Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Mechanics => Topic started by: Borealis4x on May 25, 2020, 01:14:33 PM
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Is it possible to get civilians to pickup and ship minerals for you? If not, what are some tricks to not make me pull my hair out trying to make sure all my colonies have enough minerals to build their own stuff but that my homeworld is also getting enough to fuel my fleet-building?
So far all I've come up with is to make sure that one colony receive minerals from all the mines in the system via mass drivers so there is only one place for freighters to pickup. But I don't want to have to organize designated mineral convoys for every system! That'll get old fast.
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Is it possible to get civilians to pickup and ship minerals for you? If not, what are some tricks to not make me pull my hair out trying to make sure all my colonies have enough minerals to build their own stuff but that my homeworld is also getting enough to fuel my fleet-building?
So far all I've come up with is to make sure that one colony receive minerals from all the mines in the system via mass drivers so there is only one place for freighters to pickup. But I don't want to have to organize designated mineral convoys for every system! That'll get old fast.
The current method is to try to make each system self sufficient so you don't need to transfer minerals between systems by ship. To distribute minerals use a chain of mass drivers firing in a circle and set each world's reserve levels to what it needs. I don't like it either, but logistical support commands are probably a few releases away at the soonest. Aurora is a large project and there is still a lot that needs to be done.
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In my current game I have a system that is working reasonably well.
To begin with a system is either a mining or colony type, this is determined simply on the planets, if they are low enough cost to make colonising a worthwhile investment or not. Either way any new planet (unless specifically chosen for a population) starts life as an auto mining base. One planet in the system is chosen as the main holding depot and mass drivers are used to centralise all minerals here, from there mineral transports have to be used to get things back to production colonies. At some point I will place infrastructure on the colony and it will start to gain population and so the auto mines can be swapped out for standard mines, allowing the auto mines to be shipped onot the next mining target.
The method above works for just getting minerals out of the ground and leaves me with only having to manage a single fleet of mineral transports out of the system. To develop things further into production colonies though I make use of the reserve minerals function, as soon as a colony has construction factories I set a minimum limit on all minerals there. This way the colony always has enough to produce what is required, and means I can forget about having to manually check things, I simply raise this value at given points in the development. This same practice applies to all other colonies in the system as they "come online", and it gives me a continuous cycle with little micro managment.
There is always the issue of some colonies simply not having access to some mineral types, making production there impossible. to get around this you have to plan out a loop in your mass driver network that allows packets to cover every colony you want producing. Here is how I have it set up in Sol.
Callisto AM - sends packets to Russia on Earth
An out of system mineral transport drops off all mineral at Russia on Earth
Russia - sends packets to Mars
Mars - sends packets to Luna
Luna - sends packets to Venus
CMC in Sol send packets to Venus
Venus - sends packets to my capital on Earth
To start with this makes Sol a hazard for shipping lanes due to packets flying in what looks like all directions, however once things were established it meant I never had any issues with mineral supplies on any planet. In addition to this the reserve levels on these colonies allow me to blindly send a large frieghter group if I ever need a sudden influx for a large project, instead of having to specify the exact amount to load. You do need to scale up your mass driver network to keep up with your mining production for this method or it can take years before you see any results.
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In my current game I have a system that is working reasonably well.
To begin with a system is either a mining or colony type, this is determined simply on the planets, if they are low enough cost to make colonising a worthwhile investment or not. Either way any new planet (unless specifically chosen for a population) starts life as an auto mining base. One planet in the system is chosen as the main holding depot and mass drivers are used to centralise all minerals here, from there mineral transports have to be used to get things back to production colonies. At some point I will place infrastructure on the colony and it will start to gain population and so the auto mines can be swapped out for standard mines, allowing the auto mines to be shipped onot the next mining target.
The method above works for just getting minerals out of the ground and leaves me with only having to manage a single fleet of mineral transports out of the system. To develop things further into production colonies though I make use of the reserve minerals function, as soon as a colony has construction factories I set a minimum limit on all minerals there. This way the colony always has enough to produce what is required, and means I can forget about having to manually check things, I simply raise this value at given points in the development. This same practice applies to all other colonies in the system as they "come online", and it gives me a continuous cycle with little micro managment.
There is always the issue of some colonies simply not having access to some mineral types, making production there impossible. to get around this you have to plan out a loop in your mass driver network that allows packets to cover every colony you want producing. Here is how I have it set up in Sol.
Callisto AM - sends packets to Russia on Earth
An out of system mineral transport drops off all mineral at Russia on Earth
Russia - sends packets to Mars
Mars - sends packets to Luna
Luna - sends packets to Venus
CMC in Sol send packets to Venus
Venus - sends packets to my capital on Earth
To start with this makes Sol a hazard for shipping lanes due to packets flying in what looks like all directions, however once things were established it meant I never had any issues with mineral supplies on any planet. In addition to this the reserve levels on these colonies allow me to blindly send a large frieghter group if I ever need a sudden influx for a large project, instead of having to specify the exact amount to load. You do need to scale up your mass driver network to keep up with your mining production for this method or it can take years before you see any results.
For Sol I just build everything on Earth and then ship it out to other planets, usually Mars, with small, quick short-range freighters. I don't see a reason to develop more than 1 colony on a system beyond mines and infrastructure.
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It comes down to population, if you only ever work of small ships and do not require large amounts of ground forces, then you won't require that many workers. In the example I gave I have Mars doing all my troop training, Luna houses my financial sector, Russia produces all the mines and ordinance, while Earth capital takes care of research and ship building. Venus is simply me being stubborn and deciding I am going to colony cost zero it.
I never build more than the starting things for a new colony, my aim is for them to be self sufficient. So I might ship out 100 factories from Earth to say a new mining world. After that the new world will construct it's own mines allowing my factories back on Earth to concerntrate on other more important things.
C# has dramatically changed how you have to view things compared to vb6, it simply doesn't work anymore having one superworld that consumes everything you ship back from the rim. To start with you can never grow population fast enough to keep up with manufacturing capacity, and with now so many dangers to civillians as collateral damage it is suicide to keep all the eggs in that one basket.
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Are people actually making each system self-sufficient? I would be surprised if that was the case. The most logical way to me is to use mass drivers to get all minerals into one central location of that system and then Cargo ship to get it off there wherever it is needed (implies a different system). I have a colony that is actually supposed to be a copy of what Earth is in about 1/5th of the systems I have, probably even less (not to mention it takes a lot of time and effort to get there).
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You obviously can for the most part automate most mineral operations to the degree you rarely have to interact with it all that much.
In terms if mining colonies I tend to rather use the population for factory production to produce Auto Mines rather than producing regular mines and have the population work them. This work pretty well and will eventually produce allot more minerals even if Auto Mines require more minerals and time to produce. Factories can also be used to build other things as well if you really have to so are way more flexible in the long run, but that is a completely different discussion.
As others have said... the easiest way is to use mass-drivers to send all minerals to one place in every system and from that place you then pick up and distribute minerals as you need them distributed all over your civilisation. The more you have production centres spread out all over your empire the less you are relying on shipping stuff around for no good reason.
You can set up your mineral haulers in such a way that they balance the need for different minerals for minimal usage of fuel.
These are things that simply is part of the game... I find that managing the logistical side of the game quite rewarding. I also find thriving self sufficient colonies as something quite realistic and fun to deal with. Usually I have the governors skills and traits govern how colonies grow over time, but that is more about role-play than anything else.
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Sounds like I should make a new light freighter that is cheap and fast just to ferry minerals from each system. Regular freighters are too big, slow and expensive, I need to to place mines and infra.
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I use small cargo ships (smaller than 10k tons) on cycle orders.
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I use small cargo ships (smaller than 10k tons) on cycle orders.
What size cargo and engines? What range? I got mine down to being pretty small, but 10k for a freighter that can go anywhere is extreme.
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I use small cargo ships (smaller than 10k tons) on cycle orders.
What size cargo and engines? What range? I got mine down to being pretty small, but 10k for a freighter that can go anywhere is extreme.
Reduce the speed using Minimum Engine Power and the range goes up by quite a bit.
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I use small cargo ships (smaller than 10k tons) on cycle orders.
What size cargo and engines? What range? I got mine down to being pretty small, but 10k for a freighter that can go anywhere is extreme.
Reduce the speed using Minimum Engine Power and the range goes up by quite a bit.
Well yes, this is obvious. I was curious about his actual design.
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My mineral haulers have a 5000t cargo module and whatever engine makes it go a decent speed using the best fuel efficient engine I can find. I rather build two ships going slower than one going faster to save fuel costs. A single engine is usually good enough on this ship, depending on how big it is of coarse, so one or two engines.
But that is the same for all Cargo ships more or less. There can be some exceptions when speed is of the essence so having some regular fast cargo ships can be useful but most of them should be slow and fuel efficient to save on the general fuel usage. That means I can have my military ship guzzling more fuel instead. ;)
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A trick I use is the Load Minerals When X Available command.
Pick a mineral that won't run out any time soon, and use Load Minerals When X Available followed by Load All Minerals, setting X to be an amount which gives a reasonably full hold when the load minerals command is issued.
I usually set this up with the freighter in the source system, and issue the orders with the Load minerals When X Available command last. I can then make it into a template, which can easily have its last command replaced if I want to change the size of the freighter.
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Honestly, with the tools we have, it doesn't seem like all that much effort to set up inter-system mineral hauling orders.
A cheap early game freighter with 7 engines and one cargo hold travels 1000 km/s with 35bkm range, easy. Nuclear Pulse, 30% power, size 60, 150kL fuel. That's roughly optimal throughput per cost at that tech level.
This guy can make a round trip per year at a distance of 15bkm.
So just one freighter is needed to move 12.5kt per year between systems at that range.
That's a lot of mining output handled just by giving one ship cycling orders.
And like you said, mass drivers easily centralize the mineral output in each system.
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Are people actually making each system self-sufficient? I would be surprised if that was the case. The most logical way to me is to use mass drivers to get all minerals into one central location of that system and then Cargo ship to get it off there wherever it is needed (implies a different system). I have a colony that is actually supposed to be a copy of what Earth is in about 1/5th of the systems I have, probably even less (not to mention it takes a lot of time and effort to get there).
If the system has sufficient duranium, neutronium and Corundium, then I like to make the system build itself up. If any of these 3 are missing then mines and/or factories need shipping in, which makes the system of less value
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I use small cargo ships (smaller than 10k tons) on cycle orders.
What size cargo and engines? What range? I got mine down to being pretty small, but 10k for a freighter that can go anywhere is extreme.
This is my very first cargo ship in my current campaign, still using it 50 years latter.
Acheron class Cargo Ship 9 966 tons 70 Crew 290.3 BP TCS 199 TH 160 EM 0
802 km/s Armour 1-41 Shields 0-0 HTK 22 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 18 Max Repair 100 MSP
Cargo 3 000 Cryogenic Berths 10 000 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 4
Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
Commercial Improved Nuclear Thermal Engine EP80.00 (2) Power 160 Fuel Use 10.06% Signature 80 Explosion 5%
Fuel Capacity 250 000 Litres Range 44.8 billion km (647 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
It is more than enough to drop off colonists on a planet so the civs can pick up the work from there, and also enough to move colonists at a decent rate between planets and move minerals around. I will be making an updated version with a faster engine soon seeing as I am 4 tech levels past this engine haha.
