The order system has changed since I last played (2.1) and every guide I can find isn’t for 2.7 and so I’m really confused on how to set up a tanker supplying fuel to a colony from a sorium gas giant harvester station.
There’s a standing order (transfer fuel to colony) that if made into a conditional (with 100% fuel) seems like the correct process but there’s no obvious way to choose a specific colony?
Appreciate any help thank you.
I don’t have my laptop with me so I can’t check the true specifics.
The way I do it is use the cycle order box just above the ship orders alongside a delay.
For example my Jupiter to Terra fuel line:
Refuel from stationary tanker (with delay of 15,500,000 which is about half a year)
Deposit fuel at Terra
Refuel from stationary tanker
Deposit at Terra
Refuel from stationary tanker
Deposit at Terra
With Cycle Orders ticked it will do this forever. Half a year delay seems to be a decent enough amount of time for my fuel harvesters to more or less refill.
Yes and no.
If you do that via cycling orders with delay (my preferred method before changes in conditional and standing orders) you will soon have 2 issues:
1- your tanker will not transport enough fuel to keep up with increased production
2- your tankers full spam messages will start cluttering your inbox
I encourage everybody to create a custom standing conditional order setup to fully automate your fuel and minerals logistic.
ADVANCED TIP: If you want to stick with cycles orders, I would recommend then to use the limit speed rather than waiting cycles. This will allow you to dynamically change the “pickup” waiting without redo your orders entirely.
Another way is to have a slow tanker run a never ending loop between Earth and your harvesters. Once your harvesting operation grows, add another tanker or put a faster tanker on the loop.
Or alternatively just manually send your tanker group to empty the harvesters once you get the first 90% full warning message in events log. In my last game, my replenishment group was able to empty my 60 station strong FHG once a year. It’s not that much of a bother.
Last time I used the conditional orders for this, it would drop the fuel on the innermost moon of Jupiter (which was an automine colony) and I had to move the fuel around anyway. So lately I use the slow ships with zero delay cycle orders method.
The common mistake for this behaviour is to use the drop at colony function which will drop your fuel to the closest colony. I don’t remember now what other criteria are true for the colony to be eligible.
You have to use the return at colony function which will make the Ship “remember” where is coming from.
Or something like that. I am currently travelling and without Aurora access.
I use small, cheap tankers on cycling orders. As fuel production capacity increases, I add more tankers.
Yes, me too. I use small tankers everyone with 10 mil litres, I have 6 of them at the moment. Where I produce more fuel, I have more of them moving up and down, with cycling orders. Sometimes I use delay orders too, like 100 days, 200 days.
I like to move first fuel to the system where has been harvested, I have a colony with fuel station in every gas mining operation. Then I move to earth or where I need gas. At the moment fuel is not an issue
I usually tow big stations to the giants, create a fuel dumping colony on the closest moon (now requires a ‘refuelling station’), and then have a low powered, low cost “propulsion ring”/“maneuver gear” etc. permanently attached to the station to deposit everything there via automatic orders whenever full. Flight times on big stations don’t matter if your target is within 1m km. Later (or when stockpiles require it) a big tanker comes and requisitions what I need.
Problem with this is you still get the 90% full warning messages, which I think I blocked as they were no longer relevant information.
The flight time might not matter, but what about the time it takes to actually transfer the fuel? Looks like 1888 hours for your Refinery.
That’s ~21% of a year’s production lost every trip.
Without any production bonuses, your refinery takes ~2.75 years to fill its tanks (at a 1.0 acc source).
Meaning you are getting 2.75 years of production over 2.96 years. A loss of 7% compared to using a dedicated tanker to ferry the fuel.
Factor in commander and NAC production bonuses, and the loss is easily over 10%.
I calculate this as 2.55 years to fill including the commander 40% mining bonus with 0.2 years to transfer the fuel, but yes, it comes out as about 7% inefficiency here, but there is another perspective:
It is fully automated, so it is efficient in matters of the players’ time. It has always been my philosophy in Aurora to optimize things to a point where they require least attention so that the game can move on. Automatic small freighters are also a great solution, but more often than not decide against it because it simply causes fleet clutter. (you will have to care to organize and upgrade the small ships for example, and also I am still shell shocked from original Aurora slowdowns from too many moving objects 
)
Additionally I find it nice to have automatic “tankards” at sorium rich giants, which aren’t so reliable if they get siphoned to 10% all the time as you’d have to to avoid notifications. Finding a giant automatically means you expand the supply network infrastructure without having to manually set up and then again hand-balance supply bases. All nearby colonies can then take something they need from there.
So this is simply the “fuel on demand” solution. You rig a giant one time, have reservoirs, and you tap into those when you need to. Fuel demands are met, hands can move to other matters. In short: it works well, so what else could be needed?
