Beginner questions

[feelotraveller]

Yes.  Weapons, shields, systems, drives.  Fuel is converted to energy which is then used to power these systems.
 
Energy collectors can also collect energy if the ship/base is stationary.
 
The Ackie drives are very good on the whole.  The reason you might want others is that they can put out a greater amount of thrust per space used on the ship.

[boxleitnerb]

Great, thanks!

Is it generally a good or bad idea to build mining stations everywhere (exploiting every single resource in my current sphere of influence, that is)? I mean if I don't really need a specific resource right now (according to the demand column in the expansion planer?), it wouldn't make sense to mine more of it - unless surplus is sold on the galaxy market? Question then is: is it profitable, meaning is a particular mining station making a profit accounting for its upkeep.

[Bingeling]

I would not build much more than necessary. I keep the constructors on auto, though, they seem to do mostly fine. I may queue some manual orders by the expansion planner, or left side panels, though.

[boxleitnerb]

I imagine the constructors might build too far away. When I leave them on auto, several moons and/or asteroids on my home system will not be exploited.
Is it possible after all to sell a surplus in resources? Does that happen automatically?

[Bingeling]

All that happens with resources (apart from spending them on builds) are handled by the private sector.

The AI may build the odd mine in spots where I would not. If they are tricky to defend I let them die (retirement by pirates). I may have a look at what they mine, and if I have other sources for that before letting the pirates retire it, though. In general, the thing I book manually is extra gas mines on fuel sources.

The important thing is not to exploit every resource, but to have enough resources...

The AI tend to manage resources just fine (and have become more aggressive in building fuel mines). In my current game, though, I noticd I had a rare spice planet I had missed sitting in a system right next to a major colony [&:]. I never noticed a popup on that one, and I would figure the AI should have built a mine there ages ago.

When I do manual constructor work, it is like defending the mine on a rare resource (build a defensive base with no area weapon), or early game on very hard settings where cash is absent, pirates roam, and I want very good control on where my mines are.

[boxleitnerb]

I've been reading up on resupply ships and cargo holds and a follow up question emerged:

If a mining station or resupply ship mines a planet/cloud with caslon and hydrogen, but only caslon is taken continuously away (for refuelling purposes), what happens to newly mined gases? Let's assume one source of 90% caslon and one source of 45% hydrogen. Let's also assume 100 cargo units for the station/resupply ship.

Initial cargo status: 66.6 units caslon and 33.3 units hydrogen, cargo holds are full. For every unit of hydrogen, two units of caslon will be mined, thus caslon is 2/3 and hydrogen is 1/3.

A) Caslon always has 66.6% of the cargo space reserved and hydrogen 33.3%, meaning no matter what, there will always be place for both resources according to their respective mining rate.

B) There is no discrimination between the resources regarding cargo space. If only caslon is taken away, but hydrogen is not, there will be an ever increasing amount of hydrogen until the cargo hold is full with it and no more gases can be mined. This effectively shuts down the resupply function.

Which is it, A or B?

Btw what happens when I beef up the private sector ship and station designs. They get more expensive, so is it possible that the private sector doesn't make enough profit to pay their taxes, thus affecting me?