Fuel

I like the strategy that refueling adds, but it's too hard to find places to refuel at (at least for me). I was in Emerald and I quite literally searched six stations until I found a warehouse station that had a tanker ship nearby. I didn't see any waystations or other such "hangout" spots in the system (but then again, I only looked in orbit of Emerald using the StarMap and I didn't use the NavCom).

Tanker ships would offer the best fuel prices: a 1-to-1 ratio of fuel spent versus the cost of fuel sold. Tankers carry loads and loads of fuel from a manufacturing facility where they can get a bulk discount. Thus, even though they charge market value for their fuel, they're still turning enough of a profit to cover the transportation costs of getting it from the refinery to your local waystation or hangout. If you can't find a tanker, however, the ability to refuel any ship that docks to any station would be a godsend. Depending on the station class, the fuel would have a proportionate markup. Shipyards tend to fully fuel the ships that are manufactured once they're rolled out of the dock, so they have adequate supplies of fuel on hand and charge only a tiny markup (5%). Entertainment stations aren't renowned fueling depots and probably only keep a few pods of fuel for local emergencies: as such, you could buy the fuel from them, but they would charge a significant markup (40%). Other stations would vary between the two extremes.

I would strongly insist against it being automatic, however. Sometimes if you've spent some fuel but still have enough fuel for another jump or two, you'd rather defer paying for fuel that you don't need so you can buy more goods. As such, refueling a docked ship should be a UniGUI menu option that appears when you're adjacent to a station (naturally, it only works if a player-affiliated ship is actually docked to the station).


Another refueling feature I would like is to have docking drones or some other system of transferring fuel from the tanker to the ships that are requesting refueling. MegaTrucking and/or Spewer Ops added so much atmosphere that it seems inconsistent that we're still stuck with the "magic" refueling.

One final feature I would like is the ability to transfer fuel from a pod to your own ship directly -- by docking with the pod and choosing an appropriate UniGUI option. This empties the pod of fuel (unless it's possible to use fractional accounting for the pod's reserves) and refills your ship by the same amount of fuel.

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Good suggestions.

Cambragol has been asking for "real" refueling for a while. We plan to do it. We just have to make sure every model has the correct kinds of docks and no problems result.

Allowing every station to pump fuel is a good idea. And there is no reason that it could not work.

Only tanker ships can pull fuel out of fuel pods. The plan was to limit that feature to specific ships, in order to make those kinds of ships "cool and unique". Specifically scout ships and exploration vessels would have the ability to pump fuel (in addition to the normal fuel tanker ship). Those scout ships could also pump fuel into other ships, as an emergency measure.

The idea of a UniGUI option to allow the player to pump out fuel is a good one. This feature becomes more important when you are setting up a base to raid from.

Real refueling would definitely be cool. We would have to balance out making it 'atmospheric' with preventing it becoming annoying. My solution would be to lower the frequency that one needs to refuel ships.

Also, if you are finding it hard to find places to refuel JT, I could go back and tweak how fuel ships are placed. Currently there are two types of fuel ships out there. One is 'fairly' common and can be found at waystations, processing stations and shipyards (I hope it is being found in these locations!). The second type is not as common, but has cheaper fuel. You have to go to special station types (hint* the warehouse type) to find it. This was done originally upon Shanes excellent suggestion to make the refueling system easy for players who might not care for it, but also to allowy players who want to take advantage of and manage their fuel to seek out cheaper/more efficient sources. If others are having a lot of trouble, I think I will go back and add a third class, of refuel ship, that exists at almost all stations, but kindof..gouges the player. That way fuel is always available, but you pay a price for not going a little further to find a cheap source.

I think I will go back and add a third class, of refuel ship, that exists at almost all stations, but kindof..gouges the player. That way fuel is always available, but you pay a price for not going a little further to find a cheap source.

Actually, it might be kewl to have those types of refuelers hanging out around L-points, that way if you are like me (and forget to refuel all the time), you can just refuel near the L-point for a higher price without having to LDS back to a station.

Refuelling rackets at stable L-points makes good sense, but I can tell you I'd sure love to shoot holes in a few of those if they were to spill out nicely scoopable pods of fuel. Other pirates would love the same.

It's just not really economically safe to try to freelance some suckers by sticking around an L-point unless there was an outpost nearby (like the defunct one by the Alexander L-point in EoC).

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Being that most fuels are inherently explosive, I doubt any pods would survive the piracy of a tanker, unless they were to drop them willingly...which would also be kinda kewl.