How do I calculate ship supply usage?

[Will]

The sail does cause supplies to be used. To calculate supply usage for a ship, it's (Total_Movement) * (Engine_Supplies_Used). So your ship has 10 movement, and the total supplies used by the engines is 6*10=60. 10*60=600, and your cloak adds another hundred. And it is supposed to use supplies, because technically, in the game, the engines are still "working".

Your design should work fine though, since you won't need to use the cloak all the time, and there's the occaisional binary and trinary system. So break-even without cloak, -100 with cloak (from reserves of 2300, 3000 minus max supply usage, for 23 turns of cloak). Then in binary systems you get +600 without and +500 with cloak, and in trinary +1200 without and +1100 with. Even with binaries and trinaries being scarce, you should be able to travel cloaked through at least 17 systems without running out of supplies, and add on all the nebulae systems

Of course, I would say your biggest worry here would be mines, not supplies

[Fyron]

[EDIT]Guess this is unnecessary cause Will posted while I was typing it. Oh well...[/EDIT]

Engines use supplies for each space the ship moves. The way that this supply usage is calculated is thus:
#engines*10=supplies per space moved
Therefore your ship would use:
6 engines*10 supplies per engine per move=60 supplies per move
In each turn, it would use:
10 moves*60 supplies per move=600 supplies
The cloaking device adds 100 supplies per turn, so the ship would use 700 supplies per turn.

The solar sail doesn't use any supplies by itself. Since it provides 3 extra movement, supplies will be subtracted for each of the 3 extra spaces your ship moves.

Hope this makes some sense to you.

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It's not whether you win or lose that counts: it's how much pain you inflict along the way.

[This message has been edited by Imperator Fyron (edited 09 October 2001).]