Posted by: Paul M
« on: December 03, 2013, 08:02:24 AM »I have to get the ships to the gas giant in a different system and I perfer that happens sooner than later. A tug would work if it was jump capable or else you have gates set up but without those technologies you have to use jump tenders (which for me is the lead ship of the 3).
My tankers are fast (and the civillian version is even solo-jump capable), but you burn fuel moving it around which is an issue as well. Jupiter is much like the Gulf of mexico...for that it would make a lot of sense to tow out a platform and forget about it. For an extra-sol system though that requires a tanker that sits around doing nothing most of the time, I don't see this as more cost effective than making the refinery ships mobile...or at least it strikes me as more costs, and more work compared to 1 time per year per FHG issuing 3 orders and then when I get the message they are done with shore leave giving them 1 order.
At the end of the day having many "gas stations" scattered about reduces the strain on your main homeworlds fuel refineries. It also means that it is rare a ship arrives home with empty tanks, as that is what hits your home planets fuel farm exceptionally hard. It is not that the refinery platform system doesn't make sense, depending on the situation it may make considerable sense; it is just that my view is having a flexible easily adjusted system allows me to adapt as necessary to changing circumstances. And for that having relatively fast refinery ships (530 km/s) allows me to move them about on a 2-6 months time scale with minimal fuss.
I keep looking for a place to build forward outposts (military relevant ones) but so far I've yet to find a system that can support the maintenance facilities needed for long term deployment. Plus the system needs to be relatively central...Forge would be ideal except I can't get people there to run the facilities nor is that planets atmosphere going to get terraformed on anything but a century time scale. Military ships burn too much fuel to not have a fairly serious logistics network behind their deployment. Or possibly I spent too much time playing War in the Pacific but the whole island chain conept comes fairly naturally out of an analysis of the situation in Aurora. But so far I've not found a good base to make up "Pearl Harbor/Singapore/Hong Kong" or for that matter "Guam/Rabul" or even "Wake Island."
There are lots of different ways to make use of the harvester module. Basically you have to figure out which one supports your situation best.
My tankers are fast (and the civillian version is even solo-jump capable), but you burn fuel moving it around which is an issue as well. Jupiter is much like the Gulf of mexico...for that it would make a lot of sense to tow out a platform and forget about it. For an extra-sol system though that requires a tanker that sits around doing nothing most of the time, I don't see this as more cost effective than making the refinery ships mobile...or at least it strikes me as more costs, and more work compared to 1 time per year per FHG issuing 3 orders and then when I get the message they are done with shore leave giving them 1 order.
At the end of the day having many "gas stations" scattered about reduces the strain on your main homeworlds fuel refineries. It also means that it is rare a ship arrives home with empty tanks, as that is what hits your home planets fuel farm exceptionally hard. It is not that the refinery platform system doesn't make sense, depending on the situation it may make considerable sense; it is just that my view is having a flexible easily adjusted system allows me to adapt as necessary to changing circumstances. And for that having relatively fast refinery ships (530 km/s) allows me to move them about on a 2-6 months time scale with minimal fuss.
I keep looking for a place to build forward outposts (military relevant ones) but so far I've yet to find a system that can support the maintenance facilities needed for long term deployment. Plus the system needs to be relatively central...Forge would be ideal except I can't get people there to run the facilities nor is that planets atmosphere going to get terraformed on anything but a century time scale. Military ships burn too much fuel to not have a fairly serious logistics network behind their deployment. Or possibly I spent too much time playing War in the Pacific but the whole island chain conept comes fairly naturally out of an analysis of the situation in Aurora. But so far I've not found a good base to make up "Pearl Harbor/Singapore/Hong Kong" or for that matter "Guam/Rabul" or even "Wake Island."
There are lots of different ways to make use of the harvester module. Basically you have to figure out which one supports your situation best.