Author Topic: Logistics and cargo/colony ship design  (Read 1452 times)

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Offline nakorkren (OP)

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Logistics and cargo/colony ship design
« on: September 09, 2021, 05:26:26 PM »
How do you generally handle the logistics/design consideration of loading/unloading? Do you tend to build all your cargo/colony ships with multiple cargo shuttle bays (I've been using ~5 bays which each get a 3x multiplier due to tech), or do you build multiple Spaceports (or the other orbital logistics buildings which I'm forgetting the name of) on each important colony in addition to doing so on your homeworld? Or do you transport Spaceports to the colony via ship?

Given the difficulty of building up the infrastructure on colonies, particularly when I would rather spend their limited BP on other things, I usually just build my ships with lots of cargo shuttle bays, resulting in a cargo unload multiplier of on the order of ten to twenty.  Thoughts?
 

Offline nuclearslurpee

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Re: Logistics and cargo/colony ship design
« Reply #1 on: September 09, 2021, 06:13:47 PM »
Usually in the early game I will put several cargo shuttle bays on each freighter or colony ship, maybe 5x per cargo bay (or per 10 cryo modules), because they are cheap and colonies are usually pretty close to Earth. I think for many players this would be considered excessive but for the early game in Sol I think it is worth doing as the shuttle bays are fairly cheap and don't take a lot of tonnage for a commercial shipyard.

However, once you start to expand beyond Sol the travel time becomes a dominant factor and you don't necessarily need to worry much about load/unload times, so you only need one or a few cargo shuttle bays per ship. At the same time it becomes optimal to start building larger ships to carry more infra/colonists per trip, so once you have enough shipyards a viable approach is to have big long-haul and smaller short-haul variants with the latter having more shuttle bays (per cargo bay or cryo pod) and being optimized for shuffling things around within a system of several colonies (or between colonies separated by only 1-2 JPs).

Spaceports and such are generally not really worth it for cargo handling in most cases, really they are only needed for large colonies which are major logistics hubs - typically this equates to having a lot of civilian ships active which I believe do benefit from the cargo handling bonuses and will gain a fair benefit from doing so. Certainly spaceports are not a viable thing to place at every colony
 

Offline Froggiest1982

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Re: Logistics and cargo/colony ship design
« Reply #2 on: September 09, 2021, 06:58:16 PM »
I think you can apply real-world solutions to this little dilemma of yours. Or this is what I do anyway.

I currently divide the freight into 2 main groups (bear in mind I play without civilians so the heavy lifting is all on my navy shoulders):

Shipping Lines
Courier Lines


Shipping lines are in charge of moving "goods" (can be colonists, minerals, troops, etc) between systems. Like transoceanic ships, transhipping periods of 4 or 5 days are normal for these operations. I imagine that in a trip of 30 to 40 days, it is acceptable to have 2 or 3 days devanning.

Courier Lines on the other end are in charge of in-system transportations. While these are completely obsolete with Civilian lines, they are your backbone logistic fleet without. Now, these have to be fast as it is not acceptable to have 1 day loading times for a day or less trip. Imagine you get a courier at your place and it takes 1 day to get your mail out of the van, quite annoying isn't it? A fast service allows you to use fewer ships as you can complete multiple tasks at the time.
 
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Offline Density

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Re: Logistics and cargo/colony ship design
« Reply #3 on: September 09, 2021, 11:44:36 PM »
There is no benefit to having multiple spaceports or cargo shuttle stations at a given colony. Having one of either counts as a shuttle bay for each and every ship loading/unloading there, which stacks with the bays on the ship. But they don't stack with multiples or each other; either 1 spaceport or 1 cargo shuttle station gives the max benefit. The shipboard shuttle bays stack just fine.
 

Offline AlStar

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Re: Logistics and cargo/colony ship design
« Reply #4 on: September 10, 2021, 08:44:33 AM »
I'm normally a bit of a miser with my cargo ships, so I don't think I've ever dedicated more than one or two bays for any (non-military) freighter or transport - assault transports being the exception, as you don't want your troops leisurely strolling out of the ship into hostile fire. Occasionally I'll make some with zero, but I'll usually SM those up to one once they get to the destination planet and I realize I can't unload them.  ::)

I pretty much always make my freighters in 25k-ton multiples, as that's the size of one (auto)mine. I hate delivering fractions of things, and so avoid it whenever possible.
 

Offline Arwyn

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Re: Logistics and cargo/colony ship design
« Reply #5 on: September 10, 2021, 10:46:49 AM »
At game start, my usual freighter is one hold, 2 shuttle bays. I dont bump that up until I have enough engine power and shipyard space to drive a large cargo bay.

Honestly, I use my freighters as seed ships to get colonies started, and then move a lot of the lift over to civilians. I drop initial infrastructure, a mass driver and automines into a system, and let the civilians handle the rest. It takes longer at start, but once you have multiple shipping lines going, its MUCH faster and cheaper than managing it all yourself.

Late in the early game/beginning mid-game, I use my freighters as express services for stuff that has to get delivered immediately, or to grab minerals that I need somewhere else fast. Even when I move to the express, I still dont tend to use more than 2 shuttle bays. Between the ship commander logistic bonus, and the colony logistic bonus (if any) its generally moving fast enough for me.