Can't do Sir!

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

Hi,

If not mistaken, spaceports and shipyards must be built on site, no possibility to move them or build parts and then transport them?

Meaning you need factories or a bunch of engies?

can someone remind me the actual effect of a spaceport? Each level is as if each ship has an extra cargo handling component?

[MarcAFK]

Spaceports reduce load time, the actual formula is :Formula: Adjusted Load Time = Load Time / (Commerical Spaceport Level + 1)
So a single spaceport would halve load time, 2 would reduce by 2/3rds, 3 would reduce to a quarter, etc.

Shipyards when built are actually in orbit of the body that constructed them, all shipyards in a single location will show up on active sensors as a single contact with twice the size of it's total capacity. But you can get a ship with a tractor to target shipyards separately in order to tow them to another body.
From the wiki: "
If you have a vessel equipped with a Ship to Ship Tractor, commonly referred to as a Tug, you can tow shipyards. The easiest way to handle this is to use the Tractor Specified Shipyard order for the task group containing the tug. Once you connect to a shipyard it is removed from its current pop and is detected (and can be attacked) separately. It also shows up in the Fleet window on the list of ships. Connecting a tractor will stop any tasks or shipyard improvements. For the purposes of movement (and detection) a shipyard is twice the size of its capacity. So a shipyard with two 6,000 ton capacity slipways will be 24,000 tons. If you break the tractor link while in orbit of a pop, the shipyard will then be added to the shipyard list for that population. "

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

nice!!

unrelated but you might answer, in which case orbital habitats make more sense (cost wise) than automated mines? I would only use them for gas giants probably.

[Paul M]

Orbital habitates allow you to run things other than mines on a world.  They make sense when you need to colonize a body that has a colonization cost so high that the amount of people left over to run things is too low to actually run the number of them that you want.

Examples from my AAR:  orbital habitates would make sense at Forge to allow me to put maintenance facilities there; or orbital habitates would make sense of Venus to allow me to put a terraformer or regular mines on the planet.  But the NCC has not the technology to produce orbital habitates so it is not possible at this time.

You would need to do a case by case comparison to determine if automatic mines or regular mines supported by orbital habitates made sense.  I doubt there is a universe rule.

[Stardust]

Is it possible to remove a shipyard?  I had tasked a military shipyard to continuously expand and subsequently forgot that I had done so.  I learned of the oversight when I found that the class 0 planet it was on, although quite well populated, was overwhelmed with maintaining the shipyard that now had a capacity close to 1,000,000 tons.

I just employed an obsolete tug to hall it somewhere.  So there they have sat for many years until I read this post and remembered of their ordeal.

Any suggestions?

[Mel Vixen]

Well how much pop does it need? At million tons you could put out some great Baseships. Hauling it to one of your other collonies with low employment rates (say the moon) might be a nice idea. You produce the engines and stuff on your homeworld and ship them then out to the new location for assembly.

[MehMuffin]

If you have any worlds large enough to accommodate it, send it there and get rid of stuff on that world until enough of the population is free to staff it. You can always just send in parts from other worlds to speed up construction times as well.

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

By the way, how you hasten the size increase of SY, seems to take forever. Can I help with my industries?

[metalax]

The fastest way to increase shipyard size is to set it to "continual capacity expansion". As the size and hence the production speed increases each construction cycle it will build faster than expanding the shipyard in discrete chunks that are not added until the full upgrade is complete. Other than ensuring that there are sufficient workers to staff the shipyard to avoid penalties, there is no way of speeding construction further.

[Mel Vixen]

There is also the Shipyard projects in the Construction/Production research.

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

I came to this conclusion also, continual expansion is best, because it dynamically increases SY speed and can be cancelled when needed without adverse effect.

[Hawkeye]

Unless you forget to cancel the expansion and end up with a 200,000 ton shipyard    -    and yes, it happened to me onec 

[Wolfius]

Continual expansion also results in shipyard capacity being a messy string of random numbers which might annoy some folks' OCD.  :p

The odd time I've played with it I had to use SM mode to trim it to a nice round number.

[Erik L]

Unless you forget to cancel the expansion and end up with a 251,849.42 ton shipyard    -    and yes, it happened to me onec 

Fixed that for you

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

Continual expansion also results in shipyard capacity being a messy string of random numbers which might annoy some folks' OCD.  :p

The odd time I've played with it I had to use SM mode to trim it to a nice round number.

That's not just OCD (although I feel compelled as you to round them with SM before launching a new bird), it is more difficult to read rapidly all SY capacities.
So the OCD people said...