[geoschmo]

Slynky, my guess is the issue here has nothing to do with the 50% rule, or the mineral mining. You are probably being bitten with the old "retrofitting to a new design in a simultaneous game" bug. Here's what happens:

On your turn, you design a new ship or base.
You give it a name, but the game also assigns an index number to it which it uses to track it internally.
You issue the order to retrofit your ship or base to that new design.
Another player in the game on his turn designs a new ship or base.
Since you are playing simultaneous on different machines, the .exe assigns the same index number to both designs since it uses a simple numerical progression when assigning index numbers.
When the host turn gets processed, the conflict is resolved by giving the players designs different index numbers. But unfortunatly, your orders internally still point to the old index number.

What used to happen at this point is your design would be retrofitted to the other players design. Even if it was technology you didn't have access to. You wouldn'tr be able to repair the components after retrofit in that case. There was a patch that fixed that part of it, but the other part of the bug still exsists. Now you just get no retrofit and nothing in the log.

There are ways to avoid the problem. If you are the last player in the game it won't happen to you so you won't have to worry about it. If you aren't the last player, you can avoid the problem by never trying to retrofit to a design on the same turn as you created that design. In the case where you know you are going to use a retrofit series, you can create a couple extra designs a few turns ahead and then edit them when you are ready to use them. You can retrofit on the same turn you edit a design. By then the index number is established internally.

I have also heard that if you put a new design in a build queue somewhere on the turn before you issue orders to retrofit to it you will be ok. But I think that's not 100%. Because what would happen if the other player did the same? It seems like that would still be a problem.

What would be ideal is if the game used a prefix or something on the internal index numbers to identify the player, but that never got done in the patches.