There's no such thing as too big

[safemode]

There's been a lot of discussion about economic models in VS and trying to map a realistic model for trade without overwhelming the game engine. The route I preferred was one in which we simulate trade using ships, without any "fake" arbituary number shuffling. The thing is, it would take a hundred ships at least constantly trading to actually move the amount of materials that bases and planets would be realistically requiring from an intra-stellar economy.

Enter now the super-tanker. The super-tanker is envisioned to be a massive ship roughly 2 clydesdales long and 2 clydesdales high. It would consist of rows of docking bays on both sides. These are small docking bays, with little room for anything bigger than the Cargo shuttles that would be in them. Cargo shuttles are not much more than Tug ships for a big cargo bin. Tug ships have no weapons, no room for anything but an engine and a cockpit.

Now, the super-tanker is a means for transporting _VAST_ quantities of goods. The Tug Ships do all the transactions. They launch by the hundred (literally) and dock with bases /planets that are nearby. The supertanker provides the tug ships with goods to sell to the base, along with funds. The tug ships unload any goods they have, then load back up with new goods and return to the super-tanker. The tug ships end up with a net of no funds and no goods. The Supertanker, once completing a full transaction with a nearby base/planet, then sets course for the next one in a system and moves on. They are extremely slow to accelerate and decelerate, turn, etc. They have no weapons. They do have a series of massive reactors not available to any smaller ship. These reactors power shield arrays that are scattered along the length of the ship that produce a nearly impenetrable shield. They are run by the Merchant Guild and are owned by the various factions that can afford them. They are flanked by a wing or two of fighter/interceptors to provide protection during tug ship trading and any attacks by pirates / rebels.

Basically, i'm wondering if any modellers would be interested in having a hand at creating the ship and/or the tug ship.

Think double decker bus, only lined with "little square windows" each about the size of the cross-section of a Mule. Maybe 50 per side, or more. No visible cockpit or anything like that, but there would be a "front" simply designated as being the side opposite of the engines. Engines would be situated behind the fuselage of the ship (no wings), with an outter-perimiter of smaller engines at a 45 degree angle outward. A similar perimeter of engines would exist near the front of the ship at 45 degree angles around the body of the ship. This would be to assist turning.

Shield emitters would be scattered across the ship and appear as 10 meter sized embedded parabolic dishes. They would have a light rim that glows. Since the ship is a huge cargo vessel, much of it's inside is open space filled with cargo. So a lot of it's power conduits travel along the outside, protected by insane shields, this was seen as safe. So there should be series of conduits, some large, some small, radiating from the center of the ship to all the shield emitters and the biggest to the engines.

There's no provisions for turrets, weapons of any kind. I'd also like to give it a new shield animation too.

Then there is the Tug ship. This would be like a mule, only without most of the ship. You have minimal engines on one end of the box, then a tiny little compartment for the cockpit on the other side. Basically like a flying brick. No wings. No weapons or anything again. Minimal shields would be available. very minimalistic.

if you had to put a style on either ship, it would probably be decidedly confed looking. Though it would not be confed made, it's built by the Merchant guild for the various factions. So take liberties as the merchant guild isn't a real faction, and these ships would be somewhat neutral.


well, hopefully someone gets interested... it would take me a long time to get up to the level in blender where i'd have a chance to do anything useful

[Miramor]

Wait a minute... What about the Elephant? Wouldn't that fill this role?

[safemode]

if the elephant can fit roughly 100 semi-mule sized ships... each having it's own docking port. then yea, i guess. I haven't seen the elephant.

[Neskiairti]

there is always the space train idea..

you got the engine/ship compartment at the front... and trailing behind it is linked objects.. like you might link a turret or what not.. (and maybe able to be shot off indivigually)
but anyhow.. its pulled from the front, dragged through gates.. and tugs would transport each section.. some might be big, some might be small, eh?

[bgaskey]

I actually preferred method of using the same ships, but multiplying the cargo of the AI controlled ships to provide the necessary amounts of goods. It would allow the game to retain more of its current feel while making the economy much better. Also, the clydesdale currently has 10,000,000,000 m^3 hold space, which is roughly a three kilometer cube and can probably hold enough food for a station.

[safemode]

so then it's just a matter of using the shuttles to do the trading, because the idea of a clydesdale docking is ridiculous. That's the one aspect of either train or super carrier type methods that is missing from VS. the whole "shuttle craft" "mission" thing.

basically mindless drones given commands by the mother ship's ai...they carry out the commands and return to the mother ship. mother ship can transfer to them money and cargo and they can return the favor

[lee]

With a cargo space of 10,000,000,000m^3, how many tugs would you need?

Even if it's extremely cheap to run the freighter, you would have a large amount of money sitting in the cargo bay as cargo. Take cotton as an example: The price is about 86 credits, cargo volume is 10. You would have cotton in the cargo bay worth 8.6 billion credits. If you put that money on a bank account and get only 4% interest, you'd earn 344 millon credits per year. That's almost 1 million credits earned per day.

Let's say you want to make only 10% profit. You'd have to make about 2.4 million credits every day.

How much money can a tug make in a day? It can carry 200000m^3, that's 20000 cotton. Buy cotton for 85, sell it for 95, makes 200000 credits. You need only 12 tugs, each making only one delivery per day, to have your daily profit.

With 12 tugs, you can get only 0.024% of your cargo moving. With 1200 tugs, it's still only 2.4%. And these tugs are a hundred times bigger than an Illama!

Now who would want to sit on a stockpile of cargo of which he can move only 2.4% at any given time?

Either you need like 12000 tugs per freighter, or the cargo space is too big.


Besides, the tugs won't have pilots; they would be fully automated. You don't want to have hundreds of pilots living on your freighter, taking up space, live support and wanting to be payed.

The freighter won't go to a particular station/planet or even stop. It would just move on through the system to the next jump point[1] while the tugs swarm out to do the cargo exchange. At least a large part of the tugs would probably have jump drives to swarm out across surrounding systems and to make sure that the freighter won't have to wait on them.

Swarming across surrounding systems might even be necessary because the places in one system where they can dock and exchange cargo are limited --- to maybe 20 places or so. 12000 tugs suddenly showing up in a system and swarming to only 20 places makes 600 tugs per place, coming in all at the same time. How are these places supposed to handle that? Even if they could land, unload and reload one tug every 10 minutes, it would take 100 hours to get the last tug processed.

How do you protect the tugs from pirates? Send a squadron of 300 fighters along with each fleet of 600 tugs? That makes for 6000 fighters that would have to be supported by the freighter. You might actually have to escort the freighter with a carrier and to escort the carrier with destroyers and corvettes. Supporting and maintaining the fighters and maintaining the tugs requires a lot of people. Fighters need pilots, and since the tugs are automated, the fighter pilots will have to work in three shifts: You need 18000 fighter pilots --- and some way to replace them when their shift is over. These pilots have families, as well as the people maintaining the fighters and tugs. Their family members eventually need jobs, too ...