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Are people actually making each system self-sufficient? I would be surprised if that was the case. The most logical way to me is to use mass drivers to get all minerals into one central location of that system and then Cargo ship to get it off there wherever it is needed (implies a different system). I have a colony that is actually supposed to be a copy of what Earth is in about 1/5th of the systems I have, probably even less (not to mention it takes a lot of time and effort to get there).
If the system has sufficient duranium, neutronium and Corundium, then I like to make the system build itself up. If any of these 3 are missing then mines and/or factories need shipping in, which makes the system of less value
Outside of kick-starting colonies with construction factories I tend to just ship in the minerals they use, that is way more efficient if those minerals are not available. That means less ships needed to ship facilities around everywhere. As long as a colony have enough factories to build build new facilities to put all of the new workers to work that means the colony is self sufficient.
Shipping minerals is from a strategic point of view less of a strain on your infrastructure.
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Pick a mineral that won't run out any time soon, and use Load Minerals When X Available followed by Load All Minerals, setting X to be an amount which gives a reasonably full hold when the load minerals command is issued.
That's really clever - I'll have to remember it. What I've done so far is to always centralize minerals onto the largest colony in the system, and periodically send out megafreighters (500Kt+ ships) to siphon them up and bring them to a production system - production systems being ones that had all varieties of mineral available in sufficient quantities to be self sustaining. But with that trick I very well might repurpose some of my earlier-game freighters (50-100Kt) and have them on pre-defined circuits.
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Pick a mineral that won't run out any time soon, and use Load Minerals When X Available followed by Load All Minerals, setting X to be an amount which gives a reasonably full hold when the load minerals command is issued.
That's really clever - I'll have to remember it. What I've done so far is to always centralize minerals onto the largest colony in the system, and periodically send out megafreighters (500Kt+ ships) to siphon them up and bring them to a production system - production systems being ones that had all varieties of mineral available in sufficient quantities to be self sustaining. But with that trick I very well might repurpose some of my earlier-game freighters (50-100Kt) and have them on pre-defined circuits.
Another way is to just use very small mineral haulers and have each one only handle one or a few type of minerals at a time, the hold can be as small as 1000t for handling shipping to small colonies. You don't even need a cargo shuttle bay as you likely have a cargo station present anyway at these colonies.
I find that a ship with really large cargo holds are huge overkill when it comes to moving minerals around, especially if I like to setup an automated system that I might adjust once every few years or so.
But I then tend to make pretty much every colony to build their own facilities, more or less. So I want minerals to be as spread out among my colonies as possible. This is as much for role-play as anything else. I do try to avoid using population for mining operations as much as possible.
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Honestly, with the tools we have, it doesn't seem like all that much effort to set up inter-system mineral hauling orders.
A cheap early game freighter with 7 engines and one cargo hold travels 1000 km/s with 35bkm range, easy. Nuclear Pulse, 30% power, size 60, 150kL fuel. That's roughly optimal throughput per cost at that tech level.
This guy can make a round trip per year at a distance of 15bkm.
So just one freighter is needed to move 12.5kt per year between systems at that range.
That's a lot of mining output handled just by giving one ship cycling orders.
And like you said, mass drivers easily centralize the mineral output in each system.
I used freighters similar to this to establish my first populated extrasolar colony in Alpha Centauri. After the colony was well established, the freighters were repurposed as mineral haulers.
I think I used them on a cyclical mineral hauling route between Sol and Alpha Centauri for like 100-150 game years before I felt like I needed a new freighter design.
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
asteroid mining modules are very good at dealing with this, just build a bunch of asteroid miners, tell them to move to nearest mineral source, and go grab it when you need some with a freighter
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
asteroid mining modules are very good at dealing with this, just build a bunch of asteroid miners, tell them to move to nearest mineral source, and go grab it when you need some with a freighter
Asteroid miners cost Corundium, which is the critical mineral involved in mineral crunch. Getting the civilians to help pay the mineral cost of mining can go a long way to alleviating that.
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Every mining colony gets its own freighter on cycling orders to carry its production to the major colony of choice. When I want to adjust the rate at which minerals are piling up (or not, as the case may be) on certain colonies I re-route one or two or twelve freighters to supply a different population.
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Every mining colony gets its own freighter on cycling orders to carry its production to the major colony of choice. When I want to adjust the rate at which minerals are piling up (or not, as the case may be) on certain colonies I re-route one or two or twelve freighters to supply a different population.
Alternatively you can also vary the speed of the freighters to change the rate of shipping along a route.
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Hauler Class Light Freighter:
Hauler class Light Freighter 3,000 tons 42 Crew 131.5 BP TCS 60 TH 64 EM 0
1066 km/s Armour 1-18 Shields 0-0 HTK 12 Sensors 1/1/0/0 DCR 11 PPV 0
MSP 27 Max Repair 25 MSP
Cargo 500 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 2
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
T1250/64NTi "Hauler" Starship Drive (1) Power 64 Fuel Use 4.48% Signature 64 Explosion 4%
Fuel Capacity 95,000 Litres Range 127.2 billion km (1380 days at full power)
Mk. I Planetary Scanner (1) GPS 4 Range 2.5m km MCR 227.1k km Resolution 1
Mk. I Sensor Calibration Module [TH] (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
Mk. I Sensor Calibration Module [EM] (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes*Technology Used: High-Density Duranium Armor, Improved Nuclear Thermal Engines, Minimum Engine Power 0.4x, Fuel Consumption 0.7%, Trans-Newtonian Cargo Shuttles, Commercial Damage Control
*Required Technology: High-Density Duranium Armor, Improved Nuclear Thermal Engines, Minimum Engine Power 0.4x
*Optional Technology: Trans-Newtonian Cargo Shuttles, Commercial Damage Control, Fuel Consumption 0.7%
- This is the design I'm using for Mineral Hauling in my current game... it has room for improvement. :) It only has 1x Cargo Shuttle Bay, I just have Trans-Newtonian Cargo Shuttles; weight could be saved by removing the sensors and the Commercial Damage Control.
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Hauler Class Light Freighter:
Hauler class Light Freighter 3,000 tons 42 Crew 131.5 BP TCS 60 TH 64 EM 0
1066 km/s Armour 1-18 Shields 0-0 HTK 12 Sensors 1/1/0/0 DCR 11 PPV 0
MSP 27 Max Repair 25 MSP
Cargo 500 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 2
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
T1250/64NTi "Hauler" Starship Drive (1) Power 64 Fuel Use 4.48% Signature 64 Explosion 4%
Fuel Capacity 95,000 Litres Range 127.2 billion km (1380 days at full power)
Mk. I Planetary Scanner (1) GPS 4 Range 2.5m km MCR 227.1k km Resolution 1
Mk. I Sensor Calibration Module [TH] (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
Mk. I Sensor Calibration Module [EM] (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes*Technology Used: High-Density Duranium Armor, Improved Nuclear Thermal Engines, Minimum Engine Power 0.4x, Fuel Consumption 0.7%, Trans-Newtonian Cargo Shuttles, Commercial Damage Control
*Required Technology: High-Density Duranium Armor, Improved Nuclear Thermal Engines, Minimum Engine Power 0.4x
*Optional Technology: Trans-Newtonian Cargo Shuttles, Commercial Damage Control, Fuel Consumption 0.7%
- This is the design I'm using for Mineral Hauling in my current game... it has room for improvement. :) It only has 1x Cargo Shuttle Bay, I just have Trans-Newtonian Cargo Shuttles; weight could be saved by removing the sensors and the Commercial Damage Control.
Why so small? With the same tech, you could use a standard cargo hold and multiple bigger engines to get 50x the cargo capacity (at the same speed and range, using less fuel) for less than 5x the cost.
Quick example, using same size engines and roughly equivalent scanners (I added the cryo berths just to replace the weight of your damage control, which I don't have yet):
Hauler - Copy class Freighter (P) 50,018 tons 197 Crew 585.5 BP TCS 1,000 TH 1,088 EM 0
1087 km/s Armour 1-120 Shields 0-0 HTK 127 Sensors 1/1/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 7 Max Repair 50 MSP
Cargo 25,000 Cryogenic Berths 1,200 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 2
Squire Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
Commercial Improved Nuclear Thermal Engine EP64.00 (17) Power 1088.0 Fuel Use 4.48% Signature 64.00 Explosion 4%
Fuel Capacity 1,550,000 Litres Range 124.4 billion km (1324 days at full power)
Active Search Sensor AS1-R1 (1) GPS 1 Range 1.3m km MCR 113.5k km Resolution 1
TH-Minimus (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
EM-Minimus (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
You can save a lot of fuel (and design size for fuel tanks) by using larger engines. A size-60 engine uses ~33% less fuel than the equivalent power in size-25 engines.
Obviously you need to expand your yard to make these, which takes time and resources, but I find the investment more than worthwhile, because I expect to build a lot of freighters for a long time.
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Global oranisation:
Each Sector (2 jump from central colony) has some sort of "central hub" colony : usually with biggest population, most idustrially developed, center of local shipbuilding. In my current game there are 2 big sectors : Sol and 36 Ophiuchi. Every system has its own "central hub" (some can have more) colony where all minerals from system are collected (with mass-drivers)
Intra-sector mineral transportation (Sol):
Workhorse:
Akmolinsk G9 class Cargo Ship 53 336 tons 316 Crew 4 449.2 BP TCS 1 067 TH 16 000 EM 0
14999 km/s Armour 1-126 Shields 0-0 HTK 53 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 22 PPV 0
MSP 2 504 Max Repair 2000 MSP
Cargo 25 000 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 10
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months
Commercial Plasma Core AM Drive EP8000.00 (2) Power 16000 Fuel Use 0.44% Signature 8000 Explosion 5%
Fuel Capacity 500 000 Litres Range 381.8 billion km (294 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
Orders: (all minerals are transported from sector hub colony)
Hub: Unload all minerals
Hub: Load x1000 Durantium
Hub: Load x1000 Neutronium
and all other minerals x1000
Hub: Refuel & Resupply
Colony: Unload all minerals
Colony: Load all minerals
Cycle move - check.
Cargo ship loads all minerals at hub
Unloads them on target colony
If minerals are below reserve, cargo ship loads nothing and goes to hub
If minerals are above reserve, cargo ship loads all minerals that are above reserve and transports them to hub colony.
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@Skroomit
- A good question, and a good refit... although I personally don't like it. It's overkill for something that is designed to only haul minerals, but I only ever build dedicated mineral haulers to alleviate the need to use my big freighters. Even then I hardly build much or any of either as I typically rely on Civilian Shipping for 90% of my installation moving needs and Mass Drivers for my CMCs, so typically a 5-10,000 Ton Freighter or two will do. At that point I just fold the freighter into an Orbital Miner and be done with it, since with a little extra work I can use the same design as a Salvager by just swapping modules.
