Orbital Mass Driver

[QuakeIV]

Wait until full orders don't really cut it, they are a marginal improvement at best.  If there was an actual planning tool that could use your pool of freighters to move materials from their sources to their destinations somewhat efficiently, there wouldn't be as much of a need for mass drivers from a micro standpoint.  As it is, its sheer pain updating orders manually across a fleet and I am entirely against removing mass drivers without something along those lines being implemented.

[ZimRathbone]

Damage from mineral packets was recently removed (1.13? 1.14?) - actually i thought it a bit of a shame as one of the "rites of passage" for Aurora was accidentally removing the last Mass Driver from your capital and blasting yourself to smithereens  (I never did it more than twice) but Steve introduced a warning against that way back in the VB.  Kids these days have it too easy, in my day..... <segue off into Monty Python sketch>

As funny and, um, nostalgic as it was, I think for most people it happened most commonly because the !#@*&!# civilians kept taking the last mass driver because the civilian contract code was fairly buggy (until 1.14? we shall see...). Probably a good change even if the rite of passage is now unfortunately lost to time.

Ahhh,  didn't get that aspect of it as I very rarely use Civilian contracts, I usually stick to Imperial Freight Service for "RP reasons"...

[Blogaugis]

Considering that freighting consumes resource - Sorium, for fuel production - while mass driver needs no more resources after that (except 1 sending, 1 receiving), Mass drivers are economically superior, at least, if you are staying in the same system.
Going out to the other solar systems will need fuel either way.
Say folks, that 1km/s speed of stations and engine-less objects... Is it, working?

[kilo]

Say folks, that 1km/s speed of stations and engine-less objects... Is it, working?

The orbital velocity of Earth is about 29.5km/s I would be surprised if such a slow vessel would manage to enter orbit reliably.

[ZimRathbone]

Considering that freighting consumes resource - Sorium, for fuel production - while mass driver needs no more resources after that (except 1 sending, 1 receiving), Mass drivers are economically superior, at least, if you are staying in the same system.
Going out to the other solar systems will need fuel either way.
Say folks, that 1km/s speed of stations and engine-less objects... Is it, working?

The 1km/s is just a simple trick to avoid divide by zero errors in various bits of code or having to write error handling code all over the place (and inevitably missing some) where speed is used in a denominator.

[Platys51]

This discussion could be made null if there was command: Collect all minerals, then go to next mining location.