You will end up with a rather large trading fleet around the freighter, including a flying city where all the people live. You may have as much as about 100000 people in that fleet to keep it running.

That aint cheap. You do need a lot of tugs. I really like the idea ... The whole thing is like a swarm of locusts, constantly moving from one system to another and wreaking havoc to the trade in a diameter of about 4 to 5 systems (or more, depending on the size of the swarm) around the trading fleet. Cool I'd call it a trade swarm --- one of the many ways of life in the universe ...


[1]: Wasn't there a limit to jump points? Afair jump points had different capacity, and the more the mass of a ship exceeded the capacity of a jump point, the more likely it would become for the ship to get lost.

A Clydesdale full of cotton would have a mass of more than 1.1 billion. How's the chance that it gets lost during a jump?

Maybe the limit has been removed, I don't know ...

[safemode]

With a cargo space of 10,000,000,000m^3, how many tugs would you need?

Even if it's extremely cheap to run the freighter, you would have a large amount of money sitting in the cargo bay as cargo. Take cotton as an example: The price is about 86 credits, cargo volume is 10. You would have cotton in the cargo bay worth 8.6 billion credits. If you put that money on a bank account and get only 4% interest, you'd earn 344 millon credits per year. That's almost 1 million credits earned per day.

Let's say you want to make only 10% profit. You'd have to make about 2.4 million credits every day.

How much money can a tug make in a day? It can carry 200000m^3, that's 20000 cotton. Buy cotton for 85, sell it for 95, makes 200000 credits. You need only 12 tugs, each making only one delivery per day, to have your daily profit.

With 12 tugs, you can get only 0.024% of your cargo moving. With 1200 tugs, it's still only 2.4%. And these tugs are a hundred times bigger than an Illama!

Now who would want to sit on a stockpile of cargo of which he can move only 2.4% at any given time?

Either you need like 12000 tugs per freighter, or the cargo space is too big.

Given your dimensions, let me explain some things.
1. You dont need to dump your entire cargo at a given time.
2. Your tugs dont need to make just 1 trip. They can dump their load, come back to the freighter, transact the money they made and load up again.
3. Transporting the cargo to the base would be quick, with the tugs able to make dozens of trips within an hour.
4. You assume that person would have anywhere near that kind of money not selling goods the way he's selling them. in huge quantities. You can't put the money in a bank and use that to compare to, because the money wouldn't exist for the trader any other way.
5. You would not sit on a vast quantity of a single good for no reason, you'd have your hold filled with various goods that are pretty much guaranteed to be unloaded in one of the bases along your route. Not only that, but you invest in some goods that periodically see a shortage, so you can unload those goods when the price goes up.

Dont confuse the role of the freighter. If he didn't trade in massive quantities, he wouldn't have a job at all. His profit margin doesn't need to be very big at all, because he really has no competition so long as it is very low. Competing with another freighter would be much more costly than the difference in profit from gauging his clients. Plus, the freighters are in a contract with the particular faction that bought it. They're not allowed to price gauge. They provide a function that is necessary, that can't be done at a lower cost by any other means. Their job is secure. So making a profit of even 1%, more than covers their costs.

So why not do the trade once, then bank all your profits and make more money in interest? Banks give you 4% per earth year. Maybe. Assuming the Freighter is making 1% per transaction. it's doing 100*N transactions per base. It's hitting a dozen (give or take some) per day. It runs 24 hours a day 7 days a week all year long. It's easily turning over it's entire cargo hold every few days, it's also carrying goods of varying costs. To put it in numeric terms.

100 tugs, making on avg 20 round trips per hour at a base is 2000 transactions. Now, on avg, the freighter may visit 12 bases across it's systems in a day. so now you have 24000 transactions in a day. Now there are 365 days a year so 8,760,000 transactions per year. Now lets use your cotton example for simplicity. That's .86 credits per unit at 1% profit. A tug can do 20,000 units (as per your example), so that's 20,000 * .86 * 8.76 million = 150,672 million credits per year.

I'd say it's much much more profitable being the freighter and trading at 1% profit, than living off the interest of 8.6billion in a bank.

Besides, the tugs won't have pilots; they would be fully automated. You don't want to have hundreds of pilots living on your freighter, taking up space, live support and wanting to be payed.

The freighter won't go to a particular station/planet or even stop. It would just move on through the system to the next jump point[1] while the tugs swarm out to do the cargo exchange. At least a large part of the tugs would probably have jump drives to swarm out across surrounding systems and to make sure that the freighter won't have to wait on them.


Swarming across surrounding systems might even be necessary because the places in one system where they can dock and exchange cargo are limited --- to maybe 20 places or so. 12000 tugs suddenly showing up in a system and swarming to only 20 places makes 600 tugs per place, coming in all at the same time. How are these places supposed to handle that? Even if they could land, unload and reload one tug every 10 minutes, it would take 100 hours to get the last tug processed.

I stated that the freighter would travel with a wing of fighters and it would travel to each base and stay in very close proximity, both to reduce flight time of the tugs (which are not speed demons, and need to make multiple ships, but also to keep them in one place to protect them with only a few fighters). So this entire section i quoted is pointless. Why would you try to force the tugs into a situation that you then say is unviable when that's not what i suggested at all in any of my previous posts? nonsense.

[1]: Wasn't there a limit to jump points? Afair jump points had different capacity, and the more the mass of a ship exceeded the capacity of a jump point, the more likely it would become for the ship to get lost.

A Clydesdale full of cotton would have a mass of more than 1.1 billion. How's the chance that it gets lost during a jump?

Maybe the limit has been removed, I don't know ...

This makes no physical sense. As long as you have enough energy to open the wormhole, the mass shouldn't matter, merely the size. Since the size is already acceptable, there should be no problem.


The freighter can travel with a docked fleet of 100 tugs about the size of a plowshare. The freighter would travel to each base on it's route stopping nearby. The freigter would then inundate the base with the tugs, which would travel to the base and unload goods and if necessary, load back up with goods from the base and return to the freighter. This process would repeat until all of what the freighter wanted to trade was done. This process could take an entire hour or so in the game, and pretty much lock the base out of any other ships able to get into any docks without colliding. You could easily get 40 round trips for each of the 100 tugs in an hour. While this is going on, the fighter wing that the freighter hires would patrol between the freighter and the base to ensure no pirates or any other hostiles get near the tugs.

Not all of the cargo would be unloaded however, so it's much more likely that trading would not last even an hour, and the freighter would load up and move on to the next base on it's list. A freighter would probably be limited to a small subset of systems, maybe only trading within 3 or so systems. It would take maybe a day for a freighter to make a round trip.

[lee]

Given your dimensions, let me explain some things.
1. You dont need to dump your entire cargo at a given time.

You don't need to --- what I was trying to say is that the more cargo you turn around in a given amount of time, the more profit you can make.

3. Transporting the cargo to the base would be quick, with the tugs able to make dozens of trips within an hour.

How many ships can a base handle within an hour? They need to dock and to undock, cargo needs to be moved: that takes some time.

