'Solid State' Mobile Mined Mineral Transfer

Laden Swallow · Post by **Laden Swallow** » Wed, 21. Jul 10, 19:50

A(n expensive) way to quickly mass transfer (potentially large quantities of) mobile mined minerals within a sector:

1) Set up satellites every ~5km starting close to the mobile mining site to the destination.
2) Place a large cargo capacity ship (superfreighter or TL (hence the expensive)) to 'follow' each satellite.
3) Get any freighter with a transporter device, CLS 2 and navigational command software.
4) Tell each freighter to load from one large capacity ship and unload to the next large capacity ship. Since the transporter device has a range just under 3km using this script, with appropriate placement of satellites and hence ships, no ships will move. As such this allows potentially large volumes of minerals to be transported at an equivalent speed of perhaps 1km/s. As none of these ships will be docking there will be no wage paid, but you can also hire apprentices and disable training so that no wage would be paid anyway.

Gates will slightly slow this procedure down - consider using larger ships or multiple ships for the waypoints transferring minerals through gates. If a satellite is put ~3km from the destination station, when working OOS, a ship will undock grab the minerals and redock very quickly.

The teleport ranges have been determined from a test that has the satellites ~8km apart and the ships have to move a little ways, using the sector co-ordinates at the bottom of the sector view lets me approximate the range at 2.8-2.9km.

EDIT: Spelling.

Technojerk36 · Post by **Technojerk36** » Wed, 21. Jul 10, 20:53

Nice. I might try this out should I need to transport large amounts of stuff.

TTD · Post by **TTD** » Wed, 21. Jul 10, 20:55

Reminds me of when I was building my first ammo supply complex. I used teleport to get me from one station to the next etc,the hold length of the construction site.
Seemed quicker than flying.And no accidental station crashes either.

jonnyincognito · Post by **jonnyincognito** » Thu, 22. Jul 10, 21:58

WAT...I can tell a ship to unload from another ship using a transporter? That alone would have been useful information two weeks ago! Please explain, what commands do I use and software do I need to do this?

TTD · Post by **TTD** » Thu, 22. Jul 10, 22:06

At least one of the ships must have a transporter device.
They must be in transporter range of each other.
Use "Advanced/Exchange Goods with.." command.
If you have fitted at least one of the ships with the trade softwares (not sure which one is needed as I tend to install them all),You can then transfer any goods between ships,including equipment.

Infekted · Post by **Infekted** » Fri, 23. Jul 10, 16:42

I think he was referring to the automatic process of ships shifting goods using a transporter. Not manually doing so.

In which case CLS2 is what allows you to do this with the Load and Unload functions of external commodity logistics.

garv222 · Post by **garv222** » Fri, 23. Jul 10, 21:30

This looks like a good way to improve the efficiency of my mobile mining operation! Too bad no one replied to my thread a little while back regarding mobile mining operation improvements, but I got the feeling not a lot of people understood what I was talking about.

Laden Swallow · Post by **Laden Swallow** » Fri, 23. Jul 10, 22:07

Do you mean this one garv? http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... c&start=15

The addition of the bonus pack helps greatly as the CLS2 script allows me to completely replace the falcons used previously (expensive at 3mil per) with cheap ~300k freighters and the freighters themselves are more efficient each, being able to service multiple miners; especially when more CLS2 TSs take the goods from each respective drop off point.

Laden Swallow · Post by **Laden Swallow** » Sun, 25. Jul 10, 15:43

In hindsight, it is best to probably stick with mistral SF throughout (with the odd TL mixed in for a commodity reservoir) at the appropriate distances. You get a significantly higher throughput with these.

Infekted · Post by **Infekted** » Sun, 25. Jul 10, 16:25

I guess it depends on how fast you're collecting minerals. You could probably get away with using regular Mistrals or something unless you had a truly epic mining effort going on.
Probably best to stick the larger capacity things like a TL on the end of chains, near gates or hubs.
Or increase the capacity of the ships you are using if you filter mineral streams together. For example you are mining in three sectors with ten ships each for the hub. In each mining sector you use Mistrals up to a TL by the gate. In the hub sector you have a TL by the gate and by the hub itself then join them up with a chain of Mistral SFs. Then join the gates up with multiple Mistral SFs.
You'd need to stock each gate TL with some energy to refuel the jumpers, but that's easy to accomplish with one SF using the unload up to command. I usually stock em with 5k energy.

I think in many ways whilst this is an awesome way to get things around quickly you may find the actual choke points are the things like how fast your collecting, and how fast you can get things into say the hub or whatever.

Spoiler

Show

But a string of TLs between the hub and a gate would be the very thing for storing up things you need for future stages of the plot. Or even use multiple chains to store different things. Just feed the appropriate end and watch it back up, adding extra ships if needed.

Triaxx2 · Post by **Triaxx2** » Sun, 25. Jul 10, 17:41

Actually because of the time difference, TL's to either side of the gates would keep a back log from building, even with Mistral SF's doing the running. And then use a slightly faster model of TS to run the gates. Like a Dolphin SF instead of a Mistral SF.

