Post reply

Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

Note: this post will not display until it's been approved by a moderator.

Name:
Email:
Subject:
Message icon:

shortcuts: hit alt+s to submit/post or alt+p to preview

Please read the rules before you post!


Topic Summary

Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: June 25, 2020, 06:50:36 AM »

Quote from: skoormit on June 25, 2020, 06:37:31 AM
Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 25, 2020, 05:42:50 AM
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.

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 25, 2020, 05:42:50 AM
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.
Posted by: skoormit
« on: June 25, 2020, 06:37:31 AM »

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 25, 2020, 05:42:50 AM
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.

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 25, 2020, 05:42:50 AM
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.

Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: June 25, 2020, 05:42:50 AM »

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.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: June 24, 2020, 06:34:27 PM »

Quote from: Droll on June 24, 2020, 10:35:36 AM
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.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: June 24, 2020, 05:08:29 PM »

Quote from: skoormit on June 24, 2020, 06:28:31 AM


Here is my first generation big haulers that mainly trasport mines to Venus and a few other places in Sol.

Code: [Select]
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.
Posted by: Droll
« on: June 24, 2020, 10:35:36 AM »

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.
Posted by: skoormit
« on: June 24, 2020, 06:28:31 AM »

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 23, 2020, 07:42:57 PM
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.

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 23, 2020, 07:42:57 PM
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%.



Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 23, 2020, 07:42:57 PM
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.


Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 23, 2020, 07:42:57 PM

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.

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 23, 2020, 07:42:57 PM
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.

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 23, 2020, 07:42:57 PM
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.

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 23, 2020, 07:42:57 PM
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.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: June 24, 2020, 05:23:44 AM »

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.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: June 23, 2020, 07:42:57 PM »

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.
Posted by: Thrake
« on: June 23, 2020, 05:35:46 PM »

Quote from: skoormit on June 23, 2020, 03:36:26 PM
Quote from: Thrake on June 23, 2020, 02:34:55 PM
...
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 :)
Posted by: skoormit
« on: June 23, 2020, 04:37:11 PM »

Quote from: Zincat on June 23, 2020, 03:51:32 PM
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.

Quote from: Zincat on June 23, 2020, 03:51:32 PM
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.

Posted by: Zincat
« on: June 23, 2020, 03:51:32 PM »

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.
Posted by: skoormit
« on: June 23, 2020, 03:36:26 PM »

Quote from: Thrake on June 23, 2020, 02:34:55 PM
...
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.


Posted by: Thrake
« on: June 23, 2020, 02:34:55 PM »

Quote from: skoormit on June 18, 2020, 10:31:42 AM
Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on June 18, 2020, 10:10:12 AM
Quote from: skoormit on June 18, 2020, 09:06:36 AM
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.

Quote
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)

Quote
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.
Posted by: vorpal+5
« on: June 20, 2020, 10:37:13 PM »

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...