You can't put the money in a bank and use that to compare to, because the money wouldn't exist for the trader any other way.

There are no banks in the universe?

5. You would not sit on a vast quantity of a single good for no reason,

Using a single good was only to make the example easier.

Dont confuse the role of the freighter.

So you basically see it as a "movable supply- and storage facility", not with the purpose to make profit but to keep the economy it's working for going smoothly?

It's easily turning over it's entire cargo hold every few days, it's also carrying goods of varying costs.

That sounds ok. I was assuming it takes longer to transfer the cargo due to limited docking and handling capacities on bases/planets, and eventually due to travel times.

I stated that the freighter would travel with a wing of fighters and it would travel to each base and stay in very close proximity

You also suggested that "They are extremely slow to accelerate and decelerate, turn, etc.".

, both to reduce flight time of the tugs (which are not speed demons, and need to make multiple ships, but also to keep them in one place to protect them with only a few fighters).

That makes sense when there is no problem with docking and handling capacity, and when the tugs are really very slow and/or small.

Having them in one place also makes it easier to protect them.

So this entire section i quoted is pointless. Why would you try to force the tugs into a situation that you then say is unviable when that's not what i suggested at all in any of my previous posts? nonsense.

Assuming that docking and handling capacities are limited, assuming that the superfreighter is very slow, that the tugs are relatively large, that the freighter would want to have an impact on the economy to its advantage etc., it is how it eventually would be done.

This makes no physical sense. As long as you have enough energy to open the wormhole, the mass shouldn't matter, merely the size. Since the size is already acceptable, there should be no problem.

Afair the limit was based on mass. Wormholes were only so "large" and thus considered save for ships as long as their mass wasn't greater than a certain amount. If you'd travel through a wormhole with too much mass, you might get lost. Make it sense or not, afair that's how the limit worked.

This process could take an entire hour or so in the game, and pretty much lock the base out of any other ships able to get into any docks without colliding. You could easily get 40 round trips for each of the 100 tugs in an hour.

That leaves a single tug 90 seconds for a round trip, which involves docking, unloading, reloading, undocking, flying to the base/planet, docking, unloading, reloading and flying back.

The base/planet would have to handle 4000 tugs (transactions) within one hour which leaves it only 0.9 seconds for each tug (transaction).

Is that realistic?

You could try it out: Get a plowshare, thrusters only 2/3 or 1/2 as powerful as normal (you say the tugs are slow), fill it up with precious metals, stone or cotton. Park it 2--5km away from a mining base or a commerce center and then dock to see how long that takes. It's easy with only one plowshare, but when there are a hundred, they must avoid collisions. What's the average minimum distance needed between them? What's a safe distance for the freighter to park? Do you organize the transports so that cargo with more/less mass is transported first/last so that you can decrease/increase the distances during the process?

You also need a way to verify the cargo to make sure that you move the right cargo; you need to move the cargo into a storage or out of one, you need to do the bookkeeping so that you always know what's on stock. That can be done automatically to a great extend, but it would still take time.


Shouldn't there be a docking limit (only so many ships at a time can be docked) and maybe a docking queue (ships waiting for docking clearance) for bases/planets? There would have to be some flying regulations so that the ships don't collide. They might have to wait at given coordinates for docking clearance and to maintain safe distances to other ships and to the base all the time.

A freighter would probably be limited to a small subset of systems, maybe only trading within 3 or so systems. It would take maybe a day for a freighter to make a round trip.

That's pretty fast. How they do that?

[Breakable]

I would propose to simplify the idea and just use some large ship with a theoretical "short range teleporter". That would mean if the ship gets in range of the base/planet of a few hundred km, it counts as docked.

This should be much simpler and faster to implement.

Once that is implemented, I would really love to see hundreds of shuttles flying out of a tanker. Maybe you could even be subcontracted to work a shuttle? And earn some credits by buying/transporting/selling goods to/from a tanker.

[Neskiairti]

a trade hub.. should have more docking and launching capability than say a small station..
think of airports.. an airport that expects heavy traffic with hundreds of planes docked at any given time.. has docks for each of those hundred planes.. even if it has to extend a convoluted series of retractable tunnels to make more docking space.

there is also the idea that a tug could deposit a 'crate' and fly off.. not actually unload goods.. just drop the crate.. think of the large ocean vestles with huge trailer like crates.. dockworkers dont go in, pick up each indivigual good, check that its ok.. no.. they use machinery to move the crate in to a waiting area.. and the ship is gone usually before they ever crack the seal.

[Neskiairti]

a trade hub.. should have more docking and launching capability than say a small station..
think of airports.. an airport that expects heavy traffic with hundreds of planes docked at any given time.. has docks for each of those hundred planes.. even if it has to extend a convoluted series of retractable tunnels to make more docking space.

there is also the idea that a tug could deposit a 'crate' and fly off.. not actually unload goods.. just drop the crate.. think of the large ocean vestles with huge trailer like crates.. dockworkers dont go in, pick up each indivigual good, check that its ok.. no.. they use machinery to move the crate in to a waiting area.. and the ship is gone usually before they ever crack the seal.

[ace123]

That seems like a good idea.

Yeah, for bulk goods like food, people aren't going to go inside and just be selling "50 Wheat, 25 Fish, ...". They will be transporting huge crates that are meant to feed 1000s? 10000s? of people... maybe supplies each of which can go to individual planets.

However for expensive or specialty goods, I can see why it would make sense to have those transported in smaller ships.

[lee]

Isn't a commerce center something like a trade hub? They could have the docking and handling capacity needed, and the cargo could be distributed from there with smaller ships. But I would wonder how much sense it makes to keep these capacities ready only for the occasional event of a large freighter docking. Wouldn't they want to have a good usage rate?

As to checking the cargo, I didn't mean to have people opening the containers on delivery to examine them closely; they'd rather verify a barcode or read a chip just to make sure it's the right container and to have a "handle" under which it's listed in their inventory.


How is cargo transported? Do they use standardized containers that come in about five different sizes? If so, what's the shape and size of the containers? Are all the containers space proof and have some kind of live support so that the goods don't spoil? What is used for gases and liquids? Large tanks built into the freighter?

The design of a huge freighter would depend on that. I tried to make a modified Clydesdale, but I don't like it very much.

What is approximately the size of a Clydesdale (length, width, height)? The Clydesdale__merchant_guild has currently a cargo hold of 200 million cubic meters. A 40 feet container like they put on 18wheelers holds 67.7 cubic meters; the Clydesdale could hold almost 3 million of those. About 15 million containers are in use[1].

When you add the numbers on [2], the "docking and handling capacity" is about 6 million 20 feet containers. That means there would be about one Clydesdale for every planet. Considering that there can be several planets in one system and that bases need containers as well, the new super freighter might need a cargo volume of about 800 million to 1 billion cubic meters to serve three systems and to provide extra storage space.

