The Tyranny of Starvation and Distance (an imperial accountant's lament)

[SteelChicken]

As an aside , does anyone bother with duty time / crew morale on their commercial ships . I have Fuel Harvesters that take from 18-24 months to fill 90% of their bunkers. After they have dropped 90% of the fuel off at Earth I have to let them wait for about 3 months in Earth's orbit to reduce the duty time of the crew to zero before sending them out to mine Sorium once more.

DavidR

Commercial ships are not effected by morale.

[Nightstar]

Well, most commercial ships. Geosurvey craft need to keep their morale up.

[Konisforce]

As an aside , does anyone bother with duty time / crew morale on their commercial ships . I have Fuel Harvesters that take from 18-24 months to fill 90% of their bunkers. After they have dropped 90% of the fuel off at Earth I have to let them wait for about 3 months in Earth's orbit to reduce the duty time of the crew to zero before sending them out to mine Sorium once more.

DavidR

I usually make my asteroid miners / sorium harvesters with a 24 month crew time, but that's for vague RP / handwavium reasons.  Even with that I never bring them home for shore leave.  Civilian fleet-support ships usually get a similar crew time to their fleets and hang out with them for shore leave anyway.

[Zed 6]

The main thing you need to consider for v6.21 or later is that you need to produce a lot more fuel in the first place. For example, the British Empire is my current game has ten freighters with one hold and fifteen freighters with two holds, or the equivalent of four of your giant freighters. I also have twenty-four 82,000 ton fuel harvesters in addition to my planetary-based refineries. Start building-up your fuel-producing infrastructure early in the game. There are a lot more gas giants now with good accessibility Sorium and the intention is that they should be the source of the majority of your fuel.

Before 6.21 fuel was not much of a concern and that was probably not right. Now it seems fuel has become the #1 overriding concern, at least for me and I don't necessarily think that's right either. I think the pendulum has swung too far the other way on fuel consumption. Just my opinion.

[davidr]

SteelChicken,

Yes but even on Commercial Ships the crew time on duty increases and to be fair to the personnel you control , even commercial personnel should be given shore leave after,say,every 24 months to reduce the time shown spent in space .

DavidR

[xeryon]

Without using any hard numbers my internal logic:
I think that fuel being #1 concern is spot on.  If I may use current spaceflight doctrine as the seed idea.  The primary element in spacecraft development today is the transportation of enough fuel to get you anywhere productive.  If we contemplate how much fuel is expended in getting a craft just the size of the Shuttle (4.4m lbs, with only a payload capacity of 65000 lbs) off of the surface to LEO it stands to reason that getting a craft of the scale represented in Auroa to move around in space would also be astronomical.