has anyone created a self supporting series of companies yet?

[[VR] Mad Mike]

I know it's early days but I am just curious.

some are suggesting the further out we go the harder it is gonna get to ship stuff to build. maybe I am missing something (possible as I am not able to colonise yet)

but surely the goal will never be to haul stuff 500ly into the black but to build self sustaining groups of colonies such that one will be agricultural, one mining and refining and then one for manufacture etc. and then once they are built up enough they will become to source to head out deeper into the black.

again maybe it's just me being dumb but isn't building a straight line of Tiny colonies just to get as far out as possible missing the point of colonisation?

edit damn auto correct on the title. I didn't mean companies.

 

[BL1P]

I would imagine that it will be more a case of build a line of cheap outposts untill you are ~500ly out, then build a set of supply stations for FCs.
Rince and repeat.

But like yourself I havent colonised yet.

 

[Bigmaec]

but surely the goal will never be to haul stuff 500ly into the black .

May I introduce you to Fleet Carriers?
Contrary to popular belief they work very well to transport lots of stuff out to the black.
Even in these trying times.

I guess it will take considerably more time until a fledgling colony will turn out enough to compete with FC+bubble.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

ok I should not have used 500ly as an example given the jump range of an FC but that was not my point.
my question still stands really . surely making self sustaining colonies which a range of different infrastructure which then starts it's own production has to be one of the key goals FD had in mind when thinking about colonisation?.
so change 500ly to 2000ly then. even with a fleet carrier that would be expensive, and with the jump scheduling being as it often is a lot more hassle than if you can source the stuff from a more local source... esp when talking the larger space stations which will need approaching double figures of fleet carrier loads.

my assumption is you would put an agricultural base orbiting an ELW or WW, a mining/refining base around a.couple.of different rings.

not sure how you would build efficient industrial economies....

or have I got it all wrong?

 

[Bigmaec]

ok I should not have used 500ly as an example given the jump range of an FC but that was not my point.
my question still stands really . surely making self sustaining colonies which a range of different infrastructure which then starts it's own production has to be one of the key goals FD had in mind when thinking about colonisation?.
so change 500ly to 2000ly then. even with a fleet carrier that would be expensive, and with the jump scheduling being as it often is a lot more hassle than if you can source the stuff from a more local source.

Too early right now I guess. Real high production of goods comes with high population, and I think we don't know yet how to raise pop above a low hundred thousands?

We also don't know yet all the dependencies to build a self sustaining mini bubble.

My personal guess is we will see if the first player groups reach their targets and starts building systems for real, not just daisy-chaining.

 

[Hank]

An observation based on the little I know of the new colonization feature is that areas a few thousand LYs away from the bubble will not be colonized due to distance to haul materials. Apparently at this time, colonization is only a means to expand the bubble. Not knowing what I was thinking, I thought relatively close nebulas may be candidates for new stations with economy and populations; but I was incorrect. correct me if wrong (I hope this post is On Topic)
Have a great day

 

[Jmanis]

An observation based on the little I know of the new colonization feature is that areas a few thousand LYs away from the bubble will not be colonized due to distance to haul materials. Apparently at this time, colonization is only a means to expand the bubble. Not knowing what I was thinking, I thought relatively close nebulas may be candidates for new stations with economy and populations; but I was incorrect. correct me if wrong (I hope this post is On Topic)
Have a great day

One tank (1000t) of tritium will get you 3,500 one-way if you carry everything you need for a new outpost in a fleet carrier. Feasibly, you could then set up a refinery system as a tritium depot every 3,500. But if you didn't want that, 10,000t will be a round-trip of 17,500Ly in any direction, and you'd only need two trips to build an outpost. Sure, that's a billion credits in fuel to build an outpost in a nearly 35k Ly diameter bubble, but that's just a couple hours of massacre stacking... but again, just create some tritium colonies.

That's also 10 hours of carrier flight on a return trip once the gold rush is done and FC times are back to normal... but when you have a literal month to do it... that's not a huge limiter... and that's just for a solo player. A group will be pretty unfettered.

 

[Ydiss]

I'll actually answer your question, because I've worked out what you are asking and I know it's nothing to do with fleet carriers.

The answer is likely no, as of now. My system feels pretty remote but it's only 250LY from Sol, or so (it's right on the edge of Lavingy's region, not far from Kamandhenu). On the "other side" of mine, is a field of uninhabited systems. Yet, I'm well within 2-3 jumps of fully-fledged economies that I can tap into, and my system has already begun to connect to the BG pretty cleanly, with reasonable supply and demand, despite only having an outpost and 6 settlements, so far.