If that ship was a cube, each side of the cube would have to be about 31.6km long, plus the extra space needed for the ship systems, for docking bays and to move the cargo around.

Can you cover the energy requirements for such a freighter? I remember someone insisting on that the energy requirements for spec engines would increase exponentially for the size of the ship and linear for the mass. How much energy would that be?

A tug the size of a plowshare could carry about 147 containers. Assuming the suggested 40 trips of 100 tugs per hour, that would mean you have to handle 588000 containers per hour. That gives you 0.006 seconds for each container. How do you do that?

If you look at the throughput of one of the worlds largest harbors, they might manage about 9 or 10 million 20 feet containers per year[3, 4] now. Let's say it's 10 million and that would be equivalent to 5 million 40 feet containers. Handling 588000 containers would take them 43 days. In 2005, they had about 154000 people working related to/depending on that[5].

But of course, the way I suggested earlier is only nonsense, and yours is the way to do it ...


[1]: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization
[3]: http://www.tourism-guide.org/hamburg-port/index.html
[4]: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_Hafen
[5]: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_ ... rbeitgeber

[Psyco Diver 69]

I have a idea then, when you load your ship it takes a few days (real time not game time), fly it to where it needs to go, and take a few days to unload it. What can you do with that free time, go take a fighter and do some insystem missions. This would even out the fact of how much money these super freighters would make. Think of it like this "yes I will make a TON of money, but do I want to wait for loading and unloading?" Yes players would still do it, but alot less would and we would see alot less multibillionaires.

[safemode]

as the discussion turned, it was readily apparent that the clydesdale can handle the load of being the cargo transport of choice. Thus a super-tanker 4 times the capacity wasn't needed.

The total cargo capacity isn't unloaded each stop of the ship. So the idea that the little tugs would have to take 5 hours to unload 3 million containers, isn't contrary to it's ability to function as intended. Over half a million containers per hour is fine, considering that you have multiple stops at the same base per day if the clydesdale works 24 hours a day.

Even considering 10 stops in a single system (most systems dont have that many), you'd get in at least 2 stops in a day to each base. That's 429 million containers a year to each base, assuming an earth year. That's with only 1 clydesdale per system and our 588,000 containers an hour rate. Already that's the same as having 86 of the world's largest harbours per base operating at the same time. I dont see where your argument here is for this not being feasible?

588,000 containers per hour * 2 per day * 365 days a year = 429,240,000 containers per year. / 5 million = 85.848 (harbours). That seems like plenty of throughput. As for people working to do it handle those goods, we can pretend there are robots handling, automatic facilities, etc etc to minimize the human involvement, in the end though, a lot of people are going to be in the employment of some part of the economic process.

Your process however, of having a central location in a system and having small ships trade to everywhere in the system from this hub is what i find to be unbelievable. How do you propose to overcome the time for travel and transportation of the amount of goods when if we move those goods to each location via the clydesdale, you say i can't move the goods fast enough? The travel is infinitesimal compared to having to come from a fixed base location like a commerce center.

How many smaller ships would you need to move the same amount of goods that my method can move ? How many ships would you need to move 588,000 40ft containers to each base in a 10 base system 2 times a day. You'd need 30 ships 133 times the size of a tug to do it. or 10 ships 400 times the size of a tug. Because of the method you are choosing, your ships actually have to visit 20 bases for a 10 base system, meaning depending on the topology, your best case scenario is forcing your ships to have to travel on avg, twice as fast as mine, but typically it would probably have to be much faster than that.

So, assuming you are swarming around 30 ships dedicated to trading these goods, there is a good reason to expect your method to be able to transport the same amount of goods in the same time as mine. But you also forget, space is dangerous, and you're traveling twice as much as me in it, meaning your goods are going to have to be significantly more expensive and you're going to suffer significantly more losses from attacks than the clydsedale setup i have.

As for the function of a commerce center in my setup, i'd make them markets for the privateer. Large scale goods dont get traded there, but the billions of small scale items produced across the system and rest of the galaxy would, sort of a like an interstellar bazaar. It's a way for the privateer to trade their goods without having to hunt around for a buyer base to base. They could pick up goods and take it to market, get a price there or vice versa. I this method, they are dealing with a middle man. Now, you could bypass the middle man and sell directly to buyer, but that could be risky, as many buyers are probably located in out of the way and dangerous places. Thus, you have two options as a privateer, sell quick but at a loss of potential profit, or risk it all for all of the profit (assuming you find a place to buy your goods in the first place).


In the end, it comes down to the fact that both systems can do the job, but which one is likely to emerge from a space industry for moving large quantities of goods from one base to the next in a dangerous environment? It's easier to secure a single ship than 30, it's cheaper to transport goods if you are traveling less distance, and markets tend to travel towards that of the lower cost. You tell me how the swarm yields cheaper goods, if you can then it's a toss up.

Nobody said the setup you're suggesting is nonsense, though other ideas may be, it's simply a matter of picking a method that makes more sense than the current method. It may turn out that 1 clydesdale can't do the job of handling an entire system, not because of capacity, but because the game can't handle 100 ships in such a small space at the same time, we might have to use 2 ships and divide the number of tugs, or maybe we're over-estimating the amount of goods needed to be traded or the frequency (highly likely). So we may need a 3rd as of yet, un-mentioned system for trading. I just dont see the centralized back and forth "swarming" method as being efficient at all and thus developing in a space faring universe like UTCS. Either some type of consolidated bulk transport setup would be preferred (both from security and cost perspectives) or something nobody's mentioned yet.

edit: By the way, i only gave you 30 ships because rendering and simulating 100 ships the size of a tug per system wouldn't be practical in the game. Though, a ship that's 100x as big as a tug probably can't dock at a base realistically. The idea behind the size of a tug is that it can dock with bases and such, where as larger transports can't. So in all likelihood, the idea of swarming ships even 5x the size of a tug is likely to not be realistic given the size of docking ports, and unless you're going back and forth between the commerce center and the other base multiple times an hour, further increasing your speed of travel requirements and thus increasing the cost and risk of trading the goods.

Ideally i dont think anything more than 2x the size of a tug is doable as the ships need to dock in base docking bays, and even 2x the size is pushing it, since such a large size will make the ships physically too big for the bay openings. So the swarm method would have to deal with around 50 ships making 40 round trips between the base and the commerce center an hour

[lee]

The problem is handling the large amount of ships and containers at one place within such a short time. Other than that, it's a good way to do it.

But what you are suggesting is every base having an enormous docking and cargo handling capacity which would not be used most of the time. You are suggesting that they would be able to handle each container within 6 milliseconds. If you think that's possible, then please say how you would do that.

Just make it more reasonable --- like, as has been suggested, using special trading posts or distribution centers which very purpose is handling large amounts of cargo as fast and efficient as possible. These centers could have many docking bays and handle maybe 50 tugs or more at once. They would have all the facilities needed to store all different kinds of cargo. The large freighters would be scheduled to arrive and depart in such a way that the center continuously has the workload it is prepared to handle. Assume a reasonable time for each container to be handled depending on how fast they can be unloaded and on how far they have to be transported within the center before they reach their designated position in the stock.

