Civilian Fuel Harvesters?

[linkxsc (OP)]

Hi, I'm pretty sure I should know the answer to this by now, but I've got a handful of civilian fuel harvesters sitting at Jupiter, eating up the sorium there, which I don't mind, but my trade empire is more than large enough to offset the cost of buying all the fuel they make.
Now I know that fleets out on taskforce training can and do regularly visit jupiter and fuel off of the harvesters there. I jsut cant seem to properly set up though, a ship that will travel between Io (small colony springing up, with the excess infrastructure of luna and mars getting terraformed) and the harvesters, taking all the fuel they have to offer, and dumping it all on Io.

Tried some stuff with conditionals, that doesnt seem to be helping. (the tanker keeps trying to refuel itself, rather than going and getting fuel)

[83athom]

Have you done the set up of conditionals and defaults; D:) Move to gas giant with sorium, (C1) Fuel tanks full (O1) unload 90% at nearest colony. However it seems you are having trouble with 2, the only way to circumvent this is to not have 2 and manually order to unload fuel at a colony when the tankers tanks are full (there will be a notification and interruption).

[linkxsc (OP)]

Well I've got it set.
Primary order is to move to gas giant with sorium
Conditionals are if fuel tanks are full, unload fuel at colony.

If I SM fuel into the ship, it'll fly to Io, drop its fuel, and then head back to jupiter, where it sits, and its fuel holds never fill. So I'm confused.

If I add "if fuel less than 10%, refuel at nearest tanker" each 5 day increment, it picks a harvester to drain, and trips the conditional orders, grinding gameplay to a halt, because the tanker is quite large in comparison to the harvesters. I don't mind it sitting there filling up for a year or so. But I don't like being locked into having to restart the game every minute due to the conditional order interfering with autoturns.

Edit, oh yeah, also with this setup, it'll never fully fill. it stops after 10% filled, and never goes up past that point

[MarcAFK]

What I do for civilian harvesters is to set a tanker with cyclical orders to pick up fuel from the harvesters using "refuel from target fleet" then dump it off on earth. Generally I calculate how much fuel the civys can produce in the time it takes my tankers to make a round trip, then assign that many tankers to the job.

[83athom]

My harvesters work. Maybe its just your harvester design, so we might be able to help if you post it (do you have it set as a tanker?). I usually use FHBs with fuel dump stations and tankers nearby, this way seems to work well, but sometimes I will do the cloudscoop approach.

[linkxsc (OP)]

The tanker. Nothing special, just a fuel tank, with an engine attached

Code: [Select]

Hyuga class Tanker    7,800 tons     35 Crew     340.8 BP      TCS 156  TH 300  EM 0
1923 km/s     Armour 1-35     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 27    Max Repair 75 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 3   

300 EP Commercial Ion Drive (1)    Power 300    Fuel Use 5.3%    Signature 300    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 5,000,000 Litres    Range 2177.0 billion km   (13102 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

I have it flagged as a tanker, and am doing the cycling orders like MarcAFK mentioned. However I might remind you, I'm not trying to refuel from govt owned fuel harvesters, these are shipping lined ones. I built a state owned harvester, which when setting up conditionals, the Hyuga will visit, suck fuel off of, and dump it. But it refuses to visit the civilian ones unless I do cycled orders.

[Paul M]

For the civillian fuel harvesters I just check every few game months what their level of fuel is...when it sufficient to justify a trip I manually order my tanker(s) to visit them.   It take 5 min to click through the orders at most, which strickes me as less time then you spend farting around with conditionals in this case.  Maybe I'm a fuddy duddy but outside of geoscans of asteroids I can't think of any conditional order that I've ever used that did what I really wanted, so I have stopped using them.

[Prince of Space]

Well, there is a real appeal to automating the more mundane tasks, like fuel harvesting. Setting up the system to handle the tasks automatically is rewarding, moreso than doing it by hand. So I'm sympathetic to linkxsc's goal here.

It sounds like the real problem is with the conditional and default orders systems:

"IF fuel less than X% THEN refuel from nearest tanker" is unsatisfactory because it constantly spams auto-turn interrupts. Ideally for this purpose there would also be a 90% value for the conditional statement, but the options in game only go up to 50%.

"DEFAULT move to nearest gas giant with sorium" is unsatisfactory because it doesn't trigger a refueli action.

Out of curiosity, try this:

Default 1: move to gas giant with sorium
Default 2: refuel in current system
Condition A: if fuel tanks full, then unload 90% fuel at colony within 4 jumps

Alternatively, try:

Default 2: refuel in curent system
Condition A: if fuel tanks full, then unload fuel at colony and move to sorium gas giant

I have no civilian harvesters right now so I can't try it out myself, but let's see if the "refuel in current system" order will keep targetting the civvy harvesters rather than diverting the Hyuga back to the stockpile on Io.

[MarcAFK]

That sounds like a good solution.