I had a forehead-slapping moment when I saw someone else's post of a mod to let you put remote mining components into transports. Just add "Cargo Storage" ability to them, and set the value to 0, then don't put a description on the ability. This lets transports accept them without having to get cargo bays in first. I can get two remote miners into a small and FOUR remote miners into a medium transport. On a tiny or small world, you can get MORE resources by remote mining than from colonizing and building facilities! Remote mining is suddenly useful. There is the maintenance cost, but I've tweaked the cost of remote mining components somewhat and given transports a -25 percent maintenance adjustment since they are not warships and can have much less demanding standards of construction and performance.
Remember all the requests to make transports accept supply storage as cargo so you could make cheap "tanker" ships? It's just as easy to do this for supply storage components as remote miners. Ability 2: Cargo storage, no description, amount zero. Now your transport can be crammed with supply storage components. Nice! Btw, I've reduced the size of my supply storage components to 10kt. If a 10kt engine can hold 500 supplies AND be an engine, then a standard supply storage unit has no reason to be 20kt. Emergency supply pods on the other hand are 20kt in my set because they store the equivalent of many supply units in some "special" form that doesn't spoil or break down.
Speaking of engines, I thought it was a good idea to have later Versions of the same engine store more supplies so it's worth something besides a little bit of minerals savings to research them. So all engines hold 500/550/600 supplies, then the next type starts as 500 again. This makes a reasonable difference in the supply capacity of ships with level III of any given engine and since I changed the AI files to make it break it's research stages at level III of each engine type this helps the AI a bit.
How's those mods? I made a lot of technical changes to weapons and other components, but that's going to take a lot to describe. I'll have to post a mod some day.
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 08 January 2001).]