Best way to make a resupply ship?

[thorfrog]

What the best way to make a resupply ship early on in the game? I've been playing with solar panels and supplies.

[TaeraRepublic]

Early? dont know about early, but i remember making a ressuply ship which had one (!) ressuply storage, but 15-20 solar panels.


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[Nitram Draw]

Depends on how far away from a resupply base you will be. The cheapest is to use an LC with max engines, bridge, life support, quarters and fill up the rest of the space with supply components. It will hold a few thousand supply points.
Solar panels are great for an attacking fleet but if you have a repair bay available a resupply pod is even better. Use it every turn and it will be repaired. You can add thousands of points per turn this way. You just have to remove the supply ship from the fleet to use it and the recombine it into the fleet to have the supply distributed at the end of the turn.

[Trachmyr]

The best way is with a little modification to the componets.txt file...

Find Supply Storage I, II & III and add this ability to those componets:

Ability 2 Type := Cargo Storage
Ability 2 Descr :=
Ability 2 Val 1 := 0
Ability 2 Val 2 := 0

(Don't forget to change the number of abilities to 2)

This will allow supply storage to count towards the 50% cargo restriction on transports... thus allowing "Tanker Ships"

It may also be useful to at least double the number of supplies that they hold, so they can atleast equal engines in capacity per ton, or cut tonnage/tonnage structure/costs in half.


As for solar collectors, I only put them on small scout type craft, not on tankers. The reason is that you have to have A LOT of collectors to resupply a fleet! It's better just having a couple of tankers that run supplies from your planets to the frontier/front-line.


P.S. I also usually add a repair bay to my larger tankers, so they can refuel/refit my main attack fleet... equip them with a cloak/stealth armor to keep them safe just on the otherside of the warp point.


[This message has been edited by Trachmyr (edited 16 April 2001).]

[rdouglass]

I have to differ with Trachmyr. I do use Solar Collectors in fleets and on tankers. I don't do the "cargo mod" for supply modules, but I've found that 1 Sol Collector on each ship (the space IMO is worth it) and 2 cruisers with a mix of SC's and Supply Modules (working in the tanker mode) works great. I can go a LONG way without being too low on supplys. and the occasional trinary system fills your tanks real fast...

Besides, Solar Harnessing is a cheap and effective research early on in low tech games...I really like the Sails...

[Puke]

yeah, the solar tech is good to get into early, you will need the sails later anyway, and they can even be a cost savings over some engines. i cant usually afford to put one SC per ship until i have LCs, but its really easy to field dedicated SC ships with each small fleet.

[Trachmyr]

Well, I am using a mod that increases the supply cost for (lower tech) engines, and requires a lot more engine to move your larger ships (i.e., a deystroyer needs 12 engines for spped 6... a battle cruiser needs 24!), but supply storage can hold 4x normal (it's needed with the engine mod I'm using)... so my reasons for no solar collectors on "tankers" is skewed (when you figure my large tankers have around 100K supply (but it goes fast!), it would take many years to refill the ship... and since a deystroyer with MK1 Ion engines will use 1800 supply per turn!)

So in the normal game, yes solar collectors work great (besides they lead to solar sails wich are also wonderful).

[rdouglass]

quote:

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Originally posted by Trachmyr:
Well, I am using a mod that increases the supply cost for (lower tech) engines, and requires a lot more engine to move your larger ships (i.e., a deystroyer needs 12 engines for spped 6... a battle cruiser needs 24!), but supply storage can hold 4x normal (it's needed with the engine mod I'm using)... so my reasons for no solar collectors on "tankers" is skewed (when you figure my large tankers have around 100K supply (but it goes fast!), it would take many years to refill the ship... and since a deystroyer with MK1 Ion engines will use 1800 supply per turn!)

So in the normal game, yes solar collectors work great (besides they lead to solar sails wich are also wonderful).

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Sounds like a decent mod! (more closely resembles SE3 in terms of engines) I'm kinda' reluctant to many of the mods out there, but I like the sounds of that one. I'm wondering if you could 'mod out' the Solar Col's in your mod and just have Solar Sails for the Harnessing tech. Either that, or they (SC's) would seem to be almost useless...

[Trachmyr]

Absoulutly Not!

Solar collectors are useless for big ships... unless you have hundereds of tons of them, but they are great for lihgt ships and scouts! Escorts still have 6 max engines, and a few solar collectors can eaisly fefuel them in a couple of turns. I'm trying to keep light ships useful through-out the game, thus this is another benifit of them. Additionally I've modded solar collectors as well... they always produce 250 supplies per star regardless of their level, but they get smaller as they advance (20,10,5 tons). The way they are now, they work great for smaller ships, but will not supply an attack fleet (this is how I wanted it). Additionally, Solar sail have been modded to work exactly like an engine... a big slow engine that uses no supplies, thus you won't see dreadnoughts attaching a solar sail to get 3 more movement... but you will see them on transports, colony ships and some defense ships.

As for my mod, it's going very well... I'll release it as soon as I can, but I need CUSTOM GROUPS to be activated before I can do so (and a lot of work on the AI, as I've had to rewrite all AI files!)