sorium and how to transfer it

[plasticpanzers (OP)]

I have sorium harvesters on a ship at saturn and i also have cargo ships with cargo bays and tankers with large tanker
bays but can't seem to figure out how to move the sorium/fuel from the harvester to either vessel as i cannot figure out
the process on which ship it should be or how to do it.   help appreciated.  gonna need this later on.

[MarcAFK]

Harvesters convert the sorium straight into fuel which fills it's own fuel tanks.
There's a few ways to transfer fuel, the most immediate way is to open up the individual ship window and select either ship you want to transfer from/to. Then its similar to ordnance transfer, click on the miscellaneous tab, you'll see "Manual fuel transfer (ships)" and "manual fuel transfer (population)". Ship's has a menu where you can select any ship at the same location, enter a number under "transfer amount" and hit "transfer to", or "transfer from". Population is the same but without a selection, since you can only orbit one planet at a time :p.
Now the other method of transferring is with task group orders, a ship designated as a tanker under the class design window has additional order options. Any ship can "refuel from colony" at any colony or "refuel from target vessel" at a tanker, and a tanker has additional order options for "unload 90% fuel to colony", "load unload fuel to set level" and "refuel target fleet".
So your fuel harvesters should always be designated as tankers so that other ships can easily refuel from them.

[doulos05]

Another useful tool in that is the "Equalize Fuel" button in the task force window. Have the tanker join your team  force, Equalize fuel, and then split the tanker back out.

[alex_brunius]

Normally I either manually dump 90% fuel from the sorium harvester TG at nearest moon ( and have designed them with engines ), and then pick it up from there with tankers/ships.

Or I have a tanker that shuttles back forth between the Sorium TG and the population.

[Garfunkel]

The most cost-effective way is to make a fuel harvesting base and use a tug to haul it in place. Then use a small tanker to shuttle between your FHB-TG and your colony in the same system, using the "refuel at" and "dump 90% fuel" commands. You want a somewhat slow and a small tanker to do it so that the FHBs have time to harvest more fuel before the tanker comes back. If you make a fast and/or large tanker, it'll get all the fuel at one go and probably can't top its tanks fully on the next trip.

Another thing to think about is how large the tanks on your FHBs should be. One rule of thumb is that they should be equal to the annual production capacity of the sorium harvester - but will your FHBs really remain unvisited for 12 months? Doubtful. Perhaps half of that annual production capacity is sufficient in fuel tank size for them.

You usually don't want to put engines on them because they spend 99% of their time sitting in one location.