With reference to my question of Aug 16 , I would be pleased to receive more help if possible.
At Jupiter I have a fleet of engined Fuel Harvesters ships which load Fuel to 100% then with conditional orders , transfer the Fuel to either Mars or Eath ( depending which planet is the nearest when ships are full ) . These vessels are working ok.
I have also built some engineless Fuel Harvester Stations , intending a tanker to wait with them , fill to 100% , then unload the fuel at Earth and return for another load. These Stations were towed to Jupiter but I cannot get the Tanker vessel orders to wait at the Stations then , when full , unload the fuel at Earth and return to the Stations to await another full load of fuel. If I try and make a cyclic order the Tanker wants to load from the engined Fuel Harvesters instead of the stationary stations. The Stations produce fuel ok and I can manually send a Tanker to load from these Stations and then transfer the fuel to Earth , but I want to automate the sequence so I that there is one less ship to supervise.
Can anyone therefore please please on the correct orders / conditional orders to use ( always assuming the Tanker can differentiate between the two types of Harvesters at the same location).
Fuel tank is not set to auto-refuel, it just gets filled up by the harvesters, if you have too many harvesters and they all refill to fast, alter the tanker cycle length to be shorter and/or all more fuel tank stations
To keep the 90% full warning from popping up while also keeping their size and build cost/down a little.
I also only put the sensors on the fuel tank, no point building them for every harvester.
And because they are non-stop refueling the fuel tank station they can keep the lowest refueling speed tech component. If I need faster speed I only need to upgrade the cheap fuel tank with faster tech component or add a hub fuel tank, though I have never found I need to do that so far with using a Moon of the gas giant as the fuel depot.
Hi Davidr, I do as skoormit suggestion. Many Gas Station Harvester + Tankers moving back and forth with delay orders and cycle order. I keep 1 tanker at Earth just in chase I need to move fuel to other colonies.
both station and tanker are 10m capacity. Maybe I’ll build a bigger tanker in the future. Some Gas station are also supply ships, but then after a while I start building without SP, cheaper. Didn’t use often as resupply point.
Funny, I use that warning as my alarm clock.
For high-volume harvester fleets (which is most of them), I try to keep enough tankers running cycle orders to keep up with production. But I also park an old tanker or two at the harvester location. When the 90% warning goes off, I use those tankers to make a quick ferry run to the closest fuelable colony (usually a moon), and I reassess my tanker throughput for that harvester fleet.
For very-low-volume harvester fleets, I don’t even run any cycling tankers. I just park one or two tankers with the harvs, and use an order template to make a ferry run whenever the 90% warning goes off.
That’s clever.
I usually throw a 50t thermal on all my large stations, because it adds less than half a percent to cost and adds ~0.02% to tonnage. But I just looked at my harvesters and for some reason I did not put a thermal on them in my current run. Maybe that extra half percent was gnawing at me at some point.
That’s a really good point. Upgrading in-place harvester fleets for new refuelling tech is a royal pain. I usually hand wave it with SM mode. I build a single station of a one-off design with one refuelling system for each harvester in my current fleets. When the station is done, I delete it, and then use SM mode to upgrade the refueling system in the existing harvester design. But now I’ll have to think about your approach–stick a fuel sponge in every fleet to keep the harvesters from accumulating fuel, and then you only have to worry about the xfer rate for the sponge. Very nice tweak there.
I decided that the easiest for myself was to give the tanker a delay order of 6 months whilst waiting at Jupiter. It now waits , loads from the stationary Tankers and then returns from Earth after transferring the fuel. Another problem solved.
I am with S810_Jr as I am also rattled by the 90% fuel tank warning, especially since I usually end up with many harvesting spots and thus would get late game warning spams.
In a similar fashion I solve this without a floating tank design but by just having a (hopefully present) moon of the gas giant as colony with only a refueling station on it. The harvesters, which are towed stations in my case, just automatically deposit everything there, where due to proximity their slow towed speed doesn’t matter at all, so they can stay focused at putting that harvesting equipment to use 100% of the time too.
If the empire needs fuel (anywhere), a large tanker comes and takes its tithe.
This also has the neat RP effect of having distributed supply bases anywhere a good giant pops up, which is the idea that eventually brought me on that development route.
