Posted: Sun, 21. Sep 08, 23:48
ok, thanks for replying.
Found a curious issue with this one...
I wanted to connect up a complex of 2 of these, hoping to increase my docking space (the sector where I keep my station selling Space Fuel, Space Weed, and other less-than-legal goods, had 90+ ships fighting over the measley 5 docking slots, and my own CAGs couldn't dock at all...heh). The problem was when I tried hooking up a complex hub to connect the 2 stations, the game would crash. This worked the same for both the regular hub and Ashley's Extended hub.
After a lot of head-scratching and several hangs later, I decided to try a few experiments. Here's what I found...
I planted 2 stations (I was using XTM "Complex Warehouse XL" stations, which start out empty of anything, but I doubt that matters in this case). I scripted in one ware each, in both cases scripting it in as a product and a secondary resource, just like you use in the sale office. I then tried hooking them up in a complex. The game crashed. Apparently, complexes don't like secondary resources.
I tried again, using the product and primary resource slots. The complex worked, but cleared the product slot and converted the ware to an intermediate.
After playing with the settings for a while, I decided the sales office should NOT be set up as a "sales office" if you want to run the station in a complex. My best results were to set up a station as a DEPOT, so the wares are set up as a primary resource.
Setting up as a WAREHOUSE sets the wares as products, but after converting to a complex and re-establishing the types of wares you want to carry (using CAGs carrying the stuff and the sales office auto-configuring the slots), you end up with products and intermediates listed with product cycle times underneath (always at clock cycle 00:00:00, and the station name in yellow). It looks like it might work, but the appearance is not very desirable...
However, when setting up each station as a DEPOT, and after connecting to a complex (and re-configuring ware slots), the wares get listed as products and intermediates with NO cycle times and NO station names (yellow, or any other color), much more like what you'd see in the original station.
Either way, I found that running the sales office on the complex hub clears everything on start-up, regardless of ware configuration and inventory already on the stations, and you need to start over with CAGs loaded with the wares you want to carry so the sales office can re-configure your product slots. So, if you have precious wares you don't want to lose during the conversion, pull them out of each station and into TS's first. You could pull them out after hooking up the complex (installing a hub doesn't change ware inventory), but do it before you run the sales office.
Along the way, I also found that if you convert a station from a Depot to a regular sales office (didn't try converting to a warehouse, but I guess it might be similar), you might lose any inventory you currently have in there. This is because a Depot stores everything as a resource, but on changing that to something with products, it seems all "resources" are deleted without care of the current inventory. I saw this happen to one of my stations during my experiment. Fortunately, I did all this work after a careful game save so I could figure out how to get it right, then go back later to do it officially.