
So to give you guys a brief summary, here is what I was planning on doing:
- Use a complex in Argon Prime to refine silicone ore to silicon wafers
- Use mining ships to assign them to the station and set them to "mine for station X"
- Use trading ships to sell said silicon wafers
Some basic groundwork to start of with:
The complex is set up with a manager, enough M landing pads, ore storage, container storage, energy production and silicon refineries. So basically the ships should be able to go out to the belt, mine some silicon and when full, deliver it to the station for refining.
Now to the problems that I've noticed:
- when the mining ship was assigned before to automining, nothing works at all
- when I purchase a fresh miner from a wharf and assign it to mine for the station, it will proceed to fly to a belt and mine silicone until the cargo is full
- however once the cargo is full, it takes the ship ages to fly to the station (not in the sense that the ship isnt using travelmode, but rather like the ship is idling and doing nothing, until it finally moves - where talking 20min realtime here, no seta though)
- once the ship finally arrives at the station it proceeds to dock, but it will only deliver a fraction of the silicon in the cargo hold
- then it undocks, flies to another docking bay, docks again and delivers another small fraction
I can confirm the station to be working if I tell the ship to dock and unload manually.
I haven't sat through the whole process of emptying the cargo, but this can't be as intended.
How I understand it should work is, the miner gets assigned from the manager to mine silicon for the factory (if I have multiple ores I need, the manager then decides what the ship is supposed to mine). After mining the ship should fly back to the station, dock, deliver the entire cargo hold (or idle until there is enough storage capacity on the station) and then the cycle begins all over.
Has anyone got this to work?
When I set the ships to automine without assigning them to the station, they can't sell it to the station. Instead the fly to the nearest NPC silicon refinery and sell it there.
I'd be really glad if you guys could share your experience and maybe some workarounds, but I think this needs to be subject to some patching.