Questions

[Brian Neumann]

For overhauling the freighters, you only need to do this once every couple of years assuming that your freighter has only one maintenance facility on board.  This will keep the freighter from suffering multiple failures under normal use.  If your route is a long roundtrip that will take over two years then have a second maintenance facility on board and have some supplies at the midpoint.  If a freighter has used some supplies up then they can top off.  That should get the ship back to your main base where it gets reset with the freighter maintenance check order.  The other thing to remember is for long trips like that send the freighters as a convoy.  This way when one freighter has a major problem you can have the entire convoy share those supplies.  It really does make a difference on a long run.

Brian

[Paul M (OP)]

The plan was to station a freighter semi permantly for shipping facilities and minearls about in the systems.  I have already lost one freighter to an internal explosion on the return trip to my sole x0 colony site (its a 2.6 year round trip).  But that system lacks some minearls which are available nearby but require maintaining freighters/tankers away from the homeworld if I want to exploit them, I would not be opposed to overhauling the freighters before they start on the trip back since most of the failures are on the return leg.

My ships are pretty well covered for engineering spaces but that long trip really tests them and I make sure they resupply from the tankers on the way (my tankers are well equiped with spares and function as jump tenders).  Hopefully when the Draak military deploys ion engines the upgrade to nuclear pulse civillian drives will cut the travel times down signficiantly making that colony a lot more easily reached.

[Erik L]

Back to the maintenance issues...and a big thank you for the "designate colony" information that is working just fine.  The team is busy demothballing the alien artifacts...no colony seems to make the progress slower though.

My questions is regards to frieghters/civillians.  Can you overhaul freighters without a civillian freighter facility?  I'm planning on establishing a maintance base as part of the expansion plans but do I need to build a freighter maintenance facility there or can I just use the standard maintance facility and the overhaul command for freighters?  Also do I need maintence facilities to maintain freighters or a civillian freighter facility?

Do the civillians build civillian spaceports on different worlds or just on the homeworld?  If so what do you need to trigger this?

I've almost got sufficient data from scanning for jump gate construction 180...but it has taken quite some time...probably close to a couple of years of scanning a gate.

Not sure on the freighters, but my gut says you need the freighter facility.

Civilians build on any world with more than... 100m? There's a population breakpoint, but I don't recall what it is.

[Kurt]

Back to the maintenance issues...and a big thank you for the "designate colony" information that is working just fine.  The team is busy demothballing the alien artifacts...no colony seems to make the progress slower though.

My questions is regards to frieghters/civillians.  Can you overhaul freighters without a civillian freighter facility?  I'm planning on establishing a maintance base as part of the expansion plans but do I need to build a freighter maintenance facility there or can I just use the standard maintance facility and the overhaul command for freighters?  Also do I need maintence facilities to maintain freighters or a civillian freighter facility?

Yes, you can overhaul freighters, as long as you have maintenance facilities on the planet in question.  However, there is usually no reason to do this, as the "Freighter Maintenance Check" order allows what is effectively an overhaul to happen instantaneously as long as there is a freight facility present.  IIRC, in the absence of a freighter facility, a freighter will act like a regular ship in regards to maintenance faciltiies.  In other words, they won't accumulate time on their clocks if in orbit over a world with maintenance facilities, and can be overhauled normally.  It makes much more sense to have a freighter facility available, though, if you are going to be doing a lot of this.  

Do the civillians build civillian spaceports on different worlds or just on the homeworld?  If so what do you need to trigger this?

I've almost got sufficient data from scanning for jump gate construction 180...but it has taken quite some time...probably close to a couple of years of scanning a gate.

AFAIK, civilians will build spaceports on any world, but as the construction rate is tied to population levels, it will take a long time on low pop worlds.  

I think my answers above were right, but Steve might be the only one that knows the answers for sure.

Kurt

[Paul M (OP)]

Thanks for the replies everyone.  The friegher facility can't be built at home and shipped to the colony while the maintenace facilities can is the big issue.  My colonies (the outsystem ones) are all small (few million Draak) with have fairly limited construction assets that are generally tied up building new infrastructure and that freighter maintenance facility is about 2-3 years for them to build (assuming they don't need to keep breaking it up to make new infrastructure).  In the long term the freighter facility will get built but this was looking at the issue from the short to medium term, and I didn't want to find myself unable to overhaul the freighters.

An odd event just occured, out of the blue I got a sensor contact of 3 wrecks, I sent a ship out to them (with active sensors) and after getting a message the ship arrived at the wreck the wreck conacts vanished.  I had not lost ships or anything, so it looked a lot like a random event.  Just plain odd anyway.

[sloanjh]

An odd event just occured, out of the blue I got a sensor contact of 3 wrecks, I sent a ship out to them (with active sensors) and after getting a message the ship arrived at the wreck the wreck conacts vanished.  I had not lost ships or anything, so it looked a lot like a random event.  Just plain odd anyway.

In another thread, Steve mentioned that wreck detection is broken - IIRC there's a flag that is set at a system level that has Aurora only do sensor checks in systems with more than one race.  Wrecks aren't considered another "race".  I don't remember if the behavior you described means that there's NPR/Precursor/Civilians in the system, or if the flag gets set when you transit in then is cleared at the next major update.

John

[Paul M (OP)]

I read that bit about wrecks vanishing...what was very odd was that the wrecks showed up out of nowhere.  They were bigger than my ships.  And I had no report of combat in say the last month.  I'm not missing ships and so I'm frankly baffled why there is...or was wrecks there in the first place.  It sort of looking like a random event...assuming such a thing is possible.

I'm not sure if there is civillians currently in the system, but I have a 2 colonies, and 4 task task groups in the system (a defence picket, a PDC group, a Draak-former group, and a tanker).

[welchbloke]

I read that bit about wrecks vanishing...what was very odd was that the wrecks showed up out of nowhere.  They were bigger than my ships.  And I had no report of combat in say the last month.  I'm not missing ships and so I'm frankly baffled why there is...or was wrecks there in the first place.  It sort of looking like a random event...assuming such a thing is possible.

I'm not sure if there is civillians currently in the system, but I have a 2 colonies, and 4 task task groups in the system (a defence picket, a PDC group, a Draak-former group, and a tanker).

Are you running 4.0b?  If so there could have been combat in the systme between NPRs and/or precursors.

[Steve Walmsley]

There are wrecks in some systems that are generated at the same time as the system. These are the wrecks of the precursor vessels from the fall of the precursor civilization. Or they might be there from some NPR vs NPR conflict that happened in your existing game. As mentioned above, their is a bug on wreck detection so you won't be able to detect them unless there is something else in the system worth detecting, such as civilians or alien races. When a system is flagged for sensor checks, it stays flagged until the next 5-day increment. The bug is fixed in v4.1

Steve

[Paul M (OP)]

I believe I had some civillian ships in there dropping off colonists and the wrecks were off my shipping lanes plus no precursers are in that system, and I've yet to find a NPR so I think these are wrecks from the set up of the system.  They are also very large.  There was no combat reports for several 5 day intervals before that as well.

A question on interpreting the sensor data.  I see S#### R#### Velocity Range from sensor contacts but what I am not clear on is what is the S and R?

[sloanjh]

A question on interpreting the sensor data.  I see S#### R#### Velocity Range from sensor contacts but what I am not clear on is what is the S and R?

Strength and Resolution.  IIRC, MaxDetectionRange in Mkm  = Strength * (Resolution/100)*Min(1, (TargetHS/Resolution)^2) for a target of size TargetHS hull spaces.

John