Mobile Mining quick setup

[deca.death]

500 x teladi chip plant

If you like building big and organizing enormous operations then great. Many people do. Otherwise build something 10x smaller and just use SETA overnight in few days. In this case it's fully justified.

[deca.death]

As it's hell setting up an effective mobile mining operation, I'd advice a somewhat larger defense force...

Well I could send in few battleships there, it's no problem...

Although I'm on friendly terms with everyone, even with yaki and most of pirates. Few red pirates is max I expect there, I don't think xenon will stray in that sector. It has nothing, no stations and it's a deadend. BTW I'm thinking of blocking the gate, should i put defend position right in front of it?

complex in Weaver's Tempest:

Well it's quite large, you must end chip phase in days. There is button for shorten huge links there btw ; )

[MarvinTheMartian]

Although I'm on friendly terms with everyone

So am I, for now, and I've never had a problem, even the "red" pirates seem to ignore the operation including dozens of freighters (sans Jumpdirve) in convoy going back and forth across 3 sectors.

As I think I've said before, a TM on defend position with a few fighters on board should be all you need for defence, and if not then it'll give you time to react i.e. send something bigger in, still not worth going in yourself!

[Infekted]

Ok so that time I forgot to empty my nividium TL resevoir for an hour and my entire niv fleet filled up. 50 of my 350 niv miners reverted to having the orders "none". Was for some other completely different reason then? And in case you were wondering, you can only collect niv with the collect rocks command. Can you understand my confusion? Why else would they stop?
Also I was slightly wrong on one aspect of mine minerals. They will go and mine the densest debris patch of the correct type. I think, basically its not necessarily the nearest one as I've had some ignore the patch I put them next to and head to one completely across the map. They all mined the same spot, but it was fairly annoying as it lengthened delivery times considerably.

Turning off training works, except most of my collectors are logisticians. Have to be to take that many waypoints.
From pure lazyness on my part. Made one waypoint list of all miners and loaded it into all collectors.
Works well except I had to set different collectors to different percentages or they sort of fell into this wierd lockstep. Even tho they destination lock, they all seemed to be trying to empty the same miners, unless I set one to 1%, another to 2% etc. When I did that it worked fine.
And yes, their orders uaully read something like "moving to miner X". But they do not actually move. And therefore don't train/draw wages.


Glen - How are you finding supply/consumption? I.E. I found a total of 230 miners, slighly over supplies 50 crystal fab Ls and 250 micro fabs. You are powering that monster with mines too? How many factories are not supplied by the mines? And are you making enough silicon from your 160 miners?
What I'm thinking is enough of us post our findings with this, we should be able to tell if asteroid yield has effect on speed of mining. And roughly how many miners is equal to X yield mine etc.

[deca.death]

Ok so that time I forgot to empty my nividium TL resevoir...

You should not do this manually, exactly because of that. There are cheap and abundant TL+ ships around, all you need is a good CLS setup. I'm tying to automate my game as much as possible, from fuel resupply to missiles, flails/hammers, fighters, weapons from weapon factories, mining etc. I succeeded for the most part.

[Infekted]

Ok so that time I forgot to empty my nividium TL resevoir...

You should not do this manually, exactly because of that. There are cheap and abundant TL+ ships around, all you need is a good CLS setup.

Um apart from ther fact I have a stack of ten TLs as storage. And you HAVE to sell ships full of niv manually... There's no "automatic" method of niv exploiting ;p

[deca.death]

I have a stack of ten TLs as storage. And you HAVE to sell ships full of niv manually... There's no "automatic" method of niv exploiting ;p

Hmm yes, I see, that could be a problem ... You could do some CLS setup to fill all those ships but you would need reset whole cag setup each time new TL batch arrives. Plenty of messy work both ways. BTW What do you do with all that money anyway? ; )

[Infekted]

Normally its not really a problem. I go sell 5 TLs full every ten minutes pulling in 500 or so million credits. What I do, is I have 5 TLs docked at the shipyard that are part of the CLS chain. Then I buy 1 more that isn't. I transfer the goods into it, sell it and repeat. So i never have to rewrite the CLS waypoints.
I am playing a vanilla game atm. Now I don't really like vanilla, but I wanted to see how much I could abuse known "exploits". So I've been niv mining like a crackhead and cloning like its going out of fashion.
As for what I do with the credits.. I spam ships. I have blockaded every xenon sector. I have almost blockaded every pirate sector. Then I am going to put together my "terran annihilation" fleet. Gonna need 100-200 M2s and 1000-2000 M3s for that xD
Amusing thing is, I can go build a complex that costs me 1 billion.. In the time its taken to build it. I have made a lot more than 1 billion.
I also have TLs full of cloned kit sat in shipyards. PSPs, SBSCs, PPCs etc. Annoying thing is I cant clone FFAs so have had to build actual factories D=

[glenmcd]

Each rock collecting ship, regardless of the type of ship, official speed, hull integrity, turning speed etc collects 1,2 or 3 rocks every 20 seconds. Looks like the average is around 1.3 to 1.4 (a guess). With all silicon mines used (L size) in Ore Belt, they will produce 4954.3 silicon pieces per hour. For rock collecting ships to match that, you require 21 ships. Assuming you use Mercuries fitted with special command software, rock collectors, youre up for around 220K per ship. Multiply that out and the total cost is 4.62M. The cost of the 29 silicon mines (Teladi is cheapest I think) is 26.2M plus 7.27M if you connect them with CCKs. So if you forget about silicon mines and collect rocks instead your up front costs are cut by 87% for the mineral component. You also need to take into account static costs such as TLs used to move the minerals to your complex.