- That all having been said, this game I'm doing now is a Conventional Start with no Starport and no Shipyards. When I built my shipyards the first one was a Commercial Yard which I got to 30,000 Tons to build my Pre-Cryo Colony Ship, so that refit wouldn't fit. My second yard was naval, but only 3,000 and it was for my Geo/Grav Survey Ship. I've just expanded the slipways on my existing yards and built up another two, one Naval and one Commercial, and I am in the process of expanding these new yards to 9,000 Tons for the Naval and 90,000 Tons for the Commercial. Sometime after I had finished converting all 1,500 of my Conventional Industry, and right about towards the end of expanding my TN Industry I began to have CMCs popping up like nuts. My Mass Driver was still queued up and I had to wait for my Starport first for Role-Play reasons, so I built some Haulers for the interim. They got about 10 years of use, so not too bad, and I'm in the process of replacing them right now.
These are the designs that will do so:
Longhaul Class Freighter:
Longhaul class Freighter 90,000 tons 728 Crew 3,391.6 BP TCS 1,800 TH 7,680 EM 0
4266 km/s Armour 3-178 Shields 0-0 HTK 153 Sensors 1/1/0/0 DCR 52 PPV 0
MSP 1,153 Max Repair 320.0000 MSP
Cargo 30,000 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 10
Commander Control Rating 2 BRG AUX
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months
T8000/1280MP "Longhaul" Starship Drive (6) Power 7680.0 Fuel Use 3.09% Signature 1280.00 Explosion 5%
Fuel Capacity 2,085,000 Litres Range 134.8 billion km (365 days at full power)
Mk. I Navigational Computer [Planetary Detection Module] (1) GPS 1000 Range 14.2m km Resolution 500
Mk. I Navigational Computer [Surface Scanner Module] (1) GPS 2 Range 1.8m km MCR 160.6k km Resolution 1
Mk. I Sensor Calibration Module [TH] (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
Mk. I Sensor Calibration Module [EM] (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
- This will be my primary intrasystem mule. It can move six units of Infrastructure, or one 25,000 Ton Installation with 5,000 Tons to spare. A good ship for the kinds of odd jobs I intend to have it do.
Jumphaul Class:
Jumphaul class Jump Freighter 90,000 tons 600 Crew 2,812.4 BP TCS 1,800 TH 3,840 EM 0
2133 km/s JR 2-25(C) Armour 3-178 Shields 0-0 HTK 121 Sensors 1/1/0/0 DCR 50 PPV 0
MSP 905 Max Repair 396.8 MSP
Cargo 25,000 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 10
Captain Control Rating 2 BRG ENG
Intended Deployment Time: 15 months
Liveman Drive Max Ship Size 90000 tons Distance 25k km Squadron Size 2
T8000/1280MP "Longhaul" Starship Drive (3) Power 3840.0 Fuel Use 3.09% Signature 1280.00 Explosion 5%
Fuel Capacity 1,285,000 Litres Range 83.1 billion km (450 days at full power)
Mk. I Navigational Computer [Planetary Detection Module] (1) GPS 1000 Range 14.2m km Resolution 500
Mk. I Navigational Computer [Surface Scanner Module] (1) GPS 2 Range 1.8m km MCR 160.6k km Resolution 1
Mk. I Sensor Calibration Module [TH] (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
Mk. I Sensor Calibration Module [EM] (1) Sensitivity 1 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 7.9m km
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
- Serves as a Jump Tender for the Longhaul, but has shorter range overall. A good ship for shunting things that are just a jump or so away. Paired with a tanker or a forward staging area, it can go a lot farther.
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...this game I'm doing now is a Conventional Start with no Starport and no Shipyards. When I built my shipyards the first one was a Commercial Yard which I got to 30,000 Tons to build my Pre-Cryo Colony Ship, so that refit wouldn't fit. My second yard was naval, but only 3,000 and it was for my Geo/Grav Survey Ship. I've just expanded the slipways on my existing yards and built up another two, one Naval and one Commercial, and I am in the process of expanding these new yards to 9,000 Tons for the Naval and 90,000 Tons for the Commercial. Sometime after I had finished converting all 1,500 of my Conventional Industry, and right about towards the end of expanding my TN Industry I began to have CMCs popping up like nuts. My Mass Driver was still queued up and I had to wait for my Starport first for Role-Play reasons, so I built some Haulers for the interim. They got about 10 years of use, so not too bad, and I'm in the process of replacing them right now.
Ah, yes, the small version makes sense as an early mineral mover for a conventional start.
I only ever build dedicated mineral haulers to alleviate the need to use my big freighters. Even then I hardly build much or any of either as I typically rely on Civilian Shipping for 90% of my installation moving needs and Mass Drivers for my CMCs, so typically a 5-10,000 Ton Freighter or two will do. At that point I just fold the freighter into an Orbital Miner and be done with it, since with a little extra work I can use the same design as a Salvager by just swapping modules.
I only build big freighters, because I find that Civvies are too slow to respond to contracts to move my installations around (and occasionally mess things up, if I create several demand contracts at once).
This means that I spend a couple decades in the early game fully utilizing a freighter yard, while adding more slipways the entire time.
I end up with hundreds of Haulers.
And while 25kt of cargo space is overkill for small mineral runs, I'm happy to live with the occasional overkill rather than spin up a separate yard for a freighter optimized for mineral hauling.
My mineral mule routes generally cover multiple systems, going empty outwards from Home and then scooping at a single collection point in each system on the return leg. A single Hauler can handle each route for a while until total mineral extraction along the route exceeds Hauler throughput. It is convenient to not have to worry about smaller throughput increments. I just check stockpile sizes as part of my annual New Year checklist. If minerals are backing up, I add a Hauler to the route.
This will be my primary intrasystem mule. It can move six units of Infrastructure, or one 25,000 Ton Installation with 5,000 Tons to spare. A good ship for the kinds of odd jobs I intend to have it do.
Good news: infrastructure is half the size you think it is. 2,500t. One standard hold can fit 10 units of infrastructure (normal or low-grav). Your design can fit 12.
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Oops, I forgot about that. Lol.
Better news though, although I factored the wrong amount, it is actually 2,000 per Infra as of C#.
So my design can fit 15 of 'em. ;D
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Oops, I forgot about that. Lol.
Better news though, although I factored the wrong amount, it is actually 2,000 per Infra as of C#.
So my design can fit 15 of 'em. ;D
Pretty sure it's 2500 per infrastructure.
My haulers with a single standard cargo bay haul 10 each.
Also says so here (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg116382#msg116382).
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So it would seem. Oh well. :)
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...this game I'm doing now is a Conventional Start with no Starport and no Shipyards. When I built my shipyards the first one was a Commercial Yard which I got to 30,000 Tons to build my Pre-Cryo Colony Ship, so that refit wouldn't fit. My second yard was naval, but only 3,000 and it was for my Geo/Grav Survey Ship. I've just expanded the slipways on my existing yards and built up another two, one Naval and one Commercial, and I am in the process of expanding these new yards to 9,000 Tons for the Naval and 90,000 Tons for the Commercial. Sometime after I had finished converting all 1,500 of my Conventional Industry, and right about towards the end of expanding my TN Industry I began to have CMCs popping up like nuts. My Mass Driver was still queued up and I had to wait for my Starport first for Role-Play reasons, so I built some Haulers for the interim. They got about 10 years of use, so not too bad, and I'm in the process of replacing them right now.
Ah, yes, the small version makes sense as an early mineral mover for a conventional start.
I only ever build dedicated mineral haulers to alleviate the need to use my big freighters. Even then I hardly build much or any of either as I typically rely on Civilian Shipping for 90% of my installation moving needs and Mass Drivers for my CMCs, so typically a 5-10,000 Ton Freighter or two will do. At that point I just fold the freighter into an Orbital Miner and be done with it, since with a little extra work I can use the same design as a Salvager by just swapping modules.
I only build big freighters, because I find that Civvies are too slow to respond to contracts to move my installations around (and occasionally mess things up, if I create several demand contracts at once).
This means that I spend a couple decades in the early game fully utilizing a freighter yard, while adding more slipways the entire time.
I end up with hundreds of Haulers.
And while 25kt of cargo space is overkill for small mineral runs, I'm happy to live with the occasional overkill rather than spin up a separate yard for a freighter optimized for mineral hauling.
My mineral mule routes generally cover multiple systems, going empty outwards from Home and then scooping at a single collection point in each system on the return leg. A single Hauler can handle each route for a while until total mineral extraction along the route exceeds Hauler throughput. It is convenient to not have to worry about smaller throughput increments. I just check stockpile sizes as part of my annual New Year checklist. If minerals are backing up, I add a Hauler to the route.
This will be my primary intrasystem mule. It can move six units of Infrastructure, or one 25,000 Ton Installation with 5,000 Tons to spare. A good ship for the kinds of odd jobs I intend to have it do.
Good news: infrastructure is half the size you think it is. 2,500t. One standard hold can fit 10 units of infrastructure (normal or low-grav). Your design can fit 12.
One should only use civvies for colonist and trade, feed the civs with other contracts just generates more wealth for them and you'll just end up purging them.
It is a fuel/efficiency trade off.
You invest some fuel to get your 10 Automated Mines immediately and in the right spot rather than wait 2 or 3 years and find yourself with one mining colony with 9 automines the other with 11 and both of them are still waitingbfor the mass driver...
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The civilians are quite economical with moving stuff around as you don't need to pay fuel costs and for building the ships themselves which is rather huge at the end of the day.
You should obviously use both civilians and your own freighters in combination as you really want civilians to generate tax income from trade. Trade also means they move free infrastructure around to new colonies as well which is quite important.
I have learned that you should not choke the civilian with contracts because you can't control when they are doing what and in what order. You need to use your own freighters to move important things or those things that are strategically important to you.
In terms of minerals I tend to use small ships for the most part, at least for the early and mid game, as I play with very slow development penalties that is for a very long time. I don't tend to centralise production but making sure that colonies are as self sufficient as possible so I only have to move minerals around so they can make the stuff they need. So... making sure they have enough resources for a few years production is enough and then you just keep it that way. Using the reserves function is quite good for this.
If you have several colonies in one system with industry you can just use mass-drivers and shuttle the minerals around in a ring among them, very easy. I only need mineral haulers to get the minerals I mine in system with no colonies and bring them to my colonies or in system where the distance between colonies are too great and I need to use LP to shuttle minerals between colonies.
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
There is no such limitation?
My civilians just built a Gallicite only CMC on a moon.
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
There is no such limitation?
My civilians just built a Gallicite only CMC on a moon.
According to this post (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg110347;topicseen#msg110347), CMCs will only be created on bodies with at least 10kt Duranium at 0.7 or higher Accessibility (plus other restrictions).
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
There is no such limitation?
My civilians just built a Gallicite only CMC on a moon.
