Why is it still hard to buy Tritium out in Colonia? I thought FD had changed this?
- Thread starter Skellen
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The amount of production is based on economy size, which with Colonia's (the area, not the system) population that's similar in size to London, is absolutely tiny compared to the number of players in carriers.
You can go down the Colonia highway stations to try and refuel there. What I did was made a bucketfull of credits and put in a max price buy order so I had 5000 t (set it up and logged in the next day and it was done). Even the heaviest carrier can use that to get back to the bubble.
You can go down the Colonia highway stations to try and refuel there. What I did was made a bucketfull of credits and put in a max price buy order so I had 5000 t (set it up and logged in the next day and it was done). Even the heaviest carrier can use that to get back to the bubble.
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I've just left my carrier there, with a large order, and just off exploring again to pay for it.
By following the Colonia Highway and buying as you go you can arrive in Colonia with a full tank and don't need to buy any when you arrive. In fact I arrived in Colonia from out west of the galaxy with around 8k ton of Trit, didn't bother to buy any in Colonia and by the time I got back to the bubble following the highway I had a full hold of Trit, so it doesn't matter that much how much is available in Colonia to me, there's plenty around.
I've come in to Colonia from 64k out in the black hoping to restock, so didn't use the highway.
There's a station about 3 steps towards the bubble on the highway that typically has 3k in stock for around 50k per ton, Venatores Hub, that's only 900ly out of Colonia.
You can also take a team delivery mission for thousands of tons of free Tritium, just steal it for minimal rep loss.
Use Inara to find loads of FCs in the Colonia mini-bubble selling lots of legit Trit.
Use Inara to find loads of FCs in the Colonia mini-bubble selling lots of legit Trit.
When I was out in Colonia I did an exploration/exobiology hunt loop then when a few weeks later I was back in Colonia put the profits in a buy order and parked the carrier in a system selling Tritium the order was filled when I logged on next day and I didn’t have to haul a drop. I am on my way back to the bubble after visiting the core and will fill up the same way when I get back though I might pay a little less.
Players: We want a more realistic economy! Supply and Demand!
Also Players: But not in Colonia! That should have high demand but infinite