Gas & Mineral Miners

[zpike]

Quick question about miner ships...

Should I be putting extra fuel storage on my gas miners so they can hold more between trips or do they use the cargo hold for gas storage?

How about mineral miners? cargo bay?

Also, do you increase the mining engines on your mining ships? Does it have any added effect for me to put five or ten mining engines on a miner instead of just one?

[Aeson]

Gas and mineral miners use cargo bays to store the gas and minerals that they mine. If you want them to collect more materials per trip, then you want to add cargo bays. Be aware that there's a limit on how fast resources can be collected - I believe that adding additional extractors only provides benefits until perhaps the third or fourth extractor added, at least on mining stations - so it may be counterproductive to add many more cargo bays to the mining ships. Additionally, depending on how far off the mining ships go for the materials and how long they have to spend there to fill up their cargo bays, you may need to add additional fuel cells even though the ships don't store mined materials there, just so the return trip isn't terribly slow due to the miner being out of fuel.

[Kantay]

Put one Energy collector on ALL your ships. A lot of ships just stay in one place (construction ships constructing/repairing, mining ships mining etc) and thus you can save a ton of fuel by putting that one collector on, the price to build it and support it isn't that big

[zpike]

Thanks all.

[Andy06r]

ORIGINAL: Kantay

Put one Energy collector on ALL your ships. A lot of ships just stay in one place (construction ships constructing/repairing, mining ships mining etc) and thus you can save a ton of fuel by putting that one collector on, the price to build it and support it isn't that big

Is it really that useful? What benefit does conserving fuel have when you stockpile huge quantities of fuel?

I understand putting collectors on immobile stations, but never on ships.

[Aeson]

1. We just had this conversation in the "collectors, useful?" thread (tm.asp?m=3631354) right below this one

2. An idling ship that lacks energy collectors is burning fuel for no good reason. Regardless of whether or not you have virtually limitless fuel stocks, it's an unnecessary expense that can be solved by adding a small number of small, inexpensive components to each of your designs, which greatly extend the effective operating time of your ships because they're not wasting half their fuel idling between missions.

3. A quick glance at the "collectors, useful?" thread shows three forum veterans reasonably strongly in favor of adding energy collectors to every ship and none supporting the opposing view. While not conclusive evidence in favor of energy collectors on every ship, it certainly isn't damning evidence against them, and it speaks against the position that they're unnecessary components. It's possible that all of us who are in favor of energy collectors are wrong, and it's not like it's impossible to play without energy collectors on your ships, but experience and logic speak to energy collectors being a good idea.

[Andy06r]

Does the AI do it? Just curious.

[Aeson]

Yes, the computer uses energy collectors on all its ships and bases. It'll even put them on yours, if you allow it to do your design work for you, and it'll add them as soon as they become available.