As microchip complexes are limited only by the number of factories present and the silicon available, with a fleet of 230 miners, you're looking at a chip production capacity around 11 times compared to using silicon mines. You can easily get 70 chips into a balanced complex in Ore Belt, thus with your fleet you could feed 770 chip fabs. Another way of looking at this is that you can build whatever size complex you want in any sector you want rather than only in sectors with sufficient minerals present in the form of asteroids.

When you've completed the hub you can get most of your credits back by flying the Mercuries back to the shipyard and selling them. Whatever upgrades you got in regards to software, engine tuning etc you get back 100%. With mines you get additional lag both IS and OOS, increased sector loading and unloading times, nearly ten times the up front cost, and no way of selling them when the hub is complete. If you don't feed them they flash yellow. If you destroy them they continue to lag until they go away, perhaps in a few game weeks. One disadvantage of collecting rocks is that you need to manage them, unless you can get it happening unattented. Others have using CLS but I haven't as yet.

I did a study of rock collecting some time back and detailed my findings in a thread somewhere here. I was focussing on Nividium at the time.

[deca.death]

Gonna need 100-200 M2s and 1000-2000 M3s for that xD

I'm guessing with this kind of operation you'll need to conduct everything (more or less) OOS turning this game to a ugly 2d strategy ; ) Well doesn't matter, it can be fun but equipping all those ships most certainly isn't. I prefer playing on small scale, you know, when boarding pirate centaur with 50% hull is a major bump in your assets value. I have the theory then this game is somehow best playing as intended, when you try to take it out of it's frame (like reviving yaki economy or trying to exterminate a faction) it somehow becomes hollow, experience is not as good as you've expected.

Speaking of gate blockade .... nah, this goes into new thread...

[Infekted]

Actually doing most stuff OOS so there's an actual challenge to the game... An actual reason to have an uber fleet of doom. IS, particularly with direct player involvement is far too easy.

[deca.death]

I did a study of rock collecting some time back and detailed my findings in a thread somewhere here. I was focussing on Nividium at the time.

Impressive information. That mobile mining is really lucrative, not just nvidium, you could set up an operation in one sector and feed all your factories everywhere, never to build another mine again. If you need help with CLS everything is more or less described in my UPDATE post, if you need more info, ask.

I'm guessing it would be possible (to get rid of excess ore or just to make money) set up few of trading stations that would deal in ore/silicon throughout the space, and feeding them with CLSes, right?

[Infekted]

Each rock collecting ship, regardless of the type of ship, official speed, hull integrity, turning speed etc collects 1,2 or 3 rocks every 20 seconds. Looks like the average is around 1.3 to 1.4 (a guess). With all silicon mines used (L size) in Ore Belt, they will produce 4954.3 silicon pieces per hour. For rock collecting ships to match that, you require 21 ships. Assuming you use Mercuries fitted with special command software, rock collectors, youre up for around 220K per ship. Multiply that out and the total cost is 4.62M. The cost of the 29 silicon mines (Teladi is cheapest I think) is 26.2M plus 7.27M if you connect them with CCKs. So if you forget about silicon mines and collect rocks instead your up front costs are cut by 87% for the mineral component. You also need to take into account static costs such as TLs used to move the minerals to your complex.

As microchip complexes are limited only by the number of factories present and the silicon available, with a fleet of 230 miners, you're looking at a chip production capacity around 11 times compared to using silicon mines. You can easily get 70 chips into a balanced complex in Ore Belt, thus with your fleet you could feed 770 chip fabs. Another way of looking at this is that you can build whatever size complex you want in any sector you want rather than only in sectors with sufficient minerals present in the form of asteroids.

When you've completed the hub you can get most of your credits back by flying the Mercuries back to the shipyard and selling them. Whatever upgrades you got in regards to software, engine tuning etc you get back 100%. With mines you get additional lag both IS and OOS, increased sector loading and unloading times, nearly ten times the up front cost, and no way of selling them when the hub is complete. If you don't feed them they flash yellow. If you destroy them they continue to lag until they go away, perhaps in a few game weeks. One disadvantage of collecting rocks is that you need to manage them, unless you can get it happening unattented. Others have using CLS but I haven't as yet.

