Freighter Network

[Puke]

this would be a pretty heavy game change (and its not a totally original idea), but how about this:

planets generate a minimal ammount of resources. to get more resources for your empire, you have to recycle ships. recycling will give you more resources than the original construction cost.

Freighters could be of three types - an all organic hull, an all mineral hull, or an all radioactive hull. It would have to have built in movement, and such. colony worlds could have "freighter construction" spaceyards that are good for constructing nothing but freighters.

The reason you recycle them at your homeworld instead of where they were built, is that your homeworld starts with a recycling faciltiy that gives a significant bonus to recycling income. It may not be proffitable to recycle the ships without this bonus.

The reason that you would want to build a limited freighter spaceyard instead of a general purpose spaceyard, is that freighters would take a year to build at a regular yard - but a freighter yard would have 10x the build rate. due to the high cost, freighters would have to have no maintenance.

also, the high cost (and relative short build time) of a freighter is a reason that you build and recycle them, instead of just building and recycling regualar ships (which would also be good for combat, or whatever).

cheers

[geoschmo]

Puke, great minds think alike. SJ and I were having a conversation about this very a little while ago. Your idea is almost exactly what we came up with. I was thinking you wouldn't need to have the freighters be more expensive though. Say the freigthers are cheap enough to build at a colony in one turn. Then you build a stream of them and send them back to your homeworld to be scrapped. There is nothing to stop you from building them at your homeworld too, but if you do the percentages right, say 120% scrap return, then you aren't exactly going to get rich by just building and scrapping merchant ships at the homeworld. You'd need lots of colonies sending streams of them home to expand your empire. Plus if you are building merchants at home you aren't building war ships or colony ships. And that's a bad thing.

For it to work though you'd need to remove the orbital yards from the mod. Otherwise you could get around having to travel by building a bunch of space stations to crank out merchants.

[Puke]

or at least remove the orbitals ability to build freighters. in stock, very few things use organics. you could remove orgs from ships entirely, and use it as a pre-req to build freighters.

orbitals would have a 0 organic rate.

[douglas]

There's one major problem with that setup, Will. The Launch Pad is vastly superior to the other two space yard types for any kind of construction. If that's really what you want, fine, but if the Launch Pad is intended solely as a freighter-building place, you need to change it. Maybe make one version for mineral freighters (0/2000/1) and one for radioactives freighters (1/2000/0) and require both resources for non-freighter ships?

[Will]

AH! See, I knew I was missing something important. The mineral-only Launch Pad and the radioactive-only Launch Pad sounds right. And change non-freighter hulls to require some minerals and rads, to ensure that all ships cost at least some in both resources.

[douglas]

Better change that organic rate to 1. 0 would mean that the organics cost is completely ignored in construction, both in time to complete and in resources actually paid.

[geoschmo]

So you are saying a yard with organic rate of zero can still build with organics? I don't remember hearing of that before.

[Captain Kwok]

Yes. It will build with an unlimited number of organics and won't count against your stockpile.

[douglas]

It works the same with two build rates at 0 - both resources will be completely ignored for construction at that location. All three 0's will cause no construction to occur at all, however.

[geoschmo]

That's interesting. I'll have to remember that. Might be a way to take advantage of that in a mod.