Three sorium / fuel (refining) related questions

[scratch (OP)]

The first question is around my fuel refinaries - I take a ship design with loads of fuel capacity and a bunch of sorium harvesters.   I set it as a "tanker" so as to get the "unload 90% option.   It's default order is to move to a gas giant with sorium and harvest until full, then to return to a colony and unload 90% of the fuel.   Which almost works.   What seems to happen is that a newly created ship will unload to 10%, move to a sorium gas giant, mine until full, and then refuse to move to a colony and unload.   I think I am doing something wrong but I can't for the life of me figure it out.

The second question regards civilian sorium harvesting operations.   Do they sell the fuel to me (ie does my stockpile increase)?

The last question is about sorium mining (as opposed to fuel refining).   Because it's used for jump drives etc, I don't want all of my actual sorium reserves refined into fuel.   So I set a reserve on the level.   And it's ignored.   Is there a way to not refine sorium (other than shutting down refineries)?

Thanks,

Scrathc

[telegraph]

1. never used harvesters so do not know.
2. you can refuel from them as you would from your own tankers. At the moment you refuel they charge you for the amount of fuel you have taken. Which is borked as they tend to have an abysmal fuel capacity.
3. you can load your reserves in some cargo hold (for example on PDC, a military reserve stockpile of sorts). or you can move the reserve amount to another colony. Or you could move your refineries to another colony and ship in only the intended amount of sorium to refine.

[SteelChicken]

1) those orders never worked well for me so I stopped using them.  I generally just build them with big capacities so I dont have to move them a lot.
2) no, you refuel at them (like any other fleet) and they deduct the wealth from your account - in theory as I have never done it
3) no, you need to shutdown the refineries.  I get my fuel from harvesters as much as possible.  When I start a new game harvesters are often the first thing I start building and I shut down the refineries to free up the population for other tasks.  You could also lower the refinery count by moving some offworld.

[Paul M]

The first question is around my fuel refinaries - I take a ship design with loads of fuel capacity and a bunch of sorium harvesters.   I set it as a "tanker" so as to get the "unload 90% option.   It's default order is to move to a gas giant with sorium and harvest until full, then to return to a colony and unload 90% of the fuel.   Which almost works.   What seems to happen is that a newly created ship will unload to 10%, move to a sorium gas giant, mine until full, and then refuse to move to a colony and unload.   I think I am doing something wrong but I can't for the life of me figure it out.

The newly created ship only loads 10% of its fuel capacity since it is listed as a tanker.  I don't use the default orders.  I just wait for it to have harvested for a year, then manually give it the following orders: "Move to colony", "equalize fuel percentage at colony" and "unload 90% of fuel at colony."  As a typical harvester group has 3 ships this leaves them all with the same fuel.  This works fine frankly as it is something that I have to do only 12 times per game year.  I don't know why the default orders don't work exactly the way they should.  Personally outside a few of them I find most of them aren't worth using.

After it unloads I leave it for shore leave for a few weeks and then give it a order to return to the gas giant.  I get warning most of the time by Fuel Harvester at 90% messages so it isn't something you have to invest a lot of care and attention to.

The second question regards civilian sorium harvesting operations.   Do they sell the fuel to me (ie does my stockpile increase)?

You send a tanker (or other ship) to the civillian ship and give it the "refuel from target fleet" order.  It will then take fuel from the civillian harvester and you will be charged for it.  Every few months I do this to skim off the civillian production.  Their harvesters are a god send as the price you pay for the fuel is chicken scratch.

The last question is about sorium mining (as opposed to fuel refining).   Because it's used for jump drives etc, I don't want all of my actual sorium reserves refined into fuel.   So I set a reserve on the level.   And it's ignored.   Is there a way to not refine sorium (other than shutting down refineries)?

No there isn't.  If you want to not refine your sorium you will need to turn off your refineries.  But really you should have loads of sorium in your stockpile and the amount you need for ship construction and maintenance is fairly minimal so I don't see where this is a problem.  The reserve level isn't ignored, but it is only valid for cargo loading operations, when you give a load all minerals command the ship will only take those minerals above the set level.  It doesn't prevent you using the minerals. 

[scratch (OP)]

Thanks for the commentary all.   I was hoping to minimise micro-management with tankers / gas giant fuel harvesting.   No problem, I guess I will just pay more attention for now .   

Interesting tip re sending a ship to refuel from a civ ship, I’ll have to give that a go.   It’s annoying because, in my current game, that civ fuel harvester was the first civ ship from the first civ shipping line.   No wonder they haven’t launched any regular freighters yet!

As for sorium, I’ve had one game where the largest non-gas giant stocks in Sol were on Earth.   It was promptly refined into fuel and I was left without any for jump drives / gates…. .

[joeclark77]

The newly created ship only loads 10% of its fuel capacity since it is listed as a tanker.  I don't use the default orders.  I just wait for it to have harvested for a year, then manually give it the following orders: "Move to colony", "equalize fuel percentage at colony" and "unload 90% of fuel at colony."  As a typical harvester group has 3 ships this leaves them all with the same fuel.  This works fine frankly as it is something that I have to do only 12 times per game year. 

