Mineral Logistics

[skoormit]

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Droll]

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.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

[skoormit]

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.

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.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

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.