Six minutes maybe per container, 100 tugs handled at once, about 600 hours (25 days) per freighter. Maybe that's still too small because you want to be able to handle several freighters at once. Like five to eight freighters at a time?

From the center, you'll want to distribute the cargo further for which you also need the capacity ...

Yes, maybe Clydesdales are way too large already. You need a working economy to figure out what would actually be needed. Maybe it's not so much that specialized trade posts would be required. Larger freighters might be wanted for transporting goods over long distances, and they'd just have to put up with that it takes a few days to load and unload. Maybe the smaller freighters like an Ilama are overdone already and 2000 cubic meters (twenty-nine 40-feet containers) are too much.


Maybe it would be a good idea to specify cargo space as the number of containers that can be transported, for all practical purposes. It's not like the player gets payed by the volume of the cargo, but he gets a much better idea about how much it is when you tell him "it's 5 containers" than he does when you tell him "it's 338.5 cubic meters". It makes things more realistic. Cubic meters only concern those who fill the containers --- and only because it's a reasonably small and widely enough used unit for practical purposes --- not the people who transport them. A container is a container, no matter if it's full or empty.


Maybe using cubic meters instead of containers for a unit has contributed to why the numbers are so much off: Nobody payed attention to how much that really is.

200 million cubic meters in a Clydesdale? 29 large containers in the smallest available freighter that you get as starting ship for free? Even if someone gave you an 18wheeler for free, it could only transport one container at a time. How many can you fit on a container ship? 15k containers? A reasonable number for a Clydesdale maybe; way more reasonable than about 3 million containers on that ship. Make it 15k containers for a Clydesdale, and you won't have the problem with loading and unloading it to such a great extend. Make it 3 or maybe 5 for an Ilama, that would already be a lot. It might help with scaling things to appropriate sizes: A 15k Clydesdale would be 3000 times as large as a 5 container Ilama. What size is assumed for an Ilama? Let's say you put one container in the front or back or above and put the remaining 4 in a square. The Ilama would have to be 120+ feet long or 80+ feet long and 8', 6"+ high or twice that high already. All the cargo bays would be like 5:1:5 --- do you see that in the ship designs?

A space shuttle can hold only one 40-feet container[1] (and a bit more). Afair the shuttle weighs about 500 tons. An Ilama weighs only 250 tons but can hold 29 containers. That's a bit weird ...


The game should be able to handle more than a few ships at a time. If you assume that space is a rather lively place that even has whole, big stations dedicated to trading local and speciality items in relatively small amounts, than there would be lots of traffic related to that, besides all the other traffic from cargo transports throughout the system, people commuting, recreation, police forces, pirates and whatever ...


[1]: http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761 ... uttle.html

[safemode]

A realistic amount of cargo swapping may make a lot of base designs impossible to exist. Most have only a couple docking bays, this may be unrealistic in actuality considering the population and purpose of the bases.

The problem with the bases being able to handle the volume of trading would occur on any system imagined. Either we need to increase the size of docking bays to handle extremely large ships or a method for docking large ships outside of bases or we need to reduce the required goods per time period a base receives. As most players will attest, the llama just makes it in many docking bays, there's not much room for larger ships. Either the bases would have to be redesigned, a means to dock externally would have to be implemented or some degree of ignoring reality will have to be made when it comes to the time it takes to unload and load cargo.

by the way, if i have 40 round trips an hour, then i'm giving each side 30 minutes of loading/unloading. so 30 / 40 leaves 45 seconds spent in the base/clydesdale each trip. Now you can divide that 45 seconds by how many ships you can dock at the same time at a base. That constitutes how much time is spent on each ship. I dont know where you're getting milliseconds from. Even if 1 ship docked at a time, that's still 450ms per ship, much higher than your 6ms.

In any case, the limiting factor is the base's docking size limit and number of docking ports. You'd be limited in your swarm setup just as much as i am. Thus, you can't trade the goods any faster or in any higher quantity once you reach the base than i do. The main difference is i'm bringing my "commerce center" with me. You have to keep going back to yours, wherever it happens to be in the system.

So either we are left with the base's inability to trade in a realistic quantity physically, we pretend unloading/loading is instant and for a while the base is bombarded by trading vessels, we give larger ships the ability to dock outside of a base, or we think of another means bases can recieve cargo that is more believable.

[lee]

A realistic amount of cargo swapping may make a lot of base designs impossible to exist. Most have only a couple docking bays, this may be unrealistic in actuality considering the population and purpose of the bases.

Dunno, what happens with the ship inside the base? Even if bases have only so many openings through which ships can get in and out, they could have room inside for the ships. Three openings, for example, with docking clamps inside for 10 ships each already makes 30 ships that can be docked at the same time.

If you think of the commerce center, it's pretty much like a shopping mall which would have to have parking places for the hundreds or thousands of ships in which all the customers arrive.

However, commerce centers could have some sort of drive through for the customers to enter/leave the station. While they are aboard the center, the autopilot parks the ship close to the station and picks them up later when they want to leave.

Either we need to increase the size of docking bays to handle extremely large ships or a method for docking large ships outside of bases

Well, you're in space, and cargo transport is mostly automated. Just connect freighter and station with docking tunnels and run the containers through the tunnels on conveyor bands, or pull them electromagnetically through the tunnels. It would still take long to move so many containers, but it wouldn't block the docking bays so that the station could proceed with it's normal business while exchanging large amounts of cargo.

or we need to reduce the required goods per time period a base receives.

Indeed. Why would a base need hundreds of thousands of containers very frequently? If it does, it's maybe at the wrong place.

by the way, if i have 40 round trips an hour, then i'm giving each side 30 minutes of loading/unloading.

One hour has 3600 seconds. 3600 seconds/40 makes 90 seconds. Since you are staying one hour, you have that same hour for loading and unloading on each side.

so 30 / 40 leaves 45 seconds spent in the base/clydesdale each trip. Now you can divide that 45 seconds by how many ships you can dock at the same time at a base. That constitutes how much time is spent on each ship.

Yep, you got 90 seconds for one round trip. You can dock several ships at the same time, but still every ship has no more than 90 seconds for one round trip. If it spends more time docked, it cannot make 40 round trips.

How much time every ship can stay docked depends on how long it takes to fly back and forth between freighter and base. The longer that takes, the less time is left for the ship to dock.

I dont know where you're getting milliseconds from. Even if 1 ship docked at a time, that's still 450ms per ship, much higher than your 6ms.

The 6ms is related to a single container, not a single ship. The plowshare has a cargo space of 10000m^3, so assuming a 40-feet container that holds 67.7m^3, it can carry about 147 containers. 100 tugs the size of a plowshare, making 40 trips each within one hour, adds up to 4000 times 147 containers moved, which means you have to deal with 588000 containers on each side within that hour. One hour has 3600 seconds, and divided through 588000, it leaves you very little more than 6ms to handle one container.

