Darn so I'm really gonna have to burn 30 million litres of fuel just to tug an orbital habitat one system over, huh? And so many engines just to go 200km/s. . . .

Side note: fuel has become less of a problem after attaching one of my military tankers to the tug fleet whenever it has to tug a long distance.

Since large fuel tanks are fairly lightweight my tugs ARE my tankers.  I also put one cargo shuttle and a large maintenance storage bay on them so they can resupply as well as refuel. 

My terraforming ships tend to be large and slow.  I'll sometimes use terraforming installations when I have a colony on a fairly small world  (terraform speed 10x or greater) that is far from the primary.  Sending a fleet of 5 freighters on a long journey can be more convenient than typing up one of my tugs to pull a terraforming ship tens of billions of km.  But it's an edge case and I'd never use more than a handful. 

I've also once used them for drying out an ocean world.  As long as I'm increasing the population cap faster than they are making new colonists the speed of doesn't seem to matter much.  But in that case I usually just leave one or two terraforming ships in orbit when the fleet moves on. 

 --- How about a type of Countermeasure for GSFs? Or two types, even! One that reduces the accuracy of incoming fire, like an ECM and one that increases a GSFs weighting for the random target allocation? So this way we can use the firs type of countermeasure to make our GSFs more survivable versus ground fire, while the second kind can be used to make "Wild Weasels" either with lots of speed and armor for tanking, or maybe with a powerful countermeasure system of the former type! Or perhaps even some blend of these attributes.

This topic has been moved to Aurora Videos (C#).

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=12978.0

Thank you for your inputs, I was just trying to assert that such costs exists and should be factored.
If we are discussing min-max I agree that they are more efficient but we need to account all costs related to both parties, and we are also excluding the cost of workers and the underlaying infrastructure when using installations.

Seconded on the infrastructure to support workers on a planet being terraformed. Given their large population requirement and the fact that your cargo lift capacity (both empire-owned and civilian contracted) will already be heavily tasked moving the terraforming plants themselves, it's a real pain. Manufacturing it doesn't take that long; and the costs are also pretty affordable - especially since the civilian industry will start manufacturing it "for free" and as far as I've seen, that infrastructure isn't tracked separately (I believe it was in VB6) so you can just pick it up and redistribute it later. No, it really is the logistical challenge of getting that stuff to its destination that causes an issue. Oh, AND you have to move the population, as well! (Though the opportunity cost issues here are highly situation as they depend on how many colony ships you've built and how heavily you typically task them.) Doing this within Sol is annoying, but not difficult. Doing it even one system over can be an issue. Doing it two or three jumps out? It can take years. Cheap terraforming stations that are towed into place are stupidly superior.

There's two caveats to this:

If cash-poor, the best investment is financial centers, not overpriced other installations.

I tend to under-build compared to the average Aurora player (or at least compared to Steve, judging from his AAR's) because I consistently find my biggest crunch isn't minerals, but wealth. So it's not a matter of "do I need more wealth or more terraformers?" because I always need more wealth - and I also need the terraformers anyway. So the fact the terraforming installations Create Jobs™ is significant to me. Birds, stones etc.

The second consideration is commander bonuses. Unless I am mistaken, ship-based production benefits from the ship's commander and any parent naval admin command(s), but not the civilian governor of the planet. This can be significant because generating enough commanders to fully fill out your orbital terraformer platform fleet(s) can be a real challenge - in fact Steve is upping the number of naval commanders produced next patch to address this issue overall (with multiple officers per ship due to modules the overall tax on the officer pool is higher.) If you have a civilian administrator with a decent to high terraforming bonus (and by the time you get out of Sol you'll probably have at least the guy who used to be in charge of Mars leveled up a bit from experience) you can get more out of each terraformer, and that's important because time is a precious resource unto itself, one you can't always quantify like minerals, etc.

I call these caveats because they don't, in any way, shape, or form, begin to make terraforming installations competitive. The logistics are the killer. Yes, orbitals tie up tugs and those are always in short supply (no matter how many I build I always need more) but they're tied up infrequently as they move the fleet to the next target planet and there they will sit, for months, usually for years. Production speed - since you can crank out the terraformer component with construction factories (or the entire finished product if you always use towed space stations as I do) there's no real difference in production, except that the installations are a bit slower (because they cost 100 more minerals) and because you have to build an initial investment of infrastructure to go along with them! And then you get to tie up a lot of your empire's cargo lift capacity to move the whole shebang any serious distance past a single jump out of Sol!

Humbly, I submit that the cost of ground-based Terraforming Installations should be significantly reduced - to 300, if not even further. Maybe 150-200. It'd not just be balanced, but also more lore-friendly; explaining why what takes one million workers on the ground can be done by a crew of a few hundred in space - automation. And automation costs. So if you have the lift capacity and spare population banging at the window to get into the new upper-class of the "TN economy," you have real incentive to go the manual route; plopping down "shake-and-bake" colonies so you can start Building Better Worlds.™