Mineral Logistics

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Is it possible to get civilians to pickup and ship minerals for you? If not, what are some tricks to not make me pull my hair out trying to make sure all my colonies have enough minerals to build their own stuff but that my homeworld is also getting enough to fuel my fleet-building?

So far all I've come up with is to make sure that one colony receive minerals from all the mines in the system via mass drivers so there is only one place for freighters to pickup. But I don't want to have to organize designated mineral convoys for every system! That'll get old fast.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

Is it possible to get civilians to pickup and ship minerals for you? If not, what are some tricks to not make me pull my hair out trying to make sure all my colonies have enough minerals to build their own stuff but that my homeworld is also getting enough to fuel my fleet-building?

So far all I've come up with is to make sure that one colony receive minerals from all the mines in the system via mass drivers so there is only one place for freighters to pickup. But I don't want to have to organize designated mineral convoys for every system! That'll get old fast.

The current method is to try to make each system self sufficient so you don't need to transfer minerals between systems by ship.  To distribute minerals use a chain of mass drivers firing in a circle and set each world's reserve levels to what it needs.  I don't like it either, but logistical support commands are probably a few releases away at the soonest.  Aurora is a large project and there is still a lot that needs to be done.

[Rich.h]

In my current game I have a system that is working reasonably well.

To begin with a system is either a mining or colony type, this is determined simply on the planets, if they are low enough cost to make colonising a worthwhile investment or not. Either way any new planet (unless specifically chosen for a population) starts life as an auto mining base. One planet in the system is chosen as the main holding depot and mass drivers are used to centralise all minerals here, from there mineral transports have to be used to get things back to production colonies. At some point I will place infrastructure on the colony and it will start to gain population and so the auto mines can be swapped out for standard mines, allowing the auto mines to be shipped onot the next mining target.

The method above works for just getting minerals out of the ground and leaves me with only having to manage a single fleet of mineral transports out of the system. To develop things further into production colonies though I make use of the reserve minerals function, as soon as a colony has construction factories I set a minimum limit on all minerals there. This way the colony always has enough to produce what is required, and means I can forget about having to manually check things, I simply raise this value at given points in the development. This same practice applies to all other colonies in the system as they "come online", and it gives me a continuous cycle with little micro managment.

There is always the issue of some colonies simply not having access to some mineral types, making production there impossible. to get around this you have to plan out a loop in your mass driver network that allows packets to cover every colony you want producing. Here is how I have it set up in Sol.

Callisto AM - sends packets to Russia on Earth
An out of system mineral transport drops off all mineral at Russia on Earth
Russia - sends packets to Mars
Mars - sends packets to Luna
Luna - sends packets to Venus
CMC in Sol send packets to Venus
Venus - sends packets to my capital on Earth

To start with this makes Sol a hazard for shipping lanes due to packets flying in what looks like all directions, however once things were established it meant I never had any issues with mineral supplies on any planet. In addition to this the reserve levels on these colonies allow me to blindly send a large frieghter group if I ever need a sudden influx for a large project, instead of having to specify the exact amount to load. You do need to scale up your mass driver network to keep up with your mining production for this method or it can take years before you see any results.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

In my current game I have a system that is working reasonably well.

To begin with a system is either a mining or colony type, this is determined simply on the planets, if they are low enough cost to make colonising a worthwhile investment or not. Either way any new planet (unless specifically chosen for a population) starts life as an auto mining base. One planet in the system is chosen as the main holding depot and mass drivers are used to centralise all minerals here, from there mineral transports have to be used to get things back to production colonies. At some point I will place infrastructure on the colony and it will start to gain population and so the auto mines can be swapped out for standard mines, allowing the auto mines to be shipped onot the next mining target.

The method above works for just getting minerals out of the ground and leaves me with only having to manage a single fleet of mineral transports out of the system. To develop things further into production colonies though I make use of the reserve minerals function, as soon as a colony has construction factories I set a minimum limit on all minerals there. This way the colony always has enough to produce what is required, and means I can forget about having to manually check things, I simply raise this value at given points in the development. This same practice applies to all other colonies in the system as they "come online", and it gives me a continuous cycle with little micro managment.

There is always the issue of some colonies simply not having access to some mineral types, making production there impossible. to get around this you have to plan out a loop in your mass driver network that allows packets to cover every colony you want producing. Here is how I have it set up in Sol.

Callisto AM - sends packets to Russia on Earth
An out of system mineral transport drops off all mineral at Russia on Earth
Russia - sends packets to Mars
Mars - sends packets to Luna
Luna - sends packets to Venus
CMC in Sol send packets to Venus
Venus - sends packets to my capital on Earth

To start with this makes Sol a hazard for shipping lanes due to packets flying in what looks like all directions, however once things were established it meant I never had any issues with mineral supplies on any planet. In addition to this the reserve levels on these colonies allow me to blindly send a large frieghter group if I ever need a sudden influx for a large project, instead of having to specify the exact amount to load. You do need to scale up your mass driver network to keep up with your mining production for this method or it can take years before you see any results.

