (the CMCs) will burn out in a few decades and I have that much time to set up a series of outsystem mines to feed the beast.  I look at things from the point of view how much fuel do I need to get from A to B, if it takes longer but saves fuel then "takes longer" wins.  If people find 500 km/s painfully slow...my first long range freighters did something like half that...what is that "mind boggling" slow? 

Largely I think the difference is mostly due to different mission paramenters.  My freighters and transports are intended to be first of all fuel efficient, and to be buildable with my existing yards.  Speed is whatever I get.  The tankers are designed to do rescue missions so speed is important as is self jump...tanker capacity is whatever survives the other requirements.  My refinery ships and terraformers have a higher need for speed to reduce transit times so they have more engines as speed is considered valuable as it improves their time on station.  The as yet unbuilt small priority freighter has again the goal of moving at "speed" -- it is still "painfully slow" at 900 km/s, but can self jump.

I'm not saying my ships are better, that is purely a subjective opinion anyway.  I'm saying my ships do the same job with a lower investment in resources overall but at the cost of time.  It is up to a player to decide, in my view at least, what is important to them: delivery speed, resource costs, whatever.

[MarcAFK]

Actually I never built those tankers as the shipyard refit cost was absurd.

[Paul M]

Yeah, I cringe at the retooling costs.  That is why I try to handle the job with smaller ships, as the retooling cost seems to scale both with the ship size and the number of slips.  It is a big disinsentive to have really large "civillian" designs.  I have 3 civillian yards 15 K, 35 K and 45 K capacity.  These sizes are decided based on my civillian jump engine size.   Possibly with the next step in jump engine efficiency I will look into a larger freighter hull (60K or so).

[Jorgen_CAB]

I could not agree more when I say that you keep ships as small as possible in response to their mission type.

As long as you can't dedicate yards to specific ship types and retooling is needed to fulfill your needed fleet quota then keep the ships small.

When it comes to speed versus fuel efficiency I also agree that this is highly situational. You can also calculate at which point a ship is most efficient in production cost versus speed and carrying capacity. If the ship is too slow the efficiency might prop in relation to the volume that can be carried in a certain time-frame. This can of course be important in the long run when ships are doing continuous runs of facilities to new colonies. At the same time fuel is important so increasing fuel efficiency and adding more engines is the solution if you have big enough yard-space to house those ships.

The same train of thought go into military ship design. Military ships usually focus more on powerful engines to trade less engine space for more mission tonnage in general. The problem now is that maintenance and supplies for super charged engines are very costly and fuel economy is atrocious. In my multi-national campaign ships usually need to be much more active and therefore fuel economy and ship size will matter much more.
As an example one nation is about to build a 2500 ton patrol ship that can burn 60.000 liters of fuel in 4 days at maximum speed and they produce about 3.8 million liters a year. Fuel consumption like this can be pretty destructive if you don't keep it under control. Once a couple of these ships are on constant patrol fuel will at some point become a huge concern.
The thought that goes into building a military ships are so complex that each ship must be judge by their own and their mission type, there are no optimal way to build a warship since it depend so heavily on a hugely complex set of factors. You always will have to trade some flaws for other strengths.

[83athom]

Can a wreck be towed? What I want to do is like have a salvager base where wrecks are towed too, however I don't know if wrecks can be towed and I couldn't find the answer anywhere (here or wiki).

Found out you cannot tow wrecks.

[joeclark77]

I tend to make my commercial engines very large (40HS usually) and low power (30% is typical) and the efficiency gains are dramatic.  I can put one of those on a survey ship and send it off for a ten year mission with one or two fuel tanks.  I also find that I can still have fast ships if I want them: I just add more engines.  So my main line freighters are slow but have incredible range with very low fuel consumption, and I have tankers, colliers, and "couriers" that can go almost as fast as the military simply by having more engines and less cargo.

Besides, the civilian ships are available if I want some industrial installations moved around quickly, they're usually happy to do it, and they don't use my fuel.