Infekted · Post by **Infekted** » Sun, 25. Jul 10, 18:02

I'd say that if set up correctly the only movement the gate runners should be doing is jumping. So speed should not be the concern.
In the interests of sanity, once set up you wouldn't want to have to interfere in the running of the chains at all. So your gate runners would effectively be control points, allowing you to hold or redirect at will. As such I'd say cargo capacity would be of great importance and maybe it'd be better to go the other way and use TLs here.

I think where speed would be important is getting it from a TL storage pool into a dock. And that's also where you would need your biggest TL storage resevoir.

Laden Swallow · Post by **Laden Swallow** » Sun, 25. Jul 10, 18:18

The one down side to using TLs as 'gate runners' is that they would have to be cargo messengers (whereas if you are going from one sector to its neighbour this isn't an issue as you wouldn't need the jumpdrive). Having swapped all the mercuries I had used in the chain with mistral SFs the backlog I had been experiencing (70 silicon miners dumping into 1 TL (also mining)) has vanished.

Triaxx2 · Post by **Triaxx2** » Sun, 25. Jul 10, 19:27

Setting up two or three TL's at the end points and setting up the previous link to dump to each in sequence incase one is full.

Infekted · Post by **Infekted** » Mon, 26. Jul 10, 01:47

Well personally I wouldn't want the constraint of having to ship next door for my mining. My mining is spread out all over the place. I like the idea of insta-transporting up to a gate then jumping it anywhere you need it, I already use TLs parked on gates to shift my goods around. In which cargo messengers are required anyways. Its not a big problem they are easy enough to get.

So let me get this straight, you have 70 miners emptied into one TL (also mining) then use a chain of freighters to a TL on a gate? And untill you upgraded to Mistral SFs there was a back log getting the mineral from the mining TL?

garv222 · Post by **garv222** » Mon, 26. Jul 10, 07:18

Laden Swallow wrote:Do you mean this one garv? http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... c&start=15

The addition of the bonus pack helps greatly as the CLS2 script allows me to completely replace the falcons used previously (expensive at 3mil per) with cheap ~300k freighters and the freighters themselves are more efficient each, being able to service multiple miners; especially when more CLS2 TSs take the goods from each respective drop off point.

Yep that's the one. I guess adding a TL is the only that would improve the efficiency. I'm already using CL2. While a fully upgrade Mistral SF is useful, I found that it didn't really matter if I had a mistral SF or a mercury hauler because the problem wasn't cargo capacity but rather the speed with which a TS could go through a chain of miners. The setup I had in that post was was a "nextdoor sector" so I'm not sure a string of of freighters is necessary. Just a TL to shorten the delivery from a TM to a holding point is all I need. I might be able to boost it to 5-6 TM per TS collector rather than the 4 TM per TS I'm currently using.

I'm currently taking a break from X3:TC, so I don't know when I'll beef up that mining operation.

Laden Swallow · Post by **Laden Swallow** » Mon, 26. Jul 10, 21:21

Infekted wrote:So let me get this straight, you have 70 miners emptied into one TL (also mining) then use a chain of freighters to a TL on a gate? And untill you upgraded to Mistral SFs there was a back log getting the mineral from the mining TL?

70 mercury haulers (8000 cargo variant from light of heart) mining in Aladna hill in a silicon deposit close to the East Gate to Akeela's beacon, emptied by 2 Logistician Mercury haulers* into a Mammoth. The mammoth is unloaded by 2 Mistral SF to another Mammoth, then a chain of 3 Mistral SFs (1 'stationary', 2 loading/unloading to/from that freighter) to another Mammoth, chain of 3 Mistral SF to another Mammoth, chain of 3 Mistral SF to another Mammoth which is then unloaded by 3 Mistral SF for transport through the gate where a slightly higher ratio of Mistral SF to Mammoth due to greater distance between my satellites when I wanted to try this system, with 2/3 Mistral SF emptying the final Mammoth at the end of the system into a complex with currently 73 crystal fab L#.

Before using mistral SF any of the links without mistrals would experience a backlog, I was using stock mercuries with only 4000 cargo space however which means only ~1/4 the throughput, with the mistral SF I probably have capacity to double (or more?) the number of miners before it becomes an issue again.

*(also 8000 cargo - set to collect from a miner at 51% cargo hold in an attempt to reduce both CLS going to the same freighter multiple times - as it stands they seem to keep all the miners from filling and seem to be keeping themselves busy (for a given degree of busy) - both use the same list of miners to collect from as I can't be bothered with adding a different list to different off loaders, especially as I have 8 spare CAGs used in getting the complex started all trained up for the purpose of unloading these miners when the time came and can just cut/paste the list to another of these if they start overfilling and wandering)

# (food loop completed up to 81 argnu and 223 cahoona bakeries - increasing the number of cattle ranches by 20 each time I enter the system using the coincident factory method by TTD - with the number of stations in the complex I could add all the stations in one go without losing any due to massively reduced collision damage due to probably overtaxing my compy (stations I add to the complex start recharging shields in real time - the dropped station still loses shields down to maybe 80% before I can complex it one at a time), original plan was to have been 750 chip plants but that is probably out of the question due to my sanity (which I guess is already in question

) - 150 crystal fabs extra will probably replace that idea and just export crystals everywhere (SPP in all systems? And then just disperse these chip plants everywhere...))