For Sol I just build everything on Earth and then ship it out to other planets, usually Mars, with small, quick short-range freighters. I don't see a reason to develop more than 1 colony on a system beyond mines and infrastructure.

[Rich.h]

It comes down to population, if you only ever work of small ships and do not require large amounts of ground forces, then you won't require that many workers. In the example I gave I have Mars doing all my troop training, Luna houses my financial sector, Russia produces all the mines and ordinance, while Earth capital takes care of research and ship building. Venus is simply me being stubborn and deciding I am going to colony cost zero it.

I never build more than the starting things for a new colony, my aim is for them to be self sufficient. So I might ship out 100 factories from Earth to say a new mining world. After that the new world will construct it's own mines allowing my factories back on Earth to concerntrate on other more important things.

C# has dramatically changed how you have to view things compared to vb6, it simply doesn't work anymore having one superworld that consumes everything you ship back from the rim. To start with you can never grow population fast enough to keep up with manufacturing capacity, and with now so many dangers to civillians as collateral damage it is suicide to keep all the eggs in that one basket.

[Ri0Rdian]

Are people actually making each system self-sufficient? I would be surprised if that was the case. The most logical way to me is to use mass drivers to get all minerals into one central location of that system and then Cargo ship to get it off there wherever it is needed (implies a different system). I have a colony that is actually supposed to be a copy of what Earth is in about 1/5th of the systems I have, probably even less (not to mention it takes a lot of time and effort to get there).

[Jorgen_CAB]

You obviously can for the most part automate most mineral operations to the degree you rarely have to interact with it all that much.

In terms if mining colonies I tend to rather use the population for factory production to produce Auto Mines rather than producing regular mines and have the population work them. This work pretty well and will eventually produce allot more minerals even if Auto Mines require more minerals and time to produce. Factories can also be used to build other things as well if you really have to so are way more flexible in the long run, but that is a completely different discussion.

As others have said... the easiest way is to use mass-drivers to send all minerals to one place in every system and from that place you then pick up and distribute minerals as you need them distributed all over your civilisation. The more you have production centres spread out all over your empire the less you are relying on shipping stuff around for no good reason.

You can set up your mineral haulers in such a way that they balance the need for different minerals for minimal usage of fuel.

These are things that simply is part of the game... I find that managing the logistical side of the game quite rewarding. I also find thriving self sufficient colonies as something quite realistic and fun to deal with. Usually I have the governors skills and traits govern how colonies grow over time, but that is more about role-play than anything else.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Sounds like I should make a new light freighter that is cheap and fast just to ferry minerals from each system. Regular freighters are too big, slow and expensive, I need to to place mines and infra.

[DFNewb]

I use small cargo ships (smaller than 10k tons) on cycle orders.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

I use small cargo ships (smaller than 10k tons) on cycle orders.

What size cargo and engines? What range? I got mine down to being pretty small, but 10k for a freighter that can go anywhere is extreme.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

I use small cargo ships (smaller than 10k tons) on cycle orders.

What size cargo and engines? What range? I got mine down to being pretty small, but 10k for a freighter that can go anywhere is extreme.

Reduce the speed using Minimum Engine Power and the range goes up by quite a bit.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

I use small cargo ships (smaller than 10k tons) on cycle orders.

What size cargo and engines? What range? I got mine down to being pretty small, but 10k for a freighter that can go anywhere is extreme.

Reduce the speed using Minimum Engine Power and the range goes up by quite a bit.

Well yes, this is obvious. I was curious about his actual design.

[Jorgen_CAB]

My mineral haulers have a 5000t cargo module and whatever engine makes it go a decent speed using the best fuel efficient engine I can find. I rather build two ships going slower than one going faster to save fuel costs. A single engine is usually good enough on this ship, depending on how big it is of coarse, so one or two engines.

But that is the same for all Cargo ships more or less. There can be some exceptions when speed is of the essence so having some regular fast cargo ships can be useful but most of them should be slow and fuel efficient to save on the general fuel usage. That means I can have my military ship guzzling more fuel instead. 

[mike2R]

A trick I use is the Load Minerals When X Available command.

Pick a mineral that won't run out any time soon, and use Load Minerals When X Available followed by Load All Minerals, setting X to be an amount which gives a reasonably full hold when the load minerals command is issued.

I usually set this up with the freighter in the source system, and issue the orders with the Load minerals When X Available command last.  I can then make it into a template, which can easily have its last command replaced if I want to change the size of the freighter.

[skoormit]

Honestly, with the tools we have, it doesn't seem like all that much effort to set up inter-system mineral hauling orders.
A cheap early game freighter with 7 engines and one cargo hold travels 1000 km/s with 35bkm range, easy. Nuclear Pulse, 30% power, size 60, 150kL fuel. That's roughly optimal throughput per cost at that tech level.
This guy can make a round trip per year at a distance of 15bkm.
So just one freighter is needed to move 12.5kt per year between systems at that range.
That's a lot of mining output handled just by giving one ship cycling orders.
And like you said, mass drivers easily centralize the mineral output in each system.