ship mainenance cost

[Nordhead]

I have a question concerning ship maintenance costs when it comes to designing a ship that mines asteriods. Early on I designed a miner using a Frigate ship and installed a robo mining 1 component an found out my maintenace costs far exceeded the amount of minerals mined per turn which does not make sense. Can someone tell me what type ship and components to install in order to have a positive mineral flow

thanks

[apache]

Well, satellites don't pay maintainance...

[DirkHowitzer]

There is no profitable way to remote mine with big ships unless you reduce the maintenance costs or increase mining gains in one of the .txt files. Though, as stated previously, sats have no maint. costs. It is my opinion that remote mining is not feasible.

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"He's dead, Jim."-- Lt. Commander Leonard "Bones" McCoy |Chief Medical Officer / USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

[Jubala]

With large sats you can remote mine without maintainance costs, but you can only have one sat per sector to mine so the flow of resources won't be great. You can also build really big ships to get a positive flow but imo the best way without modding is to build a mining starbase. 50% upkeep reduction does alot. Have to get a ship yard ship there to do it though, which means you got to have cruisers. Smallest ship that can house a space yard.

[Barnacle Bill]

>With large sats you can remote mine without
>maintainance costs, but you can only have
>one sat per sector to mine so the flow of
>resources won't be great.

The latest patch is supposed to have fixed that, so you can remote mine with every satallite in the group. I haven't tested it, though.

[Jubala]

I did. Only one sat mines even if you have 14 there.

[alasyr]

The only way I found profitable is using minning bases.Bases have only 1/2 upkeep which helps.Space station could be filled with 4 miners, it could make some minerals but not worth the trouble.The first base design which pays is battlestation fitted with 14 miners.The interesting thing about robo miners (farmers, extractor) don't get hit by appropriate racial bonuses (pennalties).

[Tomgs]

Quote:
4. Fixed - A satellite group cannot remote mine with all of the satellites present.

End Quote.

I took this to mean they fixed it so you could not mine with more than one satellite at a time. And that seems to be the way it is working. If you can remote mine with large ships with more than one component at a time that is probably a bug. I don't know if it works because I don't bother to remote mine anyway.

[Jubala]

Tomgs, I don't think it's a bug that all miners on a ship/base can mine. Ships and bases have upkeep but sats don't. If only one miner could mine there would be absolutely no point to remote mining whatsoever. As it is now that's almost the case anyway.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Actually, I agree with alasyr; a battlestation with 14 remote mining/farming/extracting components works pretty well. I have a couple of these, with 10 robo-miners and 4 robo-rad extractors (I'm using temporal tech, which requires a bit more radioactives than others), and they work great - 11kT minerals per turn, 4kT radioactives, and the maintenance is around 10% of that. The only problem is they took forever to build (space yard I component, 2 turns at normal build and 10 turns on emergency, for total of 12 turns each).

[DirectorTsaarx]

I re-checked my figures; that battlestation with 10 Remote Miners & 4 Remote Rad Extractors costs 2937 minerals/125 orgs/500 rads per turn in maintenance. But, as I said, it's mining 11kT minerals and 3kT rads each turn, so my net gain at the moment is 8kT minerals and 2500 rads per turn. Of course, the asteroids are only depleting at 1% per turn, so this station should pay for itself before too long (and remain profitable for a while too...). I think the initial price was around 24kT minerals, 1kT orgs, and 4kT rads.