I also had small tanker games too though, but mainly in capitol focused games where expansion matters little.
That makes me remember that another solution I had in a capitol game was ‘detachable tanks’, which were just fuel canister stations that waited next to the harvester to get full, which would then be tractored and exchanged by saved template order. Those can take time draining at home as flight time is independent once detached, and they fill time-delay free with the harvesters as well of course. Overall, this is more work on the player again though, because you have to do the exchange order manually every now and then. I’d say it is probably 1st in the stylish solutions department though, which sometimes RP tops efficiency considerations.
I hear what you are saying about keeping things simple to manage, but you can have your automation without the 7% inefficiency. Instead of building a tug for each refinery, build a tanker of roughly the same size and cost (probably a bit cheaper and a bit larger, since fuel tanks are less cost dense than engines), and give that tanker cycling orders to refuel from the refinery fleet and transfer fuel to the reservoir. Calculate an order delay (one time for each gas giant) so that a tanker is nearly full before it begins each trip. Or don’t calculate that delay and just accept that the tanker will burn more fuel than optimal over time (because making more trips than it strictly needs to). If you design the tanker such that the net throughput (fuel capacity divided by transfer plus move time needed per round trip, for some maximum moon orbit distance you wish to support) is higher than the production rate of a refinery (at some maximum net production bonus), then the extra fuel you’d burn if you don’t calculate a delay will be tiny compared to the refinery production saved, and also much less than the extra fuel your tug burns to move the refinery (which is 83% harvester modules).
It is true that a small tanker could also do the transfer, but the ring/tug can also move the station in general. Most of the time I just use the ring to get the station into place in the first place, or put it somewhere else. While it mines, the ring can sometimes fly back to receive upgrades too. It has extremely efficient engines, so it comes cheap in production and fuel use even with weight towed.
So since the ring is already on, it is easier to just use what I have anyway than to design and build a shipyard for one extra tool, and now have to handle that additional cog.
But in the end what again deters me most from the small freighter is to introduce objects with high calculation burden into the game. A small tanker would make the trip between the moon so often, it would inject so many unneeded orders between intervals. I want least calculation burden for player AND for the game. (if there was some conditional so that tankers would seek out full harvesters and drain them, that would truly make everything optimal)
But I am not arguing for the station model to be better in these modern C# times. Just know it exists and works well in making things easy.
Could you expand on what a propulsion ring/gear station is as I’ve not heard of them before.
Thanks to everyone for the discussion
Unless I’m missing something, it’s just their term for a tug. A ship with a tractor beam.
Right, a specific type of tug though that is meant to stay connected. It is a modular engine that can fit multiple types of (ideally identical sized) stations. And since stations are only rarely meant to move, and you don’t want to waste so many resources on a tug that barely utilizes the engines, this type of permanent tug uses only some of the most efficient and cheap engines.
//Edit extra info: I have been using these since ancient Aurora. The advantage is once again that you avoid micromanagement with tugging by having a permanent one assigned.(as cheaply as possible) Of course you might think that you could in that case just add proper engines to the station, but then you’d have to haul back the gigantic stations for tech upgrades, while this setup can relatively quickly wisp your much quicker unburdened propulsion rings back for the cheapest and fasted upgrades that wealth can buy.
So that is why it is distinct from a mere tug. It is a way to have a detachable engine.
Can you share the design of a ring, please?
Absolutely, here you go:
The speed is calculated to fall to a round 480 km/s after attaching to a 3mt station. Used for asteroid and gas mining, but sometimes also 300kt colony pods. The fleet also has 3mt sized troop and freight “modules” which could be brought by these in emergency, but for those I actually have equal 3mt “freighters”/tows to get them around faster.
I should really make a mental effort to get rid of the propulsion ring name though. It was born in a setting over 10 years ago where I imagined it would go around the station, and it just stuck. Removing an N to get Propulsion Rig would be a much better setting neutral name.
Huh, so kind of like JumpShips from Battletech universe, a skeletal frame with an engine for moving things around.
I imagine then that the rings attached to fuel harvesters rarely get updated (probably only when a gas giant has been used up and they will need to travel somewhere else) while those attached to orbital mines occur more often.
It’s an interesting concept and I do like methods of reducing micromanagement in this game.
Are your harvesters constantly moving to deposit fuel? I didn’t realise the 100% Fuel conditional is for any ship in the fleet so my harvester is constantly being moved due to the propulsion ring having 100% fuel. Ideally I wanted it to only set off the condition (fuel colony then return) when the harvester itself is at 100% fuel.
Hmm I guess it works out if I don’t auto-fuel the ring, eventually it will run out but probably not during the length of a game?
