I have always operated on the assumption that traditional minerals and anything made from them is not modeled. I see no reason to not agree with nuclearslurpee here.

Truly there is no better justification for thread necromancy.

While it does start to drift a little from the original topic, perhaps a solution to the OP and future issues could be the introduction of storage facilities, one for minerals, one for fuel, one for missiles and one for everything else. They need not require any population nor upkeep to keep the micro work down. But it would mean you can't just pile up mountains of minerals all on one world etc, with the new spoilers coming too it would mean those offworld colonies used as storage depots need to be looked after both in the RP world and game mechanic one.

I can see where some folks might not agree with this being a good idea. So simply add a game option similar to the free maintenance option we currently have, either "stuff requires storage/stuff can sit anywhere".

I was halfway through replying to Scandinavian when I went to check something and saw that slurpee made my points more eloquently than I was attempting to.

But I will add this: the idea that stuff is piled out in the open just because there isn't an installation in the game that models storage implies that the populations of cc 0 colonies are just sleeping in fields or whatever naturally formed shelter they can find. After all, housing made of conventional materials isn't modelled either.

I think it is important to keep in mind that in Aurora, the cost of things is usually in terms of TNEs, which we can generally assume are not the entire actual building requirement for an entity. The cost of things in good old concrete, steel, etc. is not included and at the scale of the game we can assume these are generally a negligible economic cost compared to the rare TNEs. A manual mine for instance costs 120 corundium (240 shipping tons) yet takes 25,000 tons to ship as cargo, over 99% of that facility is presumably made out of traditional materials. Similar for ground units, a typical early-game medium tank requires just under 5 vendarite to construct but requires 62 tons of transport capacity, and you are not convincing me that a medium tank is 5 tons of tank and 57 tons of supplies.

In the same way I think we can abstract fuel, mineral, etc. storage as being cheaply-built warehouses, tanks, etc. and not the hardened high-tech TNE-enabled construction we use for spaceship or military hardware. As Garfunkel points out, physical storage area is decidedly not an issue, even a small 100 km diameter has some 30,000 km^2 of surface area to work with, if you assume fairly short 10m height storage facilities and that 1 ton = 14 m^3 as Steve has used unofficially elsewhere this comes out to some 22 trillion tons of storage on that small rock, which is far more than the starting facilities on Earth even in a 12b pop start.

I also want to reiterate that besides adding more logistics micro (and not the good kind IMO as there is not really much decision making involved in "this planet is full, we need to dump everything on the nearest moon"), this really would not add as much strategic depth as people are imagining because Aurora is (until v2.0 and the new spoiler race) dominated by jump point network topography and JP defense, and come v2.0 there will be more than enough strategic depth in rear-areas defense for those who want it without resorting to adding new micro-heavy mechanics.

Limiting storage makes no sense. Even a small asteroid can hold basically infinite amount of fuel or MSP or missiles. This comes up every time someone suggests putting engines on an asteroid to move them and we do the math and people get surprised how massive and big even small asteroids are. Aurora doesn't model the tiny rocks, after all.

This isn't really a problem because of the new spoilers coming in the next version.

The new spoiler race coming in v2.0 will go much further towards motivating the use of guard detachments than this proposal, simply because it will bypass the usual jump point network entirely.

I have completely changed the way I distribute forces because of this threat. The forces involved may be small, but they can wreak havoc in an unprotected system. Therefore I am guarding fuel harvesters, terraformers, smaller colonies, etc.. In my current campaign, I have mobile forces and maintenance facilities setup in fifteen different systems.

Problem is that if you want to limit planetary fuel storage, you are opening can of worms. If the fuel storage is limited, should mineral storage and maintenance storage also be limited? And what about missiles. Do you also need planetary magazines to store your missile production?

Where one sees a can of worm another sees opportunities

I think the issue most players have with these unlimited storages is the ability to dump billions of liters of fuel, millions of tons of minerals, hundreds of thousands of missiles and maintanance supply on any small rock.

So if one were to consider improving the situation then perhaps a good approach would be to start with only allowing bodies above X millions pop unlimited storage space.