I get and support the various specialty holds in the T1 haulers, Orca and Porpoise. There is one change I would make to them if I could:
Allow fleet/corp access to the Orca and Porpoise (and by extention the Rorqual) ore holds. The Orca and Porpoise are IMO best used as specialist mining support platforms. Using them as places for miners to drop off ore and haulers to pick it up without going through the corp hangar is IMO a good thing. The corp hangar should be used for consumables etc.
Of course this isn’t at the top of things I’d like changed about the Orca but that’s another thread…
Agreed. It’s extremely inconvenient to try to empty 250k m3 out of an Orca 40k at a time. It’s a relatively small complaint, but still a frequent little headache to deal with.
If you fly all your Ore to a station with excellent Refining capabilities, you’ll need to truck the Minerals back out and fly them to some other station with excellent Manufacturing capabilities.
Yes, but you can erect stations anywhere now- or rather the advent of citadels makes it even easier? It’s rather trivial to put your manufacturing center immediately next to whatever refinery you’ve chosen to haul your ore to for repro, by comparison the trip from belts to refinery is the largest time-in-hold part of the process.
Mineral, PI and Ore holds really should be combined into one Hold type. A Materials Hold. Personally I don’t get why we have to subdivide holds. If you your Orca Has 187k Ore Hold, 40K Fleet Hangar and 30k Hold, why cant you put anything you want in any of the holds? Ore can go in Ore Hold, Fleet hangar and Cargo, why not other way around?
Further I really don’t get why Ship holds must be empty when placing them in the SMB of a Capital. A Hoarder with 50K Ammo on board can be stored in SMB. So why not any others?
It’s a matter of definitions.
Ore is Ore, but it’s also “stuff”. Bullets are Bullets, but they’re also “stuff”. And while each of the specialty Holds are tailored to a specific item, the unspecific Holds are always allowed to hold “stuff”. So that’s why you can pack an entire Orca to the brim with Ore, because some of that Ore is Ore, and some of that Ore is “stuff”.
And as for the Hoarder, I agree. Someone decided that stored ships were only allowed to carry Ammo and Charges. And then that got rolled into the aforementioned definitions, allowing you to carry several Haulers packed full of Ammo and Charges.
Useless thought for the day: what if freight containers were the specialized items and each had a unique size, i.e. All mineral-spec’d freight containers have a volume that is a factor of, say, 5m3 and an x% bonus to container internal volume that’s consistent across all mineral freight containers. Ammo containers are based around factors of 11, etc. Now, here’s the kicker, each industrial that has specialised holds now will have their holds sized to a factor equal to that of the specialized container type they’re associated with, meaning that each specialised industrial platform will fit their type of specialised container almost exactly and most or all of the others will see a loss of space efficiency because of partial space losses.
So a hold reinforced to hold compressed asteroids is somehow ill suited to hold anything else? I am calling space magic on that one.
My questions are rhetorical. Calling bull on the hold system. It is the way it is not because it makes any sense but for play balance. I think the original play balance reason is no longer valid.
I know merging holds will never come to be. If it did, the go to JF would be a Rorqual. It hauls more and is only one fifth the price.
I like this idea, ore and minerals feel thematically similar, and this could cut down on busywork for the small guys. People saying it would imbalance things are worrying too much - the Kryos is only ever going to be used by mom 'n pop`s ammo shoppe sized industrialists. Major industrialists will still transport large amounts via compressed ore, which fits in an Orca anyway.
After the swap we can repurpose the Kryos to be a fuel block truck maybe.
Dedicated holds do make sense btw:
Gasoline goes in tankers, cement in cement trucks and iPhones in general trucks. It’s a bad idea to try permutations of these…
@Jonathan_Rotineque I’m not saying I agree with the system. I also think it’s “space magic” if a room in a ship can ONLY be used to carry some things, but not others. How is the standard Cargo bay able to support and maintain mountains of ammo, right next to Soldiers, Livestock, that stupid Damsel (again), and Planetary goods, which is also right next to the blocks of Ice and piles of Ore.
@Valdr_Auduin I think I like that idea. Giving haulers the option to customize their Hold for whatever suits them. If they want to throw an Ammo crate in there, it won’t be as much as the Ammo ship would carry but at least they can carry some. And if they refit for Materials instead, same deal.
@Cristl You do have to admit, the way iProduct consumers flock to the stores when the latest thing comes out, the merchandise is probably being poured into the stockrooms like a cement truck. =)
It occurs that they’d also have it assign the factors in prime values to prevent overlap. I can’t recall though, do larger freight containers have better internal:external volume ratios?
I don’t believe the Freight containers have extra space. They were mainly intended for partitioning your Freighter’s hold.
However, the various Secure containers do use Planck Generators / Time Lord Science / Space Magic to hold more inside than they take up outside. I could see rationale for saying that an Ammo Crate can be fitted / stored within an Ammo Ship, and the wibbly wobbly will balance itself out to maximum storage capacity. Or you can toss it into some other kind of ship, and the wibbly wobbly will not balance out as well, and thus the capacity is diminished.
It wouldn’t typify the effectiveness of special containers to specific ships, their cargo bays would just be modified so that, say, Ammo Containers, which come in 50m3, 500m3, 5000m3, and 50000m3 sizes fit perfectly in its 88,000m3 (max skills, expanders, and rigs) hold on our Hoarder. Whereas Ore Containers are rated in (factors of 11) 121//1331//6677//58575m3 sizes fit into a 87,769m3 maxed out hold on the Miasmos. Ammo Containers also have +14%/+16%/+18%/+20% internal space while the Ore Containers only have +5%/+7%/+9%/+11% internal space.
You should be glad we have dedicated holds nowdays before it was expanded cargo holds in low slots everywhere now you can squeeze in some more interesting fits and not hurt your intended carrying capacity.