My Station Manager isn't doing anything and I don't know why.

[Iwantyoursmiles]

The situation: I have a boron equipment dock with every ware in the game set to resource at a low buying price. It's a trading dock that looks the universe over for good deals and stockpiles goods . . .in theory.
I have configured it as best I can and equipped it with a fleet of 20 jumpdrive traders, none of which are doing anything.

Has viable wares to purchase

Has ample allowance

Manager enabled

Ships homebased

Ships equipped

Starter fuel added

Why is my dock not working?

This is pure vanilla X3FL. Here is my save file. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Edit 1: They seem to be very attentive with salvaging. If a missile drops when an enemy is killed the station manager will have someone on it almost immediately. No trading going on though . . .

Edit 2: Even if it worked, I'm noticing another problem down the line. I want to have trade distribution ships transfer wares from the buying dock to the selling dock. In order to restrict my buyers to only buy I need to assign all the wares as resources because the station manager restrictions tool does not allow limiting ships to either buy/sell instead only trade/salvage or both.

The trade distribution command only allows loading wares that are assigned as either tradeable or products, an arbitrary restriction that renders the command inferior to the CLS agents of old. So even if I could get my buyers to only buy their wares there is no way to get the wares out of 1 dock and into another without changing resources to tradable/products which renders the whole system pointless.

A system which I'm only trying to implement as an elaborate workaround to docks not being able to assign both a buying and selling price. The intent here being to create a fleet of traders that game the margins of goods by stockpiling wares for cheap and then selling them at expensive markups when the market is ready for it.

I could forgo the station manager and instead assign 107 ships to each station that are set to buy/sell ware for best price but not only is that a huge investment cost in both credits and micro management but I have recently discovered limitations with that command that causes ships to have problems managing their jumpdrive fuel supply.

For reasons outside of my scope of understanding it appears as though the system is intentionally designed to prevent players from doing exactly what I'm trying to achieve.

There is always the option of creating a megacomplex that consumes everything and produces everything. A considerably more complicated and expensive option but I don't think there is any other choice.

[alexdefelice]

Same problem here.

[Cycrow]

Looks like a bug in the station manager when buying resources, its only checking the first (most needed) resource then losing the remaining data

For reasons outside of my scope of understanding it appears as though the system is intentionally designed to prevent players from doing exactly what I'm trying to achieve.

its not intentionally designed that way, more, that its primarily designed to work with Factories/Complexes, rather than docks

[Iwantyoursmiles]

Looks like a bug in the station manager when buying resources, its only checking the first (most needed) resource then losing the remaining data

For reasons outside of my scope of understanding it appears as though the system is intentionally designed to prevent players from doing exactly what I'm trying to achieve.

its not intentionally designed that way, more, that its primarily designed to work with Factories/Complexes, rather than docks

I was salty and didn't mean it, sorry.

[alexdefelice]

What's the best move for a dock? UT's homed there maybe?

[Jimmy C]

The Boron EqDock has unlimited capacity to hold up to medium class ships. I always have one to hold all my medium class acquisitions. It's also a good location for "bins" to store output from a production complex.