12 times per game year would be way too much for me!  I tend to give the tankers at least two years worth of fuel storage.  I give them the default order "move to gas giant with sorium" but issue the "unload fuel" order manually.  Ideally I like to unload to a moon orbiting the gas giant.  That minimizes downtime and allows me to put only a few wimpy engines on a massive fuel platform.  You can go from Jupiter to Io and back, no problem, even with only 100km/s speed.

In other games what I do is make totally immobile platforms, tow them to the gas giant, and set up a smallish tanker to continually refuel from the platforms and dump fuel at Earth.  If you have too few platforms to fill the tanker (and you keep getting "TK cannot be refueled" messages), either build more platforms or reduce the velocity of the tanker, so that you are unloading at almost exactly the rate fuel is being produced.  That way you should have little to no need to micromanage it.  (Until aliens show up and disintegrate your tanker or platforms...)

[Jorgen_CAB]

12 times per game year would be way too much for me!  I tend to give the tankers at least two years worth of fuel storage.  I give them the default order "move to gas giant with sorium" but issue the "unload fuel" order manually.  Ideally I like to unload to a moon orbiting the gas giant.  That minimizes downtime and allows me to put only a few wimpy engines on a massive fuel platform.  You can go from Jupiter to Io and back, no problem, even with only 100km/s speed.

In other games what I do is make totally immobile platforms, tow them to the gas giant, and set up a smallish tanker to continually refuel from the platforms and dump fuel at Earth.  If you have too few platforms to fill the tanker (and you keep getting "TK cannot be refueled" messages), either build more platforms or reduce the velocity of the tanker, so that you are unloading at almost exactly the rate fuel is being produced.  That way you should have little to no need to micromanage it.  (Until aliens show up and disintegrate your tanker or platforms...)

I do much the same as you. I simply build platforms that are either stationary or with minimal engines. I then have tankers on repeat order to pick up the fuel they produce. For RP reasons I give the stations about 24 month of deployment and give my tanker that transport the fuel some extra crew space (cryo space) to carry replacement crew to the stations. I then just imagine the crew being replaced at regular intervals so I don't have to bother with resting the crew.

This means I never have to do much except check so the harvesters is not over producing or my tanker ship has a too great a speed.

[Paul M]

My harvesters are my fastest civillian ships.  They are deployed well outside of Sol and are the backbone of my exploration and colonization efforts.  What you are talking about is all wonderful for Sol itself but with 9 operational civillian harvesters producing about 1.9 m liters per year (or better put I skim off about that much in a year) it is a waste of my time to bother with Jupiter.  I only use Jupiter to build up my harvesters from 10% to 30% to cover the journey to Forge.

The ships could stay on station for 2 years (they have 24 months endurance) but frankly my feeling is the crew needs a break.

Having fuel where you need it (at your out system colonies) is much better than having lots of fuel at Sol.  Once I got my harvesters in place suddenly the fuel worries started getting smaller and smaller.

[joeclark77]

My harvesters are my fastest civillian ships.  They are deployed well outside of Sol and are the backbone of my exploration and colonization efforts.  What you are talking about is all wonderful for Sol itself but with 9 operational civillian harvesters producing about 1.9 m liters per year (or better put I skim off about that much in a year) it is a waste of my time to bother with Jupiter.  I only use Jupiter to build up my harvesters from 10% to 30% to cover the journey to Forge.

The ships could stay on station for 2 years (they have 24 months endurance) but frankly my feeling is the crew needs a break.

Having fuel where you need it (at your out system colonies) is much better than having lots of fuel at Sol.  Once I got my harvesters in place suddenly the fuel worries started getting smaller and smaller.

I agree with everything you say here, but for my part I would use a fleet of fast tankers going to and from the platforms, rather than make the platforms themselves move around.  That mirrors real life for me.  Oil platforms in the gulf of mexico are stationary, but there's lots of traffic (ships and helicopters) going to and from them, picking up the oil and swapping out crews.

[Jorgen_CAB]

My harvesters are my fastest civillian ships.  They are deployed well outside of Sol and are the backbone of my exploration and colonization efforts.  What you are talking about is all wonderful for Sol itself but with 9 operational civillian harvesters producing about 1.9 m liters per year (or better put I skim off about that much in a year) it is a waste of my time to bother with Jupiter.  I only use Jupiter to build up my harvesters from 10% to 30% to cover the journey to Forge.

The ships could stay on station for 2 years (they have 24 months endurance) but frankly my feeling is the crew needs a break.

Having fuel where you need it (at your out system colonies) is much better than having lots of fuel at Sol.  Once I got my harvesters in place suddenly the fuel worries started getting smaller and smaller.

Yes, this is an interesting tactic where you keep the fleet with a close source of fuel.

One of my favorite tactics is to have a fleet fuel/supply vessel with a tractor beam. I can then attach a fuel harvesting base (or something else), which is a similar tactic.

Another simple solution that is pretty cheap is to build up supply depots. I usually do that by dumping a tracking station and a garrison brigade in a small outpost PDC on a moon/planet or asteroid. I can then use it to store anything from fuel, missiles or even ore. Sometimes I could even station a recreation ship/station there and/or some maintenance stations.

There are many good options available to you.

[Paul M]

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.