Do Leader bonuses for either Logistics or Operations improve cargo or troop load/unload times?
Not if the bonus belongs to the actual ship commander, AFAIK (STEVE: could you change/fix this, especially for troop transports? If you do fix it, then "logistics" could become the selection attribute for assigning commanders to TT/cargo/colony ships during auto-assign).
If you put the ship (actually the task group to which the ship belongs) into a Task Force, however (mouse over the buttons at the top of the system map (F3) screen to find the task force button, or look through the menus on "empires" pull-down on the main program bar), the logistics bonus of the task force speeds up the loading and unloading, as long as the task group is in the same system as the task force command group (which needs to either be on a planet or embarked on a ship with a flag bridge for it to give any bonus). Note that you should put your officer with highest logistics bonus into the "logistics officer" staff slot, since only a percentage (25%?) of the task force commander's bonus is applied.
I usually make a "Logistics Command" task force HQ'd on Earth and assign all my cargo/colony fleets to it - hadn't thought about it, but I should probably do the same for troop transports now. This avoids the requirement of creating a special ship with a flag bridge and forming my cargo ships into fixed task forces that sail together.
One caveat: Steve only recently put load times in for troop transports - it used to be instantaneous. So there's a possibility that he missed out on coding up the bonuses for transports. I doubt that this is the case, though, since they do pay attention to cargo handling system (CHS, for the glossary
), so I suspect that all ships that are loading/unloading use the same routine to calculate load times.
John