Stations management tips and tricks for new players?

[mas9510]

Any tips you wish to share about managing Stations?

I want to take the opportunity to ask a question and also help other who find this post.
Q: how can you get ships to undock from internal storage? or get to moved internal storage to a docking platform?
and are there any not so obvious UI trick(s) that can help make life easier?

Thank for all to that took time to read and post tips.

[Imperial Good]

Q: how can you get ships to undock from internal storage? or get to moved internal storage to a docking platform?

There are two ways.

1. When personally on the ship or platform that the desired ship is stored at one can explicitly call it to a pad. This is done by trying to quick travel to the ship (I forget the hotkey but it is either shift+d, or ctrl+d). When more than 1 ship is present or the only ship present is in storage a list showing all available ships appears. From this list one can select the ship in internal storage and press the "call to dock" button. This requires that at least 1 dock or launch tube is free for the ship to be placed at. When a ship is called to dock it either takes some time for the ship to be moved to a landing pad or the ship is loaded immediately into a launch tube. Once at a dock one can teleport to it as normal, sit down at the controls and take off.
2. If the ship has a captain one can use the property list to select the ship and then issue orders to it from the map view. When the order requires the ship to undock to complete the captain will immediately call the ship to a landing pad and then take-off. This is useful if you want to use teleport as a means of quickly visiting a NPC station while not having sufficient reputation to allow one to teleport to the station directly. If the ship is placed in internal storage, preventing one from teleporting to it, one can order the ship to fly anywhere nearby and one should be able to teleport to it as soon as it is out of internal storage (usually immediately). One can then quickly manually land the ship again and do whatever at the station.

Any tips you wish to share about managing Stations?

Workforce for each faction grows at the rate of 1 person per minute in cycles of 9-11 minutes. This starts to decrease above 20% occupancy until at 95% occupancy the growth rate is 1 person per 10 minutes. Since it is 1 person per faction per minute one wants a diverse workforce at larger stations requiring a lot of workers. This is done by building L habitation for each faction in a cycle, keeping number of workers for each approximately the same.

Do not waste your money on maintenance build modules. Go straight for the shipyard and warf build modules. Where as shipyard and warf can generate a lot of money, the maintenance bays will never pay for themselves.

Manager experience gain for sales and purchases is based on the percentage of the total available trade amount. For this reason building excessive storage volumes is not recommended for non-warf/shipyard stations since and under or oversupply can quickly degrade the experience gain rate to as good as 0. This does not apply to warf and shipyards since most of their experience will be coming from ship construction.

The quality of experience earned by trade/miner ship captains and stations for trades depends on the sale price from the person's perspective. If they are buying at less than half way between the minimum and average price or selling at more than half way between the average and maximum price then they will get the most experience. If they are buying at more than half way between the average and maximum price or selling at less than half way between the minimum and average price then they will be earning very little experience, and even losing morale. To control this one can manually set ware sale and buy prices. It is recommended to at least avoid the bad experience gain.

Transfers do not count as trades and so do not generate captain or manager experience. One can combine this with the above information to power level managers to higher skill levels. This is done by having a station with very little sale product and repeatedly using a trader to buy all the sell order from it at maximum sale price and then transferring the wares back to the station to be immediately sold again. If the station has enough ware types one can abuse this to power level a manager to 4 stars in around an hour.