I did a study of rock collecting some time back and detailed my findings in a thread somewhere here. I was focussing on Nividium at the time.

I dont care about cost. Just being able to accurately predict how many miners I need for x amount of factories.
I know for a fact that, my 230 miners is slightly over supplying 50 crystal Ls and 250 micochip factories. I think 200 would do the job. As thats what I have set up now. So basically the equivilent of 500 chip factories. So basically 2 miners supplies 5 S sized factories or one L sized factory. Sound about right to you?

[Infekted]

I did a study of rock collecting some time back and detailed my findings in a thread somewhere here. I was focussing on Nividium at the time.

Impressive information. That mobile mining is really lucrative, not just nvidium, you could set up an operation in one sector and feed all your factories everywhere, never to build another mine again. If you need help with CLS everything is more or less described in my UPDATE post, if you need more info, ask.

I'm guessing it would be possible (to get rid of excess ore or just to make money) set up few of trading stations that would deal in ore/silicon throughout the space, and feeding them with CLSes, right?

It's possible to sell off a small amount of over flow, but I found to my cost you cant sell that much. You are far better off building complexes that use all excess, then sell the product. Even if you under supply the complex, its better than over supply imo.

[deca.death]

It's possible to sell off a small amount of over flow, but I found to my cost you cant sell that much.

I didn't mean on any specific situation, instead of building 10 mines for profit you might setup small mobile mining operation in beginning of a game as a legitimate earning method.

[Infekted]

Yep that'd work. I'd actually build one mine on an asteroid, then dump mobile mined minerals into it. Gives you a base to sell from,

[Infekted]

Ok next thing. Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just my game?

If you to add a waypoint, usually a ship. And there are more than 100 ships in that sector, some of them will be missing from the list of possibles?
The more there are the less are included, i.e. if there are 200 ships in the sector, only half are on the list. You have to go back and repeat the step from the beginning, and hope that the ship you want is in the list.
Its only really an issue with massive mining fleets, but it is a very annoying one. When writing that many waypoints things are hard work enough tbh. Number blindness etc.. Last thing I need is to have to go back steps, or put things out of sequence. Makes debugging a nightmare.
My fix is to write up the CLS routes before new miners enter the mining sector. But it's a bit of a pain really.
It's also why I don't have large fighter fleets in the hub sector, I defend it from the gates outside, as it makes making CLS routes for my Hub ships annoying.

[Flozem]

Yes - I noticed it both in the current and my previous game... you have to re-issue to waypoint selection order and pray that the ship is included this time around...

[deca.death]

.

Game wasn't certainly designed for THAT level of abuse, guys.

[glenmcd]

hey one thing I just noticed (have no idea whether this has been mentioned before) was a dramatic lag factor that came in between when I went off to complete Final Fury and when I got back. I was away from my mining fleet for a while, and just assumed that all would be okay, the mining ships would be full when I got back and so would quickly replenish the complex with silicon. What I found was that with SETAx10 on in UK sector looking at sky with no HUD, my framerate was around 110 fps before and 4 fps (!!!!!!) after. I went through a long list of experiments to try to determine what was causing this. Finally I worked out that ships that had a full cargobay and were currently collecting rocks, increased CPU overhead enormously. As I went through my 500 Mercury Haulers transferring silicon into Mammoths and then into the complex, the framerate became noticably better at around the half way mark (only 250 ships trying to collect rocks into a full cargobay). As I got near the end I kept taking readings, and was surprised at how much lag was introduced by just a few ships in this situation. I'd guess that if I was using 1000 ships instead of 500, framerate would be 3 rather than 4. But the first one dropped fps by 5 - 10. Anyways best just to be aware of this. If you command all ships in sector to fly to sector [current sector], this is the same as commanding each ship to do nothing. The rock collecting stops and the framerate returns to normal. This is a good way to test how much lag you're getting from your rock collecting ships. With no full cargobays, I'm not seeing a noticable drop in fps even with the 500 ships.

I'm actually on a new start now and upped my complex spec to 500 x chip plants, 250 sunoil / flower farm, 150 crystal L and 50 x SPP XL. 500 rock collecting Mercury Haulers (6000 cargobay) feed this with silicon with tons to spare. To keep up with supply I'm using a dozen Mammoths and a few helpful keyboard macros. Even with the macros it's not easy keeping up with silicon supply. Looks like I have to be attending to the xfer around fifty percent of the time. If I don't attend the xfers, the ships get full and introduce lag. If I stop all ships from collecting, that's cool but starting them all again is a pain (even with a single key press macro for starting each ship). @deca.death has done the full automation thing now but I am hesitant to attempt to do this with such a large fleet. One possible way around this is to use a programmable text editor to create a file which can be loaded into CLS2. At moment I don't know where it is or what its format is. If these can be found then I'd suggest that the rest will be easy to do, even if one does regular new starts. It would also make the sharing of the automation stuff possible, so that not everybody wanting to do this needs to set it all up for themselves.