Space station factories

[Neceros (OP)]

I dream of the day I can stuff a huge factory into my ships to produce MSP, ordinance, and fighters on board.

[Norm49]

Play the scenario were earth get pull into the sun and turning humanity in a totally nomad civilization that live only in ship and station. That could be interesting.

[lumporr]

I suppose with DSPs coming in 2.     0 you can *mostly* do it entirely in space, but now that I think about it, could you not just find a tiny little asteroid, dump all your factories on it, and only use the ark population of your ship to achieve pretty much the same thing? It'd be pretty fun to RP a species operating entirely out of a single mothership orbiting some tiny single-comet backwater star.      You could move the mothership between different systems, hoovering up minerals, then jump to the next one whenever you run out, as long as there was at least a single body to use as a base of operations.      The mothership would have to be *massive* though to accommodate both a meaningful population and the cargo space for all those factories, but it could be done.     

Someone correct me if this isn't how it works - I want to try this now!

Edit: FYI, the mothership would have to be a 250 *million* tonner just to accomodate 100m pop.   

Code: [Select]

Tellus Mater class Mothership      350,000,000 tons       154,056 Crew       3,130,196.8 BP       TCS 7,000,000    TH 3,840,000    EM 0
548 km/s      Armour 60-44240       Shields 0-0       HTK 84286      Sensors 11/11/0/0      DCR 51      PPV 0
MSP 2,000,005    Max Repair 2400 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 100,000 tons     Troop Capacity 2,500,000 tons     Cargo 26,375,000    Habitation Capacity 100,000,000    Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 100    Tractor Beam     
Capitán de Fragata    Control Rating 3   BRG   AUX   PFC   
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Flight Crew Berths 2,000   
Maintenance Modules: 100 module(s) capable of supporting ships of 200,000 tons
Refuelling Hub - Capable of refuelling multiple ships simultaneously
Ordnance Transfer Hub - Capable of transferring ordnance to multiple ships simultaneously

Commercial Inertial Fusion Drive  EP1280.0 (3000)    Power 3840000.0    Fuel Use 0.03%    Signature 1280.0    Explosion 1%
Fuel Capacity 979,267,000 Litres    Range 2,012.4 billion km (42502 days at full power)

Active Search Sensor AS39-R100 (1)     GPS 2100     Range 39.8m km    Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH1.0-11.0 (1)     Sensitivity 11.0     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  26.2m km
EM Sensor EM1.0-11.0 (1)     Sensitivity 11.0     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  26.2m km

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a b for auto-assignment purposes

Threw this together a second ago, though it's very likely woefully insufficient.    Also, it would bankrupt Earth of minerals perhaps several dozen times over.    Of particular note are the 3000 engines required to move this behemoth (albeit with exceptional efficiency).    It would only take 500 engines at 50% to move the same speed, though they would go through an entire billion tons of fuel in just 41 billion km.    What's likely far more practical is to use a massive tug with efficiency somewhere in the middle, maybe around 20-25%.

[superstrijder15]

You might want to consider a home fleet, with a dozen freighters, a couple ark module stations, a bunch of tugs, and a number of fuel harvesters. And maybe a single tugged along shipyard. That would also allow growth over time, and allow splitting the fleet to do multiple things.

I wonder, at what colony cost does it become more efficient to carry colonists in cryo + a ship full of infrastructure and put the infra on a colony instead of hauling around an ark module?

An Ark module needs 500k tons for 200k colonists.
200k colonists is 20 cryogenic transports of 2500 tons each so 50000 tons.
At colony cost 1, 1 insfrastructure supports 10000 people, so for our 200k people we need 20*colony cost infrastructure. That goes with 10 per 25000 cargo hold, so it costs 50k tons per colony cost.

So the total weight is 50k + 50k * colony cost, which actually only becomes 500k at colony cost 9! So for a lot of planets this might be preferable. We do lose some workers to maintaining the infrastructure, but perhaps up to cost 7 or so this is still more economical. Important question that I don't know though: Can LG infra be used on other, non LG planets? Because if it can't, we need to either pick between asteroids and planets, or carry around twice the infra which will cost us half our colony rating and leave us at about 3.5 which would not be that good anymore.