According to this post (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg110347;topicseen#msg110347), CMCs will only be created on bodies with at least 10kt Duranium at 0.7 or higher Accessibility (plus other restrictions).
I seem to recall Steve saying, maybe in the WH40K campaign thread, or in that comment thread, that he would add a check for CMC for Gallicite as well, as he was having severe problems with gallicite at the time.
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
There is no such limitation?
My civilians just built a Gallicite only CMC on a moon.
According to this post, CMCs will only be created on bodies with at least 10kt Duranium at 0. 7 or higher Accessibility (plus other restrictions).
Then this restriction clearly does not apply on 1. 9. 5 or there is something missing
CMC creation event:
https://ibb. co/gTyMMNs
body minerals:
https://ibb. co/JQfj9r8
the system has 4 bodies with unexploited duranium
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
There is no such limitation?
My civilians just built a Gallicite only CMC on a moon.
According to this post, CMCs will only be created on bodies with at least 10kt Duranium at 0. 7 or higher Accessibility (plus other restrictions).
I seem to recall Steve saying, maybe in the WH40K campaign thread, or in that comment thread, that he would add a check for CMC for Gallicite as well, as he was having severe problems with gallicite at the time.
This must be it then.
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
There is no such limitation?
My civilians just built a Gallicite only CMC on a moon.
According to this post (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg110347;topicseen#msg110347), CMCs will only be created on bodies with at least 10kt Duranium at 0.7 or higher Accessibility (plus other restrictions).
I seem to recall Steve saying, maybe in the WH40K campaign thread, or in that comment thread, that he would add a check for CMC for Gallicite as well, as he was having severe problems with gallicite at the time.
Well, not 30 minutes after posting that link, I had a CMC pop up on a colony with only Neutronium and Gallicite.
Can anyone point me to the details of the new Gallicite check? Is it as simple as changing "Duranium" to "Duranium or Gallicite" in the text as posted?
EDIT: Clearly it is not that simple.
The new CMC appeared on a comet with: ~77k GAL@0.8 and ~35k NEU@0.9.
Another empty comet in the same system has ~282k GAL@0.9 and ~10k URI@1.0.
The empty comet is closer than the new CMC comet. It does have a longer path, but the max distance is only about 12Bkm (half the posted max CMC distance of 80AU).
The only way this selection makes any sense is if Neutronium is heavily weighted in the selection algorithm. Or if the selection does not just take the highest rated candidate, as the post claims.
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I wish that civilians would build CMCs anywhere there was a good amount of minerals instead of only in places with Duranium. Having to setup mining colonies for every little asteroid is a pain, even if you use civilian lines.
There is no such limitation?
My civilians just built a Gallicite only CMC on a moon.
According to this post (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg110347;topicseen#msg110347), CMCs will only be created on bodies with at least 10kt Duranium at 0.7 or higher Accessibility (plus other restrictions).
I seem to recall Steve saying, maybe in the WH40K campaign thread, or in that comment thread, that he would add a check for CMC for Gallicite as well, as he was having severe problems with gallicite at the time.
Well, not 30 minutes after posting that link, I had a CMC pop up on a colony with only Neutronium and Gallicite.
Can anyone point me to the details of the new Gallicite check? Is it as simple as changing "Duranium" to "Duranium or Gallicite" in the text as posted?
I think so. IMO it makes sense since without gallicite you get no engines, no engines means no ships, no ships means no way of shipping the duranium back to a colony.
In essence, he who controls the gallicite, controls the universe.
Edit: I accidentally put my reply inside the quote like an absolute tool
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Found it
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10440.msg117318#msg117318
It pays to have read all of Steve's campaigns XD
"I do agree though that the maintenance changes add extra strain, so I'll change the civilian mining location checks to Duranium or Gallicite"
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Why not just have civilians build on any body with a mineral that's 10k rich?
In other news, this conversations has prompted me to standardize my freighters into 4 classes.
- Light freighters with small cargo bays to haul minerals in convoys
- Standard freighters with standard cargo bays that haul infrastructure for colony fleets. Colony ships are based off of these designs so they can be built from the same shipyard.
- Heavy freighters with large cargo bays to haul mines and mass drivers
- And Super-Freighters with 4+ large cargo bays to haul the really heavy stuff like spaceports and labs and such.
Whats great about standardizing these designs early on is that the only thing you need to upgrade is the engine (which should always be the same size), meaning you can just refit.
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Why not just have civilians build on any body with a mineral that's 10k rich?
In other news, this conversations has prompted me to standardize my freighters into 4 classes.
- Light freighters with small cargo bays to haul minerals in convoys
- Standard freighters with standard cargo bays that haul infrastructure for colony fleets. Colony ships are based off of these designs so they can be built from the same shipyard.
- Heavy freighters with large cargo bays to haul mines and mass drivers
- And Super-Freighters with 4+ large cargo bays to haul the really heavy stuff like spaceports and labs and such.
Whats great about standardizing these designs early on is that the only thing you need to upgrade is the engine (which should always be the same size), meaning you can just refit.
I find that refitting freighters is not cost-effective. Engine cost is usually in the 40-50% range on my designs, which means I'm paying half (or more) the cost of a new ship to refit.
Say I have two ships at speed Z (giving throughput of 2 * Z), the new engine tech is 25% faster, and the refit cost is 50% of the cost of the new design.
Then, for equivalent costs, I could either:
A) Refit the old ships, for a total throughput 2.5 * Z.
B) Build a new ship, for a total throughput 3.25 * Z.
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Why not just have civilians build on any body with a mineral that's 10k rich?
In other news, this conversations has prompted me to standardize my freighters into 4 classes.
- Light freighters with small cargo bays to haul minerals in convoys
- Standard freighters with standard cargo bays that haul infrastructure for colony fleets. Colony ships are based off of these designs so they can be built from the same shipyard.
- Heavy freighters with large cargo bays to haul mines and mass drivers
- And Super-Freighters with 4+ large cargo bays to haul the really heavy stuff like spaceports and labs and such.
Whats great about standardizing these designs early on is that the only thing you need to upgrade is the engine (which should always be the same size), meaning you can just refit.
I find that refitting freighters is not cost-effective. Engine cost is usually in the 40-50% range on my designs, which means I'm paying half (or more) the cost of a new ship to refit.
Say I have two ships at speed Z (giving throughput of 2 * Z), the new engine tech is 25% faster, and the refit cost is 50% of the cost of the new design.
Then, for equivalent costs, I could either:
A) Refit the old ships, for a total throughput 2.5 * Z.
B) Build a new ship, for a total throughput 3.25 * Z.
What about fuel costs... more fuel efficient engine WILL make a huge impact.
If you build new engines and you can get both faster AND better fuel economy for engines that are almost the same price. The idea here is that every generation of new engines you reduce the efficient one additional step and have a better fuel efficiency and better engine technology. That engine probably is even less expensive even if better technology...
Example...
T1 - Commercial Nuclear Thermal Engine
Engine Power 150.00 Fuel Use Per Hour 10.8 litres Fuel per EPH 0.07
Thermal Signature 150.00 Explosion Chance 5%
Commercial Engine
Cost 37.5000 Size 3,000 tons Crew 30 HTK 7
Base Chance to hit 100%
Materials Required: Gallicite 37.5
T2 - Commercial Improved Nuclear Thermal Engine
Engine Power 172.80 Fuel Use Per Hour 8.6 litres Fuel per EPH 0.05
Thermal Signature 172.80 Explosion Chance 4%
Commercial Engine
Cost 38.8800 Size 3,000 tons Crew 27 HTK 7
Base Chance to hit 100%
Materials Required: Gallicite 38.88
T3 - Commercial Nuclear Pulse Engine
Engine Power 192.00 Fuel Use Per Hour 6.3 litres Fuel per EPH 0.03
Thermal Signature 192.00 Explosion Chance 4%
Commercial Engine
Cost 38.4000 Size 3,000 tons Crew 24 HTK 7
Base Chance to hit 100%
Materials Required: Gallicite 38.4
T4 - Commercial Improved Nuclear Pulse Engine
Engine Power 210.00 Fuel Use Per Hour 4.3 litres Fuel per EPH 0.02
Thermal Signature 210.00 Explosion Chance 3%
Commercial Engine
Cost 36.7500 Size 3,000 tons Crew 21 HTK 7
Base Chance to hit 100%
Materials Required: Gallicite 36.75
T5 - Commercial Ion Drive
Engine Power 225.00 Fuel Use Per Hour 2.7 litres Fuel per EPH 0.01
Thermal Signature 225.00 Explosion Chance 3%
Commercial Engine
Cost 33.7500 Size 3,000 tons Crew 18 HTK 7
Base Chance to hit 100%
Materials Required: Gallicite 33.75
Example T1 and T5 ships...
Centipede class Cargo Ship 190,528 tons 637 Crew 1,557 BP TCS 3,811 TH 3,000 EM 0
787 km/s Armour 1-294 Shields 0-0 HTK 173 Sensors 4/4/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 5 Max Repair 50 MSP
Cargo 125,000
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
T1 - Commercial Nuclear Thermal Engine (20) Power 3000.0 Fuel Use 7.22% Signature 150.00 Explosion 5%
Fuel Capacity 2,000,000 Litres Range 26.2 billion km (384 days at full power)
EM Sensor EM0.5-4.0 (1) Sensitivity 4 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 15.8m km
Thermal Sensor TH0.5-4.0 (1) Sensitivity 4 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 15.8m km
Centipede class Cargo Ship 188,667 tons 397 Crew 1,381 BP TCS 3,773 TH 4,500 EM 0
1192 km/s Armour 1-293 Shields 0-0 HTK 160 Sensors 4/4/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 4 Max Repair 50 MSP
Cargo 125,000
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
T5 - Commercial Ion Drive (20) Power 4500.0 Fuel Use 1.21% Signature 225.00 Explosion 3%
Fuel Capacity 500,000 Litres Range 39.5 billion km (383 days at full power)
EM Sensor EM0.5-4.0 (1) Sensitivity 4 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 15.8m km
Thermal Sensor TH0.5-4.0 (1) Sensitivity 4 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 15.8m km
You can both refit the old ones for very cheap and build new ones cheaper and better too... you also gain way better fuel economy which is primary for doing allot of logistics work. ;)
I know that the cost to refit a ship is relatively expensive so scraping the ships and build new ones is one option... the important thing is to keep your fuel economy sane. In my opinion the running fuel economy is more important over time than a small upfront production cost. I rarely see all of my cargo yards working 24/7 in my games... I would get too many cargo ships this way if I did so and I certainly have the time to upgrade the old ships to new ones... although, I usually skip on one or sometimes two tech levels and then upgrade them. I don't upgrade every freighter or commercial ship to every new engine types.
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I find that refitting freighters is not cost-effective. Engine cost is usually in the 40-50% range on my designs, which means I'm paying half (or more) the cost of a new ship to refit.
Say I have two ships at speed Z (giving throughput of 2 * Z), the new engine tech is 25% faster, and the refit cost is 50% of the cost of the new design.
Then, for equivalent costs, I could either:
A) Refit the old ships, for a total throughput 2.5 * Z.