The containers are arguable, of course, but there hasn't been something else suggested yet. Since you have to consider that cargo would frequently be transported on a planets surface as well as within a freighter or a base, and considering an obvious need for standardization, you'd end up with some reasonable container size --- and that size probably won't be much different from the container sizes used in RL now. They might be a bit larger, but give or take it a few that fit into a plowshare-sized tug, you end up with huge numbers of containers.

You might be able to empty a plowshare in only one or two batches, i. e. unloading/loading all the 147 containers at once or in two batches. But you'd still have to do something with them after/before that, like putting them together into batches before loading and distributing the batches after unloading. You'll have to move them to some sort of storage and keep track of every single one of them --- you can't just stack them up at the docking bay because 588000 (or even only 147) containers fill a lot of space. It will take time to move them around, but you got no more than 6ms for each of them, so what would you do?

In any case, the limiting factor is the base's docking size limit and number of docking ports.

It's basically the huge amount of cargo you want to move. You can do it, but it just takes more time than you want it to take.

You'd be limited in your swarm setup just as much as i am.

The difference is that I would have about 12000 tugs distributed over several systems. Make it 4 systems, with 20 docking places each, makes 80 places to dock. That's "only" a 150 tugs per place, but way better than 4000 tugs within one hour at one place. Add in some good scheduling for the tugs so that their flying time is used to give those places time to handle them, and you're getting somewhere.

Thus, you can't trade the goods any faster or in any higher quantity once you reach the base than i do.

Yes and no: I couldn't trade any faster at one place, but I'm trading at 80 places at once so that I'm 80 times as fast.

The main difference is i'm bringing my "commerce center" with me. You have to keep going back to yours, wherever it happens to be in the system.

That's no problem other than having to protect the tugs. It takes 3.5 minutes to get anywhere in the same system, so a tug trading 3 systems away takes only about 10.5 minutes flying time.

Anyway, it is required that the tugs be distributed across several systems, so it doesn't matter much where the freighter is. I'd rather have it proceed on its course than having it sit in one place and waste time.

The cargo also needs to be distributed, so why shouldn't I do that myself and charge for it and thus increase my profits (if I wanted to make some)? Since I'm specialized on it, I can still be a lot cheaper and more reliable than the competition and leave moving the small quantities to them. That's what they can do cheaper and more efficiently than I could.

So either we are left with the base's inability to trade in a realistic quantity physically, we pretend unloading/loading is instant and for a while the base is bombarded by trading vessels, we give larger ships the ability to dock outside of a base, or we think of another means bases can recieve cargo that is more believable.

Another option is to rethink the amount of cargo. Do you really need to trade that much, within such a short time?

For example, they are saying on wikipedia that one container can hold 10000 jeans. If the population was to buy one jeans every month, one container of jeans would last for 833 people for one year.

[jackS]

I haven't read up on this entire thread yet, but just to interject one thought that arose while skimming -- hierarchy via some form of container aggregation and graduated distribution centers would seem to be something worth examining. Even if the final stage for planetary distribution is something akin to the size of our current standard cargo containers (a fairly reasonable assumption), there seems no reason why all cargo moves should or would be done in only that unit. Larger cargo movers could deposit a larger distribution unit containing an aggregation of smaller cargo distribution units all intended for a particular (planet/system/etc.) granularity of recipient, and then let the recipient deal with subdividing out the contents. One imagines such larger containers would be externally mounted and detachable (Ox,Yeoman,Elephant). One would then have different levels of distribution centers commensurate with the given cargo pod size being handled (the usable capacity of each cargo pod size being some integer multiple of the previous cargo pod size). Also worth considering is that the top levels of the hierarchy of cargo pod sizes are going to be space-safe (they're external already) so you don't necessarily have to worry about putting them within a tug/shuttle, or even within the station that's responsible for their processing.

(fwiw, I would take any current cargo volume numbers for capital vessels with several grains of salt - capital vessels got mostly ignored in the last two major re-stats. Also, the Clydesdale, whenever it does get re-statted properly(which would be a lot easier if we had, among other things, a tool to estimate model volume, rather than getting the box coordinates and guessing how much is actually inside the ship ), isn't the ship you'll want to be running numbers on for cargo deliveries. If you look at http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... Clydesdale you'll note that the Clydesdale is a warship constructed at the ISM's shipyards, not a dedicated cargo carrier. The standard ISM shipping hierarchy goes Elephant -> Ox -> Mule with Reindeer as end-user shuttles. Elephant and Ox were envisioned as large-format, external container cargo vessels (see: re-imagining of the Ox), the Mule is a bit murkier on exactly what sized entities it would be best at serving, and the Reindeer has to operate on end-user containers.)

[lee]

Larger cargo movers could deposit a larger distribution unit containing an aggregation of smaller cargo distribution units all intended for a particular (planet/system/etc.) granularity of recipient, and then let the recipient deal with subdividing out the contents. One imagines such larger containers would be externally mounted and detachable (Ox,Yeoman,Elephant).

That's a good idea. Loading and unloading these freighters won't take more than releasing the containers and moving away. Smaller ships could carefully move the containers into a container hold attached to the station where they'd await their further processing.

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... Clydesdale

Hm, I looked for a page like that today, but I couldn't find it. The search doesn't find anything about "clydesdale", and it doesn't show up on the categories pages. I looked at: Vessels, Vessels:Battleship, Vessels:Cargo, Vessels:Civilian, and Vessels:Gunboat. The Clydesdale must be cursed or something like that.

whenever it does get re-statted properly(which would be a lot easier if we had, among other things, a tool to estimate model volume, rather than getting the box coordinates and guessing how much is actually inside the ship

How could a tool find out the volume of the ship when it's not possible to tell how large the ship is?

It's somewhat difficult; I made a ship which is a sphere that was supposed to have a diameter of 1250 meters. It was supposed to be 1:100, but with a scaling factor of 100, it appears rather small in the game. I compared the model with the model of the Clydesdale and figured out that the scaling factor is 2360. Now that ship looks like a planet even if it's still 25km from a station.

Really, what's the size of a Clydesdale?

[jackS]

re: how big is a Clydesdale (or, as the same technique is applicable to any model, how big is a *)

Code: Select all

\win32\bin\mesher.exe -dims clydesdale.bfxm
Processing clydesdale.bfxm...
clydesdale.bfxm -30.9034        -67.4916        -114.166        30.9034 59.4977 144.484

and, from units.csv, the scaling factor for the Clydesdale is 9.44

yields the following box dimensions:
X = 9.44 * (30.9034 - (-30.9034)) = ~583 Meters wide
Y = 9.44 * (59.4977 - (-67.4916)) = ~1198 Meters high
Z = 9.44 * ( 144.484 - (-114.166)) = ~2441 Meters long

I'd be curious to see what mesher thinks the coordinate span of your test sphere is.