Despite all that, my local 20LY bubble is mostly other colonies and missions/markets betwixt are few and far between. But growing. It'll be interesting to see if that changes, but it's changing slowly. But if I had to answer the question of "could your build be sustained just by systems like those in your local 20LY bubble?", then the answer would be a very sure "no". Not saying my local region is typical of a concerted group effort, mind. It isn't.

I still think setting up a new Colonia type region will take a long time, even with a group effort. The only difference is, I think Colonia will eventually be made to appear insignificant compared to what players will likely achieve, over time.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

This is an interesting question.
- All the goods required in large bulk volumes are Refinery exports
- not all of which can be produced by mining and converting at a Refinery Contact
- so to get basic self-sufficiency, the hardest step is going to be setting up a Refinery which can supply in 28 days the necessary commodities to build a new outpost
- your limiting factors are probably going to be Liquid Oxygen and Insulating Membrane. (you need more CMM, but it regenerates so much faster, and you need more Steel, Aluminium and Titanium but can top them up through local mining and converting the ores)
- so you need an economy which can produce about 2000t of LO in four weeks
- which probably means a baseline supply (if you're not going to be messing around maintaining favourable BGS states) of about 250t
- which should be doable with a fairly small economy size of about 5000, which could be spread across multiple stations.
- getting an economy that large through colonisation hasn't been done yet, I think, but shouldn't be that difficult once we've figured out a little more
- now, what about Insulating Membrane. You only need about 10t a day... but that probably needs an economy size in the tens of millions. That's not going to be practical, so we use a different approach for that.

So you'd want a minimum of two systems, probably, both somewhat built up. (You might be able to do it with a single very large system, but it'll probably be easier if you can isolate the two different System Economy Influence buildings you need)
- first system is your Refinery. You go all out in this for Refinery Hubs and Colony stations they can convert into Refinery economies, plus whatever slider-affecting buildings boost productivity, until you get to the production threshold you need on Liquid Oxygen. If you've got space, throw in an Asteroid Station to more efficiently feed your Refinery Contact for Steel/Titanium/Aluminium. Make sure at least some of your Colony stations are surface, for the CMM production, and at least one orbital for Insulating Membrane.
- second system covers the rest. You build an Industrial and High-Tech Outpost (which have terrible production rates at baseline, but still more than good enough to build an outpost a month) and then build a Colony station to be converted to Agricultural by nearby settlements (if you get lucky, the settlements will also produce something you need). This system doesn't need to be as large. You may need to throw in a Large Industrial Settlement somewhere here to get yourself a local Refinery contact.
- Your Insulating Membrane you'll need to get from mission commodity rewards in the Refinery system, because you're not getting it from the markets any time soon! (this is what the orbital refinery station is mainly for)
- If you've got a Fleet Carrier to use as storage, you can afford slower production in the Refinery system, because you can stockpile an Outpost's worth of supplies on the carrier for two months - or even two years if you have to - then build the outpost with those.

That's got you covered for everything you need for orbital construction and getting your initial claims through in time. So you can from there continually expand your region and build up a few more production centres at this point. It'll be very slow to start with, but you can get at least theoretical self-sufficiency relatively quickly.

But ... surface constructions need Emergency Power Cells too. And they're only produced by a tiny number of bubble systems, and you can't add more in deep space... I don't think there's any asset you can build which lets you steal/salvage them ... and they're not available as mission commodity rewards. So you can't be completely self-sufficient yet for all construction types.
(A FC full of EPCs will last you a while, but you're going to have to send it back for more eventually)


(Getting the settlement to the point where it's more efficient - rather than just theoretically possible - to produce locally rather than to have a rolling set of FCs freighting cargo out of the bubble ... well, that's going to be a much longer task. I'm not sure it's even possible to build colonisation economies that large yet - we'll see...)

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

great post you clearly are getting a good handle on this...

by the sounds of it however even if it isn't fully self sufficient it will be possible for local produce to cover a large chunk of the materials needed, then complementing that with a fleet carrier for the harder to get stuff.

thanks

 

[mtfatboy3006]

The unknowns (as far as I know) are:

• Precisely how much specialized construction and system growth is needed encourage a port to convert from a "colonization" economy to a specialized economy
• How long this takes
• What balance of buildings is required to generate refinery/industrial starports and other useful combinations
• Theoretically, mostly refinery colonies, with a few industrial (or refinery/industrial) will be enough to supply new waves of colonization for a while. The small quantities of Fruit/veg and high tech items needed can be retrieved from infrequent runs back to the bubble proper. But I don't think enough time has elapsed for any colony to become a sustainable supply point yet.

 

[HansAcker]

again maybe it's just me being dumb but isn't building a straight line of Tiny colonies just to get as far out as possible missing the point of colonisation?

I sort of hope that they'll let a game of life loose on it and that colonies without enough supplies in range could become abandoned over time (see Wellington, the state already exists).