B) Build a new ship, for a total throughput 3.25 * Z.
What about fuel costs... more fuel efficient engine WILL make a huge impact.
If you build new engines and you can get both faster AND better fuel economy for engines that are almost the same price. The idea here is that every generation of new engines you reduce the efficient one additional step and have a better fuel efficiency and better engine technology. That engine probably is even less expensive even if better technology...
...
The fact that the old and new engines are the same price does not change the cost of the refit. You pay full price for the new engines (plus some percentage as the cost of doing a refit).
Refitting a T1 to a T5 makes sense, because the 50% increase in speed over that four-tier gap justifies the 50% refit cost.
But refitting for each new engine tier is not economical, unless you place an enormous value on the fuel efficiency (or on the increase in speed for its own sake, because it reduces the amount of time your population/minerals/installations are in transit and therefore not providing value).
Your T5 ship is roughly 50% engines by cost and is roughly 7% faster than a T4 ship (assuming otherwise equivalent design).
To refit a T4 to a T5, you are paying 1/2 the cost of a new T5 to gain the throughput of about 1/14 of a new T5.
Sure, you gain some fuel efficiency, but I'd rather have 7x the marginal throughput per cost.
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Yes.. I edited my post above to reflect that.. and the reason why I do it... ;)
I would get way too much throughput if I kept building new ships while fuel economy is more important in the long run.
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Why not just have civilians build on any body with a mineral that's 10k rich?
In other news, this conversations has prompted me to standardize my freighters into 4 classes.
- Light freighters with small cargo bays to haul minerals in convoys
- Standard freighters with standard cargo bays that haul infrastructure for colony fleets. Colony ships are based off of these designs so they can be built from the same shipyard.
- Heavy freighters with large cargo bays to haul mines and mass drivers
- And Super-Freighters with 4+ large cargo bays to haul the really heavy stuff like spaceports and labs and such.
Whats great about standardizing these designs early on is that the only thing you need to upgrade is the engine (which should always be the same size), meaning you can just refit.
I find that refitting freighters is not cost-effective. Engine cost is usually in the 40-50% range on my designs, which means I'm paying half (or more) the cost of a new ship to refit.
Say I have two ships at speed Z (giving throughput of 2 * Z), the new engine tech is 25% faster, and the refit cost is 50% of the cost of the new design.
Then, for equivalent costs, I could either:
A) Refit the old ships, for a total throughput 2.5 * Z.
B) Build a new ship, for a total throughput 3.25 * Z.
I only upgrade when its substantial to do so. Every 3 tiers or thereabouts.
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Why not just have civilians build on any body with a mineral that's 10k rich?
In other news, this conversations has prompted me to standardize my freighters into 4 classes.
- Light freighters with small cargo bays to haul minerals in convoys
- Standard freighters with standard cargo bays that haul infrastructure for colony fleets. Colony ships are based off of these designs so they can be built from the same shipyard.
- Heavy freighters with large cargo bays to haul mines and mass drivers
- And Super-Freighters with 4+ large cargo bays to haul the really heavy stuff like spaceports and labs and such.
Whats great about standardizing these designs early on is that the only thing you need to upgrade is the engine (which should always be the same size), meaning you can just refit.
I find that refitting freighters is not cost-effective. Engine cost is usually in the 40-50% range on my designs, which means I'm paying half (or more) the cost of a new ship to refit.
Say I have two ships at speed Z (giving throughput of 2 * Z), the new engine tech is 25% faster, and the refit cost is 50% of the cost of the new design.
Then, for equivalent costs, I could either:
A) Refit the old ships, for a total throughput 2.5 * Z.
B) Build a new ship, for a total throughput 3.25 * Z.
I only upgrade when its substantial to do so. Every 3 tiers or thereabouts.
How often you upgrade probably also depends on the technology speed you play the game on too. I currently play on 15% technology rates and that probably will force me to upgrade due to fuel issues much sooner. Somtimes it might even be worth doing it using the same technology just with bigger and more fuel efficient engine tech. When you have to wait 30-50 years to get all the necessary technologies between each level then getting even a 30-50% boost in fuel efficiency will matter allot on your commercial freighters.
in my current new campaign I'm only about 30 years in and the best engine I have is this one...
Engine Power 62.50 Fuel Use Per Hour 6.99 Litres
Fuel Consumption per Engine Power Hour 0.112 Litres
Size 25 HS (1,250 tons) HTK 5
Thermal Signature 62.5 Explosion Chance 5% Max Explosion Size 15
Cost 15.6250 Crew 12
In about 5-10 more years I will be able to create this one...
Engine Power 90.00 Fuel Use Per Hour 5.50 Litres
Fuel Consumption per Engine Power Hour 0.061 Litres
Size 40 HS (2,000 tons) HTK 6
Thermal Signature 90.0 Explosion Chance 4% Max Explosion Size 22
Cost 20.2500 Crew 18
I have about six 200.000t freighters but they are roughly 80% idle right now as all my colonies are still in Sol. But having my fuel economy on the ship reduced will make a huge impact when I soon start to colonise my first colony outside Sol. A change from 0.112 per powerhour to 0.061 are quite substantial for me at this time.
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Why not just have civilians build on any body with a mineral that's 10k rich?
In other news, this conversations has prompted me to standardize my freighters into 4 classes.
- Light freighters with small cargo bays to haul minerals in convoys
- Standard freighters with standard cargo bays that haul infrastructure for colony fleets. Colony ships are based off of these designs so they can be built from the same shipyard.
- Heavy freighters with large cargo bays to haul mines and mass drivers
- And Super-Freighters with 4+ large cargo bays to haul the really heavy stuff like spaceports and labs and such.
Whats great about standardizing these designs early on is that the only thing you need to upgrade is the engine (which should always be the same size), meaning you can just refit.
I find that refitting freighters is not cost-effective. Engine cost is usually in the 40-50% range on my designs, which means I'm paying half (or more) the cost of a new ship to refit.
Say I have two ships at speed Z (giving throughput of 2 * Z), the new engine tech is 25% faster, and the refit cost is 50% of the cost of the new design.
Then, for equivalent costs, I could either:
A) Refit the old ships, for a total throughput 2.5 * Z.
B) Build a new ship, for a total throughput 3.25 * Z.
In VB6 I would scrap the freighters and reuse their old engines in fuel harvesters. After the initial trip out they only have to occasionally move to the hub moon to unload so slower/less efficient engines aren't a big concern. I do need to put a colony on a nearby moon with a refueling station instead of just dumping it on a random rock but I consider that an acceptable price for reduced management.
I haven't kept a C# campaign on long enough to do much harvesting yet though.
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I like to keep old components around, in reserve. I may use them for third-class 'colonial ships' at time, or scrap them when I have an acute lack of a mineral...
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I find that refitting freighters is not cost-effective. Engine cost is usually in the 40-50% range on my designs, which means I'm paying half (or more) the cost of a new ship to refit.
Say I have two ships at speed Z (giving throughput of 2 * Z), the new engine tech is 25% faster, and the refit cost is 50% of the cost of the new design.
Then, for equivalent costs, I could either:
A) Refit the old ships, for a total throughput 2.5 * Z.
B) Build a new ship, for a total throughput 3.25 * Z.
What about fuel costs... more fuel efficient engine WILL make a huge impact.
If you build new engines and you can get both faster AND better fuel economy for engines that are almost the same price. The idea here is that every generation of new engines you reduce the efficient one additional step and have a better fuel efficiency and better engine technology. That engine probably is even less expensive even if better technology...
...
The fact that the old and new engines are the same price does not change the cost of the refit. You pay full price for the new engines (plus some percentage as the cost of doing a refit).
Refitting a T1 to a T5 makes sense, because the 50% increase in speed over that four-tier gap justifies the 50% refit cost.
But refitting for each new engine tier is not economical, unless you place an enormous value on the fuel efficiency (or on the increase in speed for its own sake, because it reduces the amount of time your population/minerals/installations are in transit and therefore not providing value).
Your T5 ship is roughly 50% engines by cost and is roughly 7% faster than a T4 ship (assuming otherwise equivalent design).
To refit a T4 to a T5, you are paying 1/2 the cost of a new T5 to gain the throughput of about 1/14 of a new T5.
Sure, you gain some fuel efficiency, but I'd rather have 7x the marginal throughput per cost.
One of the only things that I expect from a cargo ship is, of course, to carry things around, but do it with a minimal cost per trip. Not updating engines incurs an economy this is true, but also comes with a cost when during decades it will pollute and make space unbreathable.
For exemple now, I will swap 2 100 HS ion engines with 0.5 fuel efficiency to one 160 HS magneto plasma engine with 0.4 fuel efficiency. The freighter will be 10% faster with 1% fuel efficiency rather than 1.6%. I personnaly would rather build more freighters that are more fuel efficient for a similar transportation capability than keep using outdated freighters. Eventually the rationale would depend both on gallicite stockpile and gallicite to litres of fuel conversion you wish for but I wouldn't say that not upgrading is that much of an obvious choice... Unless you're talking of refiting at every slight improvement obviously.
Work Horse Mk5 class Freighter 36,647 tons 105 Crew 464.3 BP TCS 733 TH 1,000 EM 0
1364 km/s Armour 1-98 Shields 0-0 HTK 31 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 7 Max Repair 100 MSP
Cargo 25,000 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 3
Capitaine de corvette Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months
Commercial Ion Drive EP500.00 40% 0.5 100H (2) Power 1000 Fuel Use 1.60% Signature 500 Explosion 4%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 76.7 billion km (651 days at full power)
Work Horse Mk6 class Freighter 34,425 tons 89 Crew 456.1 BP TCS 688 TH 1,024 EM 0
1487 km/s Armour 1-94 Shields 0-0 HTK 22 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 8 Max Repair 204.8 MSP
Cargo 25,000 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 3
Capitaine de corvette Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months
Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive EP1024.0 40% 0.4 160H (1) Power 1024 Fuel Use 1.01% Signature 1024 Explosion 4%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 129.2 billion km (1005 days at full power)
It will take me at least 20 years before I can make another upgrade of similar magnitude.
Refitting would cost me 205 gallicite now. Not refitting would cost me 981 000 litres of fuel per freighter (16 litres per hour instead of 10.4) during those 20 years. It means it equates to a 4 785 litres of fuel per gallicite conversion rate.
In practice I will also spend extra time developing military engines as well as researching and improving jump drives, so more like 30 years and ~1 500 000 litres.
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...
It will take me at least 20 years before I can make another upgrade of similar magnitude.
Refitting would cost me 205 gallicite now. Not refitting would cost me 981 000 litres of fuel per freighter (16 litres per hour instead of 10.4) during those 20 years. It means it equates to a 4 785 litres of fuel per gallicite conversion rate.
In practice I will also spend extra time developing military engines as well as researching and improving jump drives, so more like 30 years and ~1 500 000 litres.
I like the analysis. It is a very useful way of framing the tradeoffs.