[safemode]

The idea with what i was giving an example with for 100 tugs 40 times an hour was a maximum throughput. Not the avg. So a clydesdale doing rounds would likely need much less in the way of number of tugs active and number of round trips needed within an hour. It would also likely take much less time than an hour to do the job and move on. You stated it wasn't enough even at that rate. Now we're agreeing it's plenty, and indeed, overkill.

You can't have 12,000 tugs swarming around the various systems. You'd have more ships dedicated to mass trading than all the ships in the current game. While we're trying to be realistic, we are still limited to the capabilities of the hardware running the game.

As for the time for individual containers and what not, it doesn't matter how much time or what happens the moment the stuff is dropped off from the tug. The tug unhooks it's container (it's a single container, we're just expressing them in number of truck trailers), hooks a new one up and leaves. So the idea that you'd have to divide the time needed to unload/load by the number of "containers" inside the tug is void. What about partial trades? We can leave that torobotic automation magic. Getting all involved with how the load is sub-divided or organized in any more basic manner than a seperate internal container for each type of good is getting pedantic. Are we Sams Clubbing grain, or selling it in easy to hold containers? etc etc. it's all pointless discussion since it will never get represented in any more detailed way than a container per good.


You're trading a fraction of the amount i am at 80 places at the same time. To trade the same volume at each base, you'd still take much longer, because you'd still have to traverse a much larger distance. If every base needs 500,000 containers, whether you trade with them all at once or one at a time, you spend the same amount of time loading and unloading so it takes the same time, the difference is in the time to get to the bases. The logic is obvious. Think of it like this. Take your entire swarm, now pretend that each base has the goods for the next base and you have the goods already needed for the first base in your swarm. You hit the first base with the entire swarm. Eventually you finish, you move to the next base. Now you do this one base to then next with the entire swarm moving at once. Now, you've cut out the travel back and forth to a source location and you've still done the job of getting the goods from Point A to point B. Hence, you've made the job much much faster and cheaper. This is the exact same thing as the clydesdale approach.

Now, there is a way for hitting multiple bases less frequently can be faster than hitting a single base at a time at a much higher frequency, and that's if the base can't handle the load equivalent to all the bases at once but at a single base. That would of course, depend on just how frequent you could hit each base and that has a lot of variables, too many to say for sure whether it would happen or not. You gotta juggle goods back at the commerce center, one base's demands may have to depend on the supply at another base, making concurrent trading impossible, the distance to the bases is directly related to how frequent trading can occur, the number of ships we want to dedicate to this process in the game. It may turn out that which one is faster changes system to system, given the technical limitations of the game are met. Low volume favors you, since you can hit them all at once, high volume favors me, since my transit time is much less than yours, parallel dependencies favors you, since you wont have to wait for one base to finish trading to begin trading with the next, i can do well with both serial and parallel trading, because i can bring surplus goods with me for parallel trading, and i work serially.

Technically, it may be possible to swarm in some places and clydesdale in others. I would think smaller systems would benefit more from swarming, and larger systems would do best with the clydesdale, if for no other reason than transit times being much more risky in larger systems for smaller trade vessels.


Now lets get down to the real dirt. If we had the _ability_ to transport around 3 million containers worth of goods via a clydesdale (or something else), and we have the means to transport roughly half a million containers an hour to bases. How should we determine the supply and demand of planets and bases such that they are somewhat realistic, without making the game become nothing more than dealing with the supplying of these bases with these particular goods?

I think commerce centers could act as inter-system trading posts. The commerce center has "supplies and demands" but it's demands are related to intra-system demands that aren't met by intra-system supplies. It achieves it's supply by demanding goods supplied by it's current system that are demanded by the nearby systems. In this manner, commerce centers have to ask each base in it's system what it's supplying and what it's demanding. It determines what demands can't be met by the system's supply and creates a list of demands. This is the inter-system-demand list.
It then looks at all adjacent system's (presumably via some news data) commerce centers and looks at their inter-system-demands list. If any of their demands match any of it's system's supplies, then it creates a new "intra-system-demand list" This is a list to that is traders in the current system look at when looking to trade goods from a base to the commerce center. In this way, the commerce center is supplied with what another system is looking for, and news feeds are updated to so traders in that system know to go to the current system to get the goods they need.

That is the function of commerce centers that i see in terms overall trade. They offer a means for one system to ask another system what it's got and tell it what it needs without having to touch each base. It also offers a central single location for trading to take place between systems, letting native traders deal with taking it to where it eventually needs to go. Since they'd be more familiar with the system, this seems to make logical sense as well as be more efficient too.


Using central commerce stations as an inter-system trading post would provide a means of realistic multi-system trading that doesn't exist at all at the moment. This would necessitate a re-design of the internals of a commerce station, exposing a new interface of the base computer and dynamic news feed. Allowing the user to see the demands and supplies of nearby systems and vice versa, while at the same time, giving them a single target to bring those goods to in those systems.

[safemode]

Some terms may have been changed from my previous post. Ignore them, the following is how i'm currently organizing the ideas.

Role of new Commerce Center:

scans bases and planets in it's system. Gets a list something like this.

baseA -> supply list , demand list
baseB -> supply list , demand list
BaseN -> supply list , demand list.

CommerceCenter : compares demand list at baseA with supply lists from rest of bases. Creates a new list where each demand is followed by a base with the good as a supply. The bases are ordered by descending supply amounts, thus the first base in the list is the base with most of the good that is being demanded at the given base.

thus the lists look like
Demands reconcilliation lists:
BaseAGood1 -> BaseC, BaseH, BaseN
BaseAGood2 -> BaseB, BaseC, BaseE, BaseD
BaseAGood3 -> "nothing"

Now, the Commerce center does this for every good in the demands list for every base in the system. It then sums up all the available supply for a given demanded good and checks to see if the demand can be met. It then creates an Intra-system demands list based on any goods that their demand can't be met.

Intra-System Demands list
Good1 -> 500 units
Good4 -> 100 units
Good3 -> 1000 units.

The commerce center then creates an intra-system supply list based on surplus goods for which they exceed demands. This is added to what the commerce station has in stock at the time.

Intra-System Supplies list
Good2 -> 50 units
Good5 -> 700 units

The Commerce center then "posts" these last two lists to all the adjacent systems. Adjacent being determined by 1 hop's distance via jump gates
They would also post the lists via the dynamic news service, providing the player with the ability to make trades over a greater distance, but then so would NPC's.

Thus the commerce center copies the other system's intra-system supply and demand lists into it's own inter-system Demands and Supplies list. It is ordered in descending order of amount needed and price supplied, so the greatest value is first.

inter-system Demands list
Good1 -> SystemA, SystemC
Good5 -> SystemA
Good3 -> SystemB, SystemA

inter-system Supplies list
Good2 -> SystemB
Good4 -> SystemA, SystemC


Now, the commerce station needs to retrieve surplus that is demanded by adjacent systems so that it's available when they come to buy it. To avoid waiting for some NPC to make the trade, since it would hold up inter-system trading and cause all sorts of issues, the commerce station needs it's own ship or ships that it can send out with specific orders.

