Because I usually have a mineral crash, I converted (and built) at the rate of 15 mine : 10 construction (i.e. 40% construction), with some dregs left over for fuel and ordnance. I find that shipbuilding is a significant sink of duranium once the SY get rolling, so I'm building surplus mining capacity now (which is arguably a mistake, but once you get behind it's difficult to find the minerals to build a lot of mines without pausing construction or building fighter factories - I wish there were a wider selection of useful things to build that didn't suck duranium).
I usually build in groups of 10 and build x2 Construction followed by x1 mines, x1 fuel and x1 ordinance for 4 run throughs to get things going then start pushing up the number of mines. What I do before this is build Financial centres usually as they allow me to build up a fairly good duranium stocks. For colony worlds they are a very interesting choice. I had a world with no minerals that was a bit of financial centre and it was producing a hefty chunk of change. I was trying to keep 1 centre for each million population more or less. What astounded me was the civillians instance of putting 37 million people on a venus-like hellhole x16.x cost I think. It had a greenhouse pressure of nearly 10 and surface temperature of 400+ C but it had loads of low availablity minearls...and I had put some automatic mines there never thinking it would suddenly become the largest offplanet colony.
I agree that duranium seems to be over used in terms of producing your economy. And I agree whole heartedly that once you get behind crawling out of the hole is very hard. Especially if it involves building automated mines to do so.
On shipping terraforming facilities: I've been burned doing this to high-cost (much higher than 1.91) worlds, since there's no population to run them. For low-cost (2-ish) worlds, I've actually found it to be cheaper (in shipping tonnage) to ship over ~50 factories and a bunch of duranium and boronide and let the remote terraforming population build the factories (after shipping in a seed of a few factories to start with) - the only reason I do this, however is when I haven't researched terraforming yet, and because I know I'll be able to ship them to another location when I'm done with them. Ditto on Brian's comment about terraforming ships - they last forever now and don't require a population (i.e. the equivalent of automated terraforming factories.
The Draakkaan Holding had 18 terraforming ships. They were operating on 3 worlds one of which had 2 terraforming engines of its own. But the round trip time to the colony world in question was a few months and if I sent a 6 ship group they would spend 4 months getting there. The system was a double binary and the travel times were not short but it was a fabulus system. I had a research centre there (recoverd from the ruins on the planet) so I was a bit strapped for people. I had plans to boost its local industry but currently had 5 Factories, 1 Refinery, 12 mines, and a few maintenance facilities plus the research station and some mothballed fighter factories. I had two planets with automatic mines (9 and 3) respectively and mass drivers flinging material around. Population was around 3 million if I recall properly. The civillian jump ship liners were routinely moving people there so I was in nearly continous "build infrastructure" mode.
What I found better was to send a freighter to the colony pick up minerals and cart them home and ship to the colony working factories. Until you get at least 15 factories online you can't build much quickly. I had one colony world I was really boot strapping. It was my only 0.0 world and was about a 1.5 year round trip...I had build the liners for that purpose actually. I still routinely would loose one to maintenance failure on the trip and need to send it in for repair. I had 2 ENG and 1 factory plus 2 mines after my first infrastructure shipment and as I lost a freighter on the return trip to an internal explosion I wan't planning on further trips till I had faster ships the only one in the plans. It was building mines...that was SLOW!
Hey!!! I just realized that all commercial designs should be marked "conscript only". I used to keep my terraformers with military crews so that they'd have longer time on station (less chance of breakdown) but that's moot now.
I use my civillian merchant marine to train my commanders.
I don't think you're going to be able to get out of the system on a conventional start without jump gates, i.e. I think Steve has changed the game so that they're a fundamental part of the commercial economy. The one way I can think of to get around this is to build tramp colony and cargo ships with 2 cryo or 1 cargo holds - these can move people and minerals (but not factories or mines) and be built at "only" 10K-11K tons. Then you'd need to build a troop transport (not sure how big this is 'cuz I haven't researched it yet) and lots of engineers - the engineers land on the remote planet and start building factories (and later mines - in the early days it's more efficient to ship minerals in from the home world).
STEVE - This is a reason to consider allowing factories and mines to be broken down into 5 1-hold pieces - it would allow them to be shipped in tramp freighters operating outside the jump gate network.
John
I think that is correct but I'l still try and see what happens. I am not fond of this change. I can live without the civillian shipping lines if it means I don't put up "here is the nice creamy oreo centre of my empire" billboards for any enemies. Assuming that they put out heat (and its hard to imagine they don't) they would be relatively easy to detect and would invalidate the need for a proper survey of the system. Attack Vector Tactical disregards the possibility of stealth simply because it would take an IR telescope about 5 hours to do a full sweep of the system and any man made object would stand out fairly seriously against cosmic background and the drive plume is impossible to avoid. The plume itself radiates both IR and visible light not to mention soft Xray in AV:T as they use fusion torches so they are using a mix of D, T, and He as propellent (not terribly efficient but I tried without success to point out that ion drives are really only limited by the onboard powersupply not intrinsically limited to being low thrust on physics principles).
But I don't see why you can't break things down to ship on smaller freighters. Once you are in your third wave of expansion I see the value to jump gates since you have both a navy and space to trade in the advent of a war before that not so much.