What you are saying is that this engine upgrade has a one-time cost of 205 gallicite (and wealth) and an ongoing benefit of ~49kL fuel per year, assuming that the ship is in constant use.
If you have access to gas giants, a single Sorium Harvester module produces more than 49kL per year.
That module costs 10 duranium and 20 boronide. It is 85% cheaper than the refit, and uses minerals that, on balance, are easier to come by than gallicite. Duranium is twice as abundant as gallicite in the universe, and I never come close to using all the boronide I dig up incidentally when I'm mining the minerals I actually want.
Even with the overhead costs for moving harvester ships into orbit of a gas giant, it is going to be much cheaper (in wealth terms) to harvest the extra fuel than to refit the engines.
As an example, my 80-module stations are 87.7% harvesters by cost.
My tug costs as much as 130 modules, but I use them to tow miners and terraformers as well, and the harvesters don't use much of my total tug time, since they generally stay in the same place for many decades.
A single 4ML tanker costs the same as 7 modules, and one tanker can keep up with a station's output at a distance of ~12 Bkm, while consuming less than 1% of the fuel it transports.
My total logistics overhead for sorium modules is therefore somewhere around 25%.
So unless you don't have access to gas giants, or you have an unusual mineral crunch, or you have much more gallicite (and wealth) than you can find uses for, it is cheaper to make the extra gas than to prevent its consumption.
If your ships are in constant use, then your freighter fleet is either just barely meeting your freight needs, or it is not meeting your needs.
In either case, you should be seeking to increase the bandwidth of your fleet, and you probably want to do that as cost-effectively as possible.
So, this refit provides more value than just fuel savings--it also provides a 9% increase in bandwidth.
But you have another option to increase bandwidth: build new ships.
For roughly 2.2 times the cost of a refit (but no additional gallicite), you could build a new Work Horse, which provides more than 12 times the increase in bandwidth.
That's more than 5 times the return on your wealth, in terms of bandwidth gained per wealth used.
If you are gallicite constrained, building the new ship is even more attractive, since you are getting 12 times the bandwidth for the same gallicite cost.
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That assumes, however, that you'll always have a gas giant with Sorium available. It's a valid cost analysis, but with that important corollary.
Sorium is not a renewable resource. As such, burning precious fuel is not something you would normally do indiscriminately. Since I always roleplay, I try to keep things "realistic", hence I go for efficiency when feasible.
Even if you do not roleplay, if you do not use civilians you'll have to build a ton of cargo ships and colonizers yourself. The fuel consumption can become very high very quickly if you keep using old engines.
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That assumes, however, that you'll always have a gas giant with Sorium available. It's a valid cost analysis, but with that important corollary.
Yes. I said as much in my post. Twice.
Sorium is not a renewable resource. As such, burning precious fuel is not something you would normally do indiscriminately. Since I always roleplay, I try to keep things "realistic", hence I go for efficiency when feasible.
Even if you do not roleplay, if you do not use civilians you'll have to build a ton of cargo ships and colonizers yourself. The fuel consumption can become very high very quickly if you keep using old engines.
Gas giants contain a lot of sorium. It is really hard to imagine fully depleting all of the ones you find.
I use civilians, and I still build a TON of cargo ships and colonizers.
In year 2067 (started in 2025), I have 154 freighters (with total capacity of 182 standard holds), and 203 colonizers (with total capacity of 8.82M colonists).
(I'm playing with 25% global tech rate; you might find it easier to reach these numbers sooner in your own game.)
The colonizers are in constant use. They don't need to be, but I like to roleplay that the billion people on the homeworld have a very strong desire to be elsewhere.
The freighters are at least 95% utilized.
The total annual fuel consumption of these ships, plus the tankers needed to keep enough fuel at the colonies, is roughly 64ML.
I have never upgraded any of these ships for new engine tech.
My first generation was size-60 Nuclear Pulse, 30% power, 0.8 fuel consumption. My current generation is size-100 Improved Nuclear Pulse, 30% power, 0.7 fuel consumption.
(I just finished Ion Drive research. I will finish 0.6 fuel consumption in a year, and will design my next generation. Yay!)
At full shipyard production, I am capable of increasing the capacity of these fleets by ~7% per year.
I have harvesting stations with a total of 640 modules, and my harvesting tech is 64kL.
With commander and admin bonuses, these stations produce 62ML per year, consuming 31kt of sorium in the process.
I have explored 15 systems outside my home.
The best gas giant contains 10.8Mt of sorium with 1.0 accessibility.
That's enough to supply my current usage for nearly 350 years.
Even if my fuel use increases at a constant annual rate of 7%, this single gas giant will provide all the fuel I need for more than four decades.
During that time, it is a near certainty that I will find another 1.0 gas giant of equal size.
If I don't, I'll just have to use the next best one I have found, which has 4.5Mt of sorium at 0.9 accessibility.
If another decade goes by and I use that one up and I still haven't found a stellar (ha!) replacement, then I'll just have to settle for the 226Mt, 0.8 accessibility monster one system over. That one should last another half-century, but I will have to build 25% more harvesting stations to make up for the reduction in accessibility.
It is really hard to use up all the gas giants.
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...
It will take me at least 20 years before I can make another upgrade of similar magnitude.
Refitting would cost me 205 gallicite now. Not refitting would cost me 981 000 litres of fuel per freighter (16 litres per hour instead of 10.4) during those 20 years. It means it equates to a 4 785 litres of fuel per gallicite conversion rate.
In practice I will also spend extra time developing military engines as well as researching and improving jump drives, so more like 30 years and ~1 500 000 litres.
I like the analysis. It is a very useful way of framing the tradeoffs.
What you are saying is that this engine upgrade has a one-time cost of 205 gallicite (and wealth) and an ongoing benefit of ~49kL fuel per year, assuming that the ship is in constant use.
If you have access to gas giants, a single Sorium Harvester module produces more than 49kL per year.
That module costs 10 duranium and 20 boronide. It is 85% cheaper than the refit, and uses minerals that, on balance, are easier to come by than gallicite. Duranium is twice as abundant as gallicite in the universe, and I never come close to using all the boronide I dig up incidentally when I'm mining the minerals I actually want.
Even with the overhead costs for moving harvester ships into orbit of a gas giant, it is going to be much cheaper (in wealth terms) to harvest the extra fuel than to refit the engines.
As an example, my 80-module stations are 87.7% harvesters by cost.
My tug costs as much as 130 modules, but I use them to tow miners and terraformers as well, and the harvesters don't use much of my total tug time, since they generally stay in the same place for many decades.
A single 4ML tanker costs the same as 7 modules, and one tanker can keep up with a station's output at a distance of ~12 Bkm, while consuming less than 1% of the fuel it transports.
My total logistics overhead for sorium modules is therefore somewhere around 25%.
So unless you don't have access to gas giants, or you have an unusual mineral crunch, or you have much more gallicite (and wealth) than you can find uses for, it is cheaper to make the extra gas than to prevent its consumption.
If your ships are in constant use, then your freighter fleet is either just barely meeting your freight needs, or it is not meeting your needs.
In either case, you should be seeking to increase the bandwidth of your fleet, and you probably want to do that as cost-effectively as possible.
So, this refit provides more value than just fuel savings--it also provides a 9% increase in bandwidth.
But you have another option to increase bandwidth: build new ships.
For roughly 2.2 times the cost of a refit (but no additional gallicite), you could build a new Work Horse, which provides more than 12 times the increase in bandwidth.
That's more than 5 times the return on your wealth, in terms of bandwidth gained per wealth used.
If you are gallicite constrained, building the new ship is even more attractive, since you are getting 12 times the bandwidth for the same gallicite cost.
Your analysis is true. This was in fact my first thought when preparing my answer. However, I then realized that the issue here is that both fuel and minerals are generated with no cost other than building a module. Therefore, it's hard to put a value on mined minerals when looking only at the initial corundium cost which will have an almost limitless return on investment, just like it is hard to put a value on fuel harvested. Eventually, the conversion rate felt more elegant since I am comparing two ressources which are produced at virtually no cost, yet are limited in supply with varying availability.
You are right that I am slightly overestimating my fuel consumption. However most of my freighters are on cycling orders, a back and forth trip will typically take some 400 days at this point with up to 4 stops to fill/empty cargo (load/unload installations and load/unload minerals on the way back). Grossly, this is a 1 to 2% decrease in my earlier yearly fuel consumption.
Most of my freighters are busy most of the time, except for a handful used for short-term needs. Eventually freighter management is a major source of micro so I am lax in that part of the game as a personnal choice, ie. I could be more proactive and use more freighters. Let's call it galactic bureaucracy inefficiency :)
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More fuel also means more tankers though, which might or might not be a concern. There also are allot of overhead producing and moving fuel harvesters as well so it can't be completely disregarded.
Another concern might also be commanders to run the ships/harvesters. The less ships you have the more capable commander with logistics/production skill you get to use which will also effect the overall efficiency of both ships and harvesters.
At some point it probably will be more or less irrelevant to replace commercial engines when older engines already are very efficient and your fuel production is greater and the cost to replace ships still remains quite high, but early on it is very effective to give older ships new engines and perhaps use the old engines for secondary tasks or simply scrap them and gain some of the Gallicite back.
When you play a game at 10-20% research rate the time between significant research tech can be like 50 plus years. In the early game an engine change can be like a million or more litres of fuel per year for a single big freighter in difference. When your production rate of Sorium to fuel ration is around 50000 litres... let's assume that with planet efficiency and commander ability just for the sake of argument. Each refinery burn 20 sorium per year. In this case I need 20 refineries per year to keep the ships running 24/7 and that is 400 Sorium per year. If I run that particular ship for 200 years which is not too uncommon in some campaigns that is 80k sorium and one entire station with 20 harvesting modules dedicated to one ship (obviously the efficiency of the station will go up over time). The cost of the station is around 700 BP (270 Duranium, 435 Boronide and some other minerals in smaller amounts)
Another point is... what happens if your harvesters is attacked and destroyed, that will be an expensive thing to parry as well.
In my opinion running costs is generally more important than some small amount of Gallicite once in a while. I also tend to pay less and less for the engine on my freighters over time as well, eventually the engines are very cheap.
Although scraping might be bugged as it seem you get resources back when scraping a ship and then again when you scrap the components. I just realized this when I scraped a ship and got the Gallacite for the engines and then the engine components as well, then I got the Gallacite when I scraped those so a total of about 300 Gallicite for engines that cost 600 Gallicite. As far as I know you are only supposed to get 25% back when you scrap something. In any way replacing the engines in the example above would cost me about 250 Gallicite after I scraped the old ship engines.
If you look at a much different example of say a Magneto Plasma level freighter and an Ion engine level freighter then the numbers will be very different as you will not save as much fuel and your fuel production levels are allot higher. You will need to have a much wider technology difference before it is worth scrapping old ships and build new ones.
