Freighter Network

[Parasite]

Will said:
...eventually you will hit a point where the maintainence on those ships would cause problems.

I would not think Maintenance would be a problem. More Maintenance for more frieghters means automaticly more resources coming in to pay for them. It can all be balanced out. The thing then that matters is the time (distance) it takes to get back to a scrap yard.

More distance -> more turns of maintenance -> less profit -> Stretched supply lines.

This sounds like it is as it should be.

[Will]

Yes, but it becomes a micromanagement headache if maintainence is included for Freighters. You would need to find the nearest Spaceport, figure out how long it would take a Freighter to make it to that Spaceport, figure out how much resources would be returned from scrapping the Freighter, and compare that to the cost of building and transporting the Freighter. This is supposed to be fun, right?

The whole point to this mod (in my view) is: to focus on developing and protecting trade routes within an empire; to introduce real blockading, where you need some firepower to enforce it, not a little scout sitting over a planet; to show the flow of resources, instead of having them magically appear each turn; to add another layer of strategy in economic sabatoge; etc.

[Suicide Junkie]

Dude, you are way overcomplicating it.

It is a simple scrap profit give 20 turns worth of maintenance, so don't build any freighters more than 20 turns away from the scrap facility.

Where 20 is an arbitrary number depending on how you set it up.

[Will]

Yes, you could set it so there is a large number of turns that you have to still turn a profit. It would still be micromanagement I think. For one, part of the strategy of playing a mod like this would be organizing convoys with armed escort, which would take some time, which would need to be accounted for in the distance. Also, when you think about it, you would be paying maintainence for what is essentially a big cargo hold of a resource. Say each Freighter has a 15000 mineral "cargo" component. Then you're paying maintainence on that -- paying resources you already have, for resources that you "have" but can't use yet -- until it gets back to the scrap facility. Essentially, the longer a Freighter would travel, the more resources that would "magically" disappear from the hold.

[Magnum357]

I think I sort of agree with Will, I look at these Freighters as "Civilan" Freighters which would not require your Empire/Military to maintain them as there repective Corperation/Organization would do that for you.

I'm a little confused though why you would need both a Organice type Spaceyard and an Radioactive type space yard to make this work. Could someone please explain why you need to do this to make the Freighter network work right?

[Will]

The problem, as was noted by douglas and originally overlooked by me, is that if you have a facility that has SY abilities of 0/2000/0, it will construct anything (including warships) with zero cost for minerals and radioactives. Having a Mineral Launch Pad (0/2000/1 construction rate) will ensure that it can only effectively build Mineral Freighters. Same for Radioactive Launch Pad (1/2000/0) building only Radioactive Freighters.

[Magnum357]

Ok, I think I understand what you mean. You have to give each "Lauch Pad" shipyard at least 1 point of either Mineral or Radioactive Construction capability otherwise it will construct at no cost. But why do you need BOTH a Mineral Lauch Pad (constuction cost 0/2000/1) and a Radioactive Constuction Pad (Constuction cost 1/2000/0)? Can't you just get by with a Lauch Pad that has a Constuction capability of 1/2000/1?

[Parasite]

You would still need to pay to build the ship right? even if it has a "0" build amount, it means you can build as much as you want, but I think you would still need to pay for it.

So each turn you would spend 10000 * 10 colonies to produce the next round of frieghters when you scrap them you would get 10000 * 10 * 1.1 back. So you would net 10000 minerals from the ten colonies to spend on other things like warships or building more launchpads.

Also the "1" rads able to be built means that the frieghter engines and movement would need to be modded or adjusted somehow. Possibly the bridge and engines could just cost organics, then it is getting better.

[geoschmo]

What he's doing there is taking advantage of the bug where if you mod a construction queue to have a 0 rate in minerals it will build at an infinite rate in minerals and not deduct the minerals from your totals. So the answer to your question is, no, you don't actually pay to build the ship. At least not minerals. In his suggestion you would pay mainly organics and get back minerlas when you scrap it.

[douglas]

Say you have mineral freighters that cost 10000/2000/0 to build and 10 colonies with 0/2000/1 mineral Launch Pads building them. Each colony will produce one such freighter per turn at no minerals cost. Each turn, assuming safe routes and after the first freighters from each world have had time to reach the spaceport, you will gain 10000 * 10 * 1.1 = 110000 minerals from scrapping freighters. Assuming resource costs in general are on about the same scale as stock, that's quite a substantial income, especially coming from just 10 planets.

The overall rate of income is per Launch Pad and can be easily scaled simply by changing the build cost of the freighters. In fact, you don't even need a scrap return above 100% at all, since the build cost is never actually paid anyway. It just needs to be sufficiently higher at a Spaceport than at a Launch Pad that it's almost always worth taking the time to send the freighter to the Spaceport before scrapping it. Also, you could have technologies that increase the effectiveness of your Launch Pad-based mining by giving more expensive freighter hulls or components. The extra cost is never actually paid and does not affect build times, so it only affects the gain from scrapping.