I'm thinking about having my homeworld spend a couple of years building a roughly two million ton terraforming mobile station. As I've got it currently designed, it could terraform 10% of an atmosphere per year, which looks pretty attractive to me. However the ship will be awfully slow, at ~1000K KM, so having to bring it back for refueling, shore leave and what not would be prohibitive. Would the ship use fuel while parked in orbit doing the terraform thing? Does the "deployment time" on a civilian ship matter one iota? I am considering putting an orbital habitat and recreational module on the thing. (I assume it will give 'shore leave' to its own crew?) Given the size of what I am building, it does not add much to the cost at all, and only slows it down a tiny bit. Is this utterly redundant? Would I gain anything by doing this other than RP flavor?
I realize in theory I could probably use tugs to move multiple, smaller, shipyard produced platforms, but I am already finding the micromanagement a tad overwhelming without adding more of that. Having a single big ship that I move once, wait till it's done, then move on to the next, seems the least tedious way to handle it.
Actually it just dawns on me now that I have several quarter million ton fuel harvesters working Jupiter, and they'll be dumping fuel on Mars, my first destination for the terraformer. At least at first, I guess fuel won't be a problem.