Saying that one mineral is less important than another does not really fly with me... you can say the same thing about Galicite as you can with Sorium and fuel. You can mine more Galicite as well if you have a few really good Gallicite sources. If I upgrade my cargo ships once in 50 years and the total cost is about say 300-500 Gallicite per ship after scraping the old components. That is a cost of 6-10 Gallicite per year in running costs. I pay that cost as it probably is only one mine dedicated to each freighter in terms of Gallicite costs. Saying that Gallicite are rarer and used more can be true to some extent but military ships can be monsters in terms of consuming fuel if you get into a long drawn out war, especially if you a below their tech in engine as you need to increase the power of your engines to compensate.
I do understand that the type of campaign you play will provide a very different picture as to how often or if at all you upgrade your cargo ships engines.
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I can take my current new campaign as a better example.
The best scientist I have in Propulsion is 15% and currently have 14 labs (I have a rule that labs can't be traded between science field unless I also spend 5000 Wealth through SM). This give me a total of 672 RP per year. I'm nearly 30 years into that campaign and I have just started to explore outside of the Sol system. I did give myself some tech in order to speed op the process such as TN tech in the beginning otherwise I would not be at this point yet.
Engine tech researched so far is...
Nuclear Thermal Engines.
0.9 litres per powerhour engines.
1.25% powered engines.
The next research to be done are
0.8 litres per powerhour, 2000RP
Maximum Engine Size 40, 2000RP
Minimum Power Mod x0.4, 1000RP
for the next generation of freighter engines, this will take me about 5-8 years more. Then designing the engine retooling and all that another 2-3 years so i look at around 10 more years before I can get new engines... roughly. If nothing else happen to interfere with those plans though.
In Sol I have two decent sources of fuel...
Jupiter 4.3 million Sorium at 0.6 accessibility
Neptune 1.3 million Sorium at 0.3 accessibility
In Sol I also have about 300.000 Gallicite at around 0.8 accessibility plus I already stored about 100.000 Gallicite on Earth. I have an income of 1318 Gallicite per year all coming from Civilian mines at this time.
My current cargo ship the Centipede burn about 1.8 million litres of fuel in a year of operation which at this time means roughly 1300 Sorium per year at my production rate from Harvesters, although I get all my fuel from refineries right now. I also don't use all my 10 cargo ship all the time at this point in time... perhaps half of them are constantly in use, about 625.000t of cargo space or 25 standard cargo holds.
The next line of engine I expect a 40% decrease in fuel cost.
My calculation about engines I can expect about a cost of about 100 Gallicite per cargo hold in upgrade cost over time. I probably will upgrade the cargo ships roughly as I start needing them, but once I settle my first colony outisde Sol I will need them all and then some more. I have a total of 55 cargo holds to upgrade the engines on, so that will be about 5.500 galicite or at this time about four years worth of Galicite income.
I expect these new ships to operate for at least 50 more years before the next round of upgrades. In that time these ships will save me 36.000.000 litres of fuel per ship in running costs over 50 years. This fuel is then a cost of about 15.000 Sorium per ship at my current conversion rate... although I expect this to rise during the next 50 years though.
The rate at which you find Gallicite versus Sorium is roughly 1:10. So there are about ten times as much Sorium as most other minerals. You then have to figure out how much fuel does military ship use over the cost of their engines. Military engines tend to actually be much lower in cost versus freighters than their use of fuel, this is due to the increased use of fuel for high powered engines and missiles who all use fuel. I general fuel costs for military ships can overshadow the cost in Gallicite but that depends on how many military conflicts you end up in which is a factor that you can't know for sure.
But if you only look at the rare of which the minerals exist in the galaxy you need a ships running cost to be less in one mineral over the other. As long as the cost to upgrade a ship is ten times less in Gallacite than Sorium you should be fine, so it is a question of how often you upgrade not whether you do it or not.
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More fuel also means more tankers though, which might or might not be a concern. There also are allot of overhead producing and moving fuel harvesters as well so it can't be completely disregarded.
I included the cost of tugs and tankers in my estimation of the overhead of sorium harvesting stations.
It's not that much. I figured 25%, and I'm probably overestimating tug usage, and accounting for a longer tanker round trip (12 Bkm) than I usually have to make.
Another concern might also be commanders to run the ships/harvesters. The less ships you have the more capable commander with logistics/production skill you get to use which will also effect the overall efficiency of both ships and harvesters.
I can't possibly ever have enough commanders for all of my freighters. There are just too many ships.
But even if I could put a 50% logistics bonus commander on every ship, it would not make much of a difference. When a round trip takes 90 days, and loading and unloading takes a total of 3 days with no commander, the 1.5 days saved by a 50% logistics bonus means a 1.6% increase in throughput.
There are far fewer mining ships, but most of my mining bonus comes from the four commanders in the naval admin commands for mining.
My net admin bonus for mining is currently 41.3%.
The weighted average commander bonus on my 18 harvester stations is 14.4%.
At some point it probably will be more or less irrelevant to replace commercial engines when older engines already are very efficient and your fuel production is greater and the cost to replace ships still remains quite high, but early on it is very effective to give older ships new engines and perhaps use the old engines for secondary tasks or simply scrap them and gain some of the Gallicite back.
Depends on what you mean by "early on" I guess. If you mean before you can deploy sorium harvesters, then sure. It is likely to be more cost effective to refit engines for fuel efficiency than to build fuel refineries.
But sorium harvesters are 1/4 the cost of refineries.
When you play a game at 10-20% research rate the time between significant research tech can be like 50 plus years. In the early game an engine change can be like a million or more litres of fuel per year for a single big freighter in difference.
You'll have to show me an example of an early game engine upgrade that will save 1ML of fuel per year for a single freighter.
My typical early freighters burn less than 200kL per year with a single standard cargo hold.
I play at 25% research rate. My first freighter engines are size-60, 30% power, 0.8 fuel consumption.
Another point is... what happens if your harvesters is attacked and destroyed, that will be an expensive thing to parry as well.
A valid question.
If your empire will be severely crippled by an attack on your harvesters, you must protect them.
You should also split them among several locations, if possible.
And maintain a large enough reserve to keep your fleets running until you can reestablish supply.
But you are going to do those things anyway.
You could also pay to upgrade your freighter engines to reduce fuel consumption, but that is a very expensive option. The resources are almost assuredly better spent on the other options, unless you are talking about a 4+ generation gap in engine tech.
In my opinion running costs is generally more important than some small amount of Gallicite once in a while. I also tend to pay less and less for the engine on my freighters over time as well, eventually the engines are very cheap.
You can call it "some small amount of Gallicite" and make it seem like it's no big deal.
But the cost of just producing the fuel (instead of saving it) is a much smaller amount of minerals that are in more abundance.
Saying that one mineral is less important than another does not really fly with me... you can say the same thing about Galicite as you can with Sorium and fuel. You can mine more Galicite as well if you have a few really good Gallicite sources. If I upgrade my cargo ships once in 50 years and the total cost is about say 300-500 Gallicite per ship after scraping the old components. That is a cost of 6-10 Gallicite per year in running costs. I pay that cost as it probably is only one mine dedicated to each freighter in terms of Gallicite costs.
I do understand that the type of campaign you play will provide a very different picture as to how often or if at all you upgrade your cargo ships engines.
You would rather pay 6-10 Gallicite per year, for 50 years, rather than pay 10 Duranium plus 20 Boronide (plus another ~25% in overhead costs) just one time?
We all know Duranium is enormously important. And we also know it is twice as abundant in the universe as the other minerals.
If you are using more Boronide than Gallicite in your games, I am really interested to find out how.
My point about Sorium being plentiful is that my empire, which is slow to explore and builds a lot of freighters and colonizers, finds more sorium on gas giants than it will likely be able to use.
This has always been the case in my games. I don't think I am just continuing to have good luck finding Sorium sources.
Certainly the type of game you play will impact the relative advantages of refitting engines vs increasing fuel production.
I play a slow game. Not as slow as others. 25% research and survey speed. Perhaps if your surveying is much slower then it will take longer to find a suitable sorium source.
I play with default NPR settings, and no spoilers. If your universe is very hostile, maybe the cost and risk of defending a harvester fleet is too high.
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skoormits point regarding gas giants is actually important with respect to sorium. Unlike all other minerals, sorium has bodies where it can generate in large quantities whereas the other minerals cant. This is in addition to any sorium that might exist on other bodies.
Because of this, like duranium, sorium implicitly ends up with beneficial generation compared to other minerals allowing which is why one might not encounter sorium deficits despite universal usage.
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Here is my first generation big haulers that mainly trasport mines to Venus and a few other places in Sol.
Centipede class Cargo Ship 169,597 tons 405 Crew 1,208.7 BP TCS 3,392 TH 1,875 EM 0
552 km/s Armour 1-272 Shields 0-0 HTK 208 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 4 Max Repair 200 MSP
Cargo 125,000 Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 2
Lieutenant Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
VDC-25/50n Class-1 Void Propulsion System (30) Power 1875.0 Fuel Use 11.18% Signature 62.5 Explosion 5%
Fuel Capacity 2,000,000 Litres Range 19 billion km (397 days at full power)
It is basic technology after about 30 years into the game... i will get better engines soon... perhaps 10 years as I explained before. The next engine is burning half the fuel at 0.8 fuel efficiency, size 40 and power level of 40% still using Nuclear Thermal Engine technology.
You can't compare the one time cost in the fuel harvester as a cost because I can counter that with only part of a mine. I have enough Galacite in Sol for a very long time. The mine in my case produce 3.5 mineral efficiency in total for several different minerals and a 0.9 Galacite efficiency with a 35% mineral extraction administrator and sector administrator at 10%.
As I showed in my other answer above the harvester is not just the module in cost, there is more overhead cost in the station itself (about 35BP per module for a station with 50 modules). But if you say you use the a harvester then I can say I use a mine to produce the Gallicite resources and we are back to how much Gallicite versus Sorium is used in relation to how abundant they are.
A mine from the comet above will supply my needs for freighter engines for hundreds of years as well, I can get other resources for military applications as I have allot of Gallacite and more limited in Fuel for now. But I have enough of both for quite a while.
The cost of the mine is more difficult to count but the above Comet is very efficient and have about 70.000 Galacite and 140.000 Corrundium on it and a few other at around 15-30.000t range. The current production on this rock is 14.9 (12t tech rate) Gallacite per year and 58 other minerals per mine. In this case a mine cost only wealth as it is run by Civilians so I pay 25 Wealth per equivalent mine there.
Now, I could place an Auto-mine there for 240 or find a more suitable mining colony for a maned mine. But it still is a one time cost to bring me about 15t Gallacite and nearly 60t of other minerals every year.
If I need to invest about 100 Gallicite every 50 years to upgrade my engines for every cargo hold (roughly) that is 2 Gallicite per year I need to mine, my civilian mine above do that for a wealth cost of 1.3 or about 6.6 Corrundium as a one time cost as that is the cost of an Auto-mine divided on all the mineral extracted on "this particular" site. I also would not use just ONE fuel harvesting module per cargo module I would need many of them.
Obviously this Comet is a really good place but even if you only have two minerals at a site with very large quantities and both are at 1 efficiency so half go to the Gallicite you only pay around 14 one time cost of Corrundium for the two ton per year extraction of minerals needed. I happen to have five good Gallicite mining sites on Comets in this campaign each with more than 30.000t of Gallicite and the best one have 70.000t of Gallicite.
