[jimbob55]

If you want to be sure that the sats and fighters are launched rather than staying in cargo....Build a freighter with launch bays for the number of sats / fighters you expect to be built per turn.

Load at least 1 sat + fighters into it and send it away from the planet and then (once it is too far from the planet to reach it in the present turn) tell it to load sats / fighters from the planet and remote launch over the planet. Click repeat orders (red circular arrow button) and it SHOULD load and launch everything on the planet.
Sometimes this doesn't work when you are loading from another freighter..so beware.
Having the freighter parked in orbit all the time means any excess cargo is loaded onto it anyway, so you could just build large cargo freighters to take the excess.

If you want to store resources that would otherwise be wasted, make 1 planet your storage location. It builds a shipyard base, when that is built the base builds another shipyard base. You keep using the newly built shipyard bases to build more shipyards until you start going into resource deficit. At that point mothball the bases produced... Put the shipyards into a fleet and the mothballed bases into another fleet to cut down on clutter. As your tech improves, you can build larger shipyard bases with additional expensive components to store more minerals.
Best to research resource manipulation and build a recycling facility at this planet at some point before you cash in your bases....

[This message has been edited by jimbob55 (edited 14 February 2001).]