Thus we can expect to have our system's surplus at the commerce station at the regular intervals. Only surples that is in inter-system demand is bought, but it can be possible that the commerce station starts accumulating goods that isn't being bought. This would garner price fluctuations.

We would rely on NPC's/player to make the inter-system trades between commerce stations. NPC's and players could bypass and make trades spanning several systems if they choose, they aren't just limited to nearby systems, the lists and stockpiling at commerce centers is just limited to that for simplicity's sake. For the most part, the lists are for the NPC's and player's benefit, the commerce center doesn't do much with them internally except update them.

Updating of lists takes place at regular intervals. news is updated at the same time.

The Commerce center in this manner, is geared towards inter-system trade. It is not meant to be the middle man for intra-system trade (between bases in the same system). Though, it's lists could be used by NPC's and players to make educated decisions about what all the various bases need and have. These lists would only be available at the commerce center, not at any other base. We could say it is due to a speed of news limitation, in that the commerce center sees so much traffic from all bases and all systems that it can produce such lists with accuracy, where as individual bases would have severely outdated data that would be useless to traders. Or that the commerce centers are owned by the merchant guild and they just dont want to share

[lee]

The idea with what i was giving an example with for 100 tugs 40 times an hour was a maximum throughput.

Well, how much throughput do you need? The more, the better, but I'd think something like about 40% of your stock within one week would be very good already. To get a good number, we could try to look at distribution centers or supermarkets in RL to see what percentages they are operating with.

It would also likely take much less time than an hour to do the job and move on. You stated it wasn't enough even at that rate. Now we're agreeing it's plenty, and indeed, overkill.

I never said I would do it within one hour. I didn't say it's plenty or overkill; I was merely questioning if you really need to trade that much cargo.

You started out with a ship three times the size of a Clydesdale. I was merely questioning the possibility of moving cargo fast enough in the huge amounts involved with that.

You can't have 12,000 tugs swarming around the various systems. You'd have more ships dedicated to mass trading than all the ships in the current game. While we're trying to be realistic, we are still limited to the capabilities of the hardware running the game.

Maybe the game needs a more efficient way to handle ships. Space is huge, and there would be way more than only 12k ships throughout the universe.

As for the time for individual containers and what not, it doesn't matter how much time or what happens the moment the stuff is dropped off from the tug.

Sure it matters. If you leave the container(s) sitting in the docking bay, the next tug can't just drop it's container(s) on top of it/them. You got a chain, and the whole process is only as fast as the slowest link.

The tug unhooks it's container (it's a single container, we're just expressing them in number of truck trailers), hooks a new one up and leaves.

You didn't say before that they have a single container they unload in the docking bay. Containers of that size and mass are difficult to handle. You'd need at least special docking bays specifically built to handle such containers.

Another problem is that the larger a single container is, the more effort it will take to repack the cargo inside according to destinations. Having to repack containers adds to the time it takes to handle the cargo.

So the idea that you'd have to divide the time needed to unload/load by the number of "containers" inside the tug is void.

It is not. Sure you can make use of aggregation and save time, but that doesn't magically solve your problems. The efficiency of aggregation is limited.

What about partial trades? We can leave that torobotic automation magic. Getting all involved with how the load is sub-divided or organized in any more basic manner than a seperate internal container for each type of good is getting pedantic. Are we Sams Clubbing grain, or selling it in easy to hold containers? etc etc. it's all pointless discussion since it will never get represented in any more detailed way than a container per good.

It has to be considered when you want to be realistic. Even if it's never simulated in detail in the game, it would have to be done, and it determines the limits the simulation has to use. That has, for example, an effect on how long it takes before a buyer actually has his unit of cargo in hands.

And considering your idea about using commerce centers and supply/demand lists (below), that will already require you to repack the paracontainers along the route of transportation. You also need to keep in mind that it is mandatory for (at least) the smallest container used to be full so that the cargo inside doesn't move around during transportation. That means you will have to repack them at some time.

The huge amount of cargo you wanted to trade would require insane efforts when you give it only one hour. It involves more than just dropping off huge containers and then leave them to themselves, and you can't just ignore that.


What I'm voting for is to define a way in which cargo would be traded in the game, considering as many conditions and limits as we can think of to make it as realistic as possible. As a result, we would be able to say things like: "X containers of type A can be unloaded from ship type S within T minutes.", "One docking bay can handle this many containers of that type within T minutes.", "It takes T minutes to repack a container of type Y." etc.. All these parameters should then be used in the simulation of cargo transport.

You're trading a fraction of the amount i am at 80 places at the same time.

As I already explained, you cannot trade as fast as you think.

To trade the same volume at each base, you'd still take much longer, because you'd still have to traverse a much larger distance.

There is a limit as to how much cargo a docking bay can handle within a given amount of time. You and me have both pretty much the same limits with cargo handling on our freighters as a base has.

The problem is that we both have 100 docking bays on our freighters, but a base has only about 3 on it. Therefore, I go to 80 bases at a time and make use of all my docking bays. You go to one base at a time, only to find out that 97 of your 100 docking bays are obsolete because the base can't handle what you could.

Is that so hard to understand?

If every base needs 500,000 containers, whether you trade with them all at once or one at a time, you spend the same amount of time loading and unloading so it takes the same time, the difference is in the time to get to the bases.

That's true. But unless every base is able to handle the number of containers it needs within a given amount of time, I can't help them.

But since I have a freighter with 100 docking bays, I have the choice of either using only 3 of them or to go to many bases at a time. Going to many bases at a time increases the throughput of the freighter (though it takes time to fly there), and I'm making more profit. Making more profit is the reason why my freighter has so many docking bays.

The logic is obvious. Think of it like this. Take your entire swarm, now pretend that each base has the goods for the next base and you have the goods already needed for the first base in your swarm. You hit the first base with the entire swarm.

Sending 12000 ships to one base won't make any sense. Even my freighter with 100 docking bays can't handle them all at once.

Thinking of that, the freighter might need more than 100 docking bays, or its cargo volume is just unreasonably big --- or the amount of cargo to be traded exceeds all practical limits.

Now, there is a way for hitting multiple bases less frequently can be faster than hitting a single base at a time at a much higher frequency, and that's if the base can't handle the load equivalent to all the bases at once but at a single base. That would of course, depend on just how frequent you could hit each base and that has a lot of variables, too many to say for sure whether it would happen or not.

The swarm approach is inevitably faster in any case.

The greater the difference in docking and handling capacity and the greater the amount of cargo (in relation to capacity) involved, the more faster it becomes to go to many bases at a time instead of to only one.

That basically means that you have to swarm the more/the farther the more cargo is to be moved. It also means that when you have a relatively low amount of cargo, it can be faster to process all of it at a single base. The swarm approach allows you to do whatever is faster.