So I will need to divert more industry and minerals in general to feed the fuel industry than I need the mining industry in this case.
There will come a time when I might need to run the ship longer than 50 years to upgrade them, but from my perspective playing in a very slow tech advancement that will be many hundreds of years into the future if ever in this campaign.
If you chose Fuel or Gallicite should be a general resource decision. So it will depend on how desperate you are for Sorium or Gallicite and you can't compare them one for one either as the fuel cost allot more Sorium than what you in general need Gallicite or rather the industry you need to expand either of them. In most of my cases then upgrading engines produce a far less impact on my industry as it means less logistics overhead and less cost in actual minerals overall.
Another thing that I generally prioritise is fuel for the military. One of the reason for this is that the military almost always need very high power multiplier as I almost always will be less advanced than NPR for a very long time. So I generally need more sorium for engine fuel than Gallacite for the actual engines in comparison as a 150% power engine only require 50% more Gallicite but 176% more fuel.
As for Boronide not being used very much then I say that it is, there is allot of stuff that use Boronide. Boronide is the power-source of Trans-Newtonian components, structure and weapons. I also only allow Humans to build colonies on a 33% gravitational limit (don't find the standard setting very realistic without genetic engineering) so I need ALLOT of Low-G infrastructure that need power (Boronide) to function. So for me that is a hard yes to Boronide being an important resource.
Boronide
Standard Installation Cargo Station, Low G Infrastructure, Mass Driver, Naval Headquarter, Sector Command, Terraforming Installation
Standard Components Lasers, Railgun, Microwave, Meson, Particle Beams, Plasma Carronade, Fuel Tanks, Refueling Systems
High cost Installation Fuel Refinery, Refueling Station, Ordnance Station, Space Station
High cost Components Power Plants, Fuel Harvester module
At the end of the day there is not ONE answer to this question... it is still a question of how much resources you have and what resources are most precious for you at this time. When I use upgrade the ships I need to divert LESS industry to produce the stuff needed to support the freighter fleet which is a small amount of Gallicite rather than a huge amount of fuel.
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skoormits point regarding gas giants is actually important with respect to sorium. Unlike all other minerals, sorium has bodies where it can generate in large quantities whereas the other minerals cant. This is in addition to any sorium that might exist on other bodies.
Because of this, like duranium, sorium implicitly ends up with beneficial generation compared to other minerals allowing which is why one might not encounter sorium deficits despite universal usage.
The only real point here is that Fuel extraction work differently from mines in that you need to spread them out more, there really are not more Sorium than other minerals in general. We have to remember that converting Sorium to fuel also cost allot of Sorium. The main difference is that other minerals are spread out more but you will still find a few gems of most other minerals too which you will make you main provider just like Gas planets.
Fuel crunches is a real problem in Aurora and many AAR have had serious fuel crunches over the years as well as Duranium, Gallicite or sometimes even Tritanium shortages as well if they used allot of missiles.
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I might also add something that I think IS a balance issue of the game and that is how civilians interact with reduced power efficiency of engines.
I rarely want to research more than 30% perhaps 25% power efficiency of engines as that tend to be more than enough in terms of fuel efficiency for my cargo and mineral haulers. As said, fuel is plenty enough at that point. instead I will hamper my civilian traffic with much slower engines.
At this point I do agree that replacing engines on cargo ships becomes a none issue and the only time I stop to upgrade engines or rather scrap ships and build new ones most often is when there are ships idle.
There is a case to be made that sometimes speed is important as getting stuff to a certain place fast can actually be important not just the quantity. You also can factor in lost production of the item you move as well. This is why I tend to build things such as mines in places where there is minerals to mine as I loose less potential production from the time a mine is built and then shipped out. If a trip somewhere take six month that is half a year of lost productivity on that mine for every trip, if I can cut the trip into three months I loose half of that production shortfall... over the course of fifty years that can amount to allot of production. But I obviously need to be able to produce effectively at both locations for this to matter. As I tend to spread out resource gathering and make sure I have a steady stream and slow rise in mineral income to keep pace with production this is important. I don't want to strip mine places as that can leave nasty logistical and planning issues in the future.
Older ships obviously still have their place as they can effectively move stuff that are not time sensitive which might be things like infrastructure, stations, components, minerals and things like that. I also try to make sure that if possible there are resources or construction to move in both directions, that will make logistics more effective as well. You can even save on things like mass-drivers that way as you move most minerals with your ships as you deliver mines to mining colonies you grab the minerals on your way back.
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I might also add something that I think IS a balance issue of the game and that is how civilians interact with reduced power efficiency of engines.
I rarely want to research more than 30% perhaps 25% power efficiency of engines as that tend to be more than enough in terms of fuel efficiency for my cargo and mineral haulers. As said, fuel is plenty enough at that point. instead I will hamper my civilian traffic with much slower engines.
I 100% agree with this. After somebody posted about the effect that the minimum engine power tech has on civilian shipping, I stopped researching past 30% in my games.
There is a case to be made that sometimes speed is important as getting stuff to a certain place fast can actually be important not just the quantity. You also can factor in lost production of the item you move as well. This is why I tend to build things such as mines in places where there is minerals to mine as I loose less potential production from the time a mine is built and then shipped out. If a trip somewhere take six month that is half a year of lost productivity on that mine for every trip, if I can cut the trip into three months I loose half of that production shortfall... over the course of fifty years that can amount to allot of production. But I obviously need to be able to produce effectively at both locations for this to matter. As I tend to spread out resource gathering and make sure I have a steady stream and slow rise in mineral income to keep pace with production this is important. I don't want to strip mine places as that can leave nasty logistical and planning issues in the future.
Older ships obviously still have their place as they can effectively move stuff that are not time sensitive which might be things like infrastructure, stations, components, minerals and things like that.
This is a great point, and is something I love about the game.
How valuable is speed for freighters, independent of throughput (speed times capacity)?
It's a question that does not have a single correct answer for all uses of freighters across your empire.
Sometimes freighter speed matters A LOT. Like when you have an unexpected mineral crunch at a major production colony. Every day of missing minerals is a day of lost production.
For most non-emergency freighter uses, freighter speed doesn't matter much for it's own sake.
Like on your typical mule runs to bring minerals from your mining sources to your production centers. What matter in these cases is throughput.
Higher speed is certainly "better", because it means cargo is in transit (and therefore not producing value) for less time, but I find that I first want to determine the design that optimizes throughput per cost, and then I might deviate a little bit from that design and pay a small cost premium on throughput in exchange for higher speed.
Certainly there is such a thing as "too slow" for mules. I'm not going to want a mule that travels only 100km/s, no matter how cheap the throughput is. That would just leave too many minerals in transit all the time.
Fortunately, with the relative cost of components in the game, the range of freighter speeds that have optimal throughput per cost is well above the "too slow" threshold.
On the question of refitting freighter engines for speed (rather than for fuel savings, as we have discussed above), I still find that building new ships returns more throughput per cost, unless the gap in engine tech is several levels.
If the upgrade is for ships used as mules, then the speed itself shouldn't be worth much of a price premium. It is throughput you are after.
If the upgrade is for ships used on urgent deliveries, then throughput is not the ultimate measure of value, and the speed increase may be worthwhile.
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I might also add something that I think IS a balance issue of the game and that is how civilians interact with reduced power efficiency of engines.
I rarely want to research more than 30% perhaps 25% power efficiency of engines as that tend to be more than enough in terms of fuel efficiency for my cargo and mineral haulers. As said, fuel is plenty enough at that point. instead I will hamper my civilian traffic with much slower engines.
I 100% agree with this. After somebody posted about the effect that the minimum engine power tech has on civilian shipping, I stopped researching past 30% in my games.
There is a case to be made that sometimes speed is important as getting stuff to a certain place fast can actually be important not just the quantity. You also can factor in lost production of the item you move as well. This is why I tend to build things such as mines in places where there is minerals to mine as I loose less potential production from the time a mine is built and then shipped out. If a trip somewhere take six month that is half a year of lost productivity on that mine for every trip, if I can cut the trip into three months I loose half of that production shortfall... over the course of fifty years that can amount to allot of production. But I obviously need to be able to produce effectively at both locations for this to matter. As I tend to spread out resource gathering and make sure I have a steady stream and slow rise in mineral income to keep pace with production this is important. I don't want to strip mine places as that can leave nasty logistical and planning issues in the future.
Older ships obviously still have their place as they can effectively move stuff that are not time sensitive which might be things like infrastructure, stations, components, minerals and things like that.
This is a great point, and is something I love about the game.
How valuable is speed for freighters, independent of throughput (speed times capacity)?
It's a question that does not have a single correct answer for all uses of freighters across your empire.
Sometimes freighter speed matters A LOT. Like when you have an unexpected mineral crunch at a major production colony. Every day of missing minerals is a day of lost production.
For most non-emergency freighter uses, freighter speed doesn't matter much for it's own sake.
Like on your typical mule runs to bring minerals from your mining sources to your production centers. What matter in these cases is throughput.
Higher speed is certainly "better", because it means cargo is in transit (and therefore not producing value) for less time, but I find that I first want to determine the design that optimizes throughput per cost, and then I might deviate a little bit from that design and pay a small cost premium on throughput in exchange for higher speed.
Certainly there is such a thing as "too slow" for mules. I'm not going to want a mule that travels only 100km/s, no matter how cheap the throughput is. That would just leave too many minerals in transit all the time.
Fortunately, with the relative cost of components in the game, the range of freighter speeds that have optimal throughput per cost is well above the "too slow" threshold.
On the question of refitting freighter engines for speed (rather than for fuel savings, as we have discussed above), I still find that building new ships returns more throughput per cost, unless the gap in engine tech is several levels.
If the upgrade is for ships used as mules, then the speed itself shouldn't be worth much of a price premium. It is throughput you are after.
If the upgrade is for ships used on urgent deliveries, then throughput is not the ultimate measure of value, and the speed increase may be worthwhile.
I think we agree more than we disagrees... my experiences comes mainly from starting a few VERY slow games in C# with 10-20% research, 50% or lower terraforming, 5% survey and not able to easily colonise low gravity worlds. This put a much higher strain on my first 100-150 years in terms of fuel efficiency, therfore upgrading ships... both for speed and fuel efficiency become very important.
Once I have engine size at around 5000t and power efficiency at 30% I have reached a peak performance level where upgrading engines on ships become pointless. I might scrap ships in favour of faster ones eventually but that will usually take hundreds of years and I have not yet reached that point in any of my starting campaigns. I tend to play slow and start a new campaign with every new major release that Steve does... ;)
Speed on freighters can also be very important from a military or overarching strategic perspective, therefore I often keep some very fast less fuel efficient freighters around that can be used for that purpose when necessary and they will perform regular work in the mean time even if not optimal in performance. Upgrading the engines on such ships have a strategic value and have nothing to do with efficiency in any way.