Newbie question!

[Baron Munchausen]

Supplies are like water. They seek the 'lowest level' at all times. So, if you build a ship with almost nothing but supply storage it will hold much more than any one warship and will 'fill' the ships in the same fleet from its own tanks. The warships will stay 'full' while the supply ship has more than the capacity of any one warship. When it sinks down below the capacity of the warships, you can remove it and add a different (hopefully full) supply ship to the fleet.

The solar panel ship is good, too, but can be very slow to regenerate supplies for large fleets. It's also far more expensive to build and maintain. Tankers are better for short-range operation. A combination of tanker ships and solar panel ships is best for long-range operations.

[CW]

I always thought supply storages are counted as cargo compartments, aren't they? I couldn't design a tanker based around a transport hull.

[Grandpa Kim]

Sorry CW, unfortunately supply components have no storage capacity so they do not count towards the storage total on transports-- at least in the unmodded game. Seems to me some mods do have this feature. .... Come to think of it, I haven't tried that trick in gold yet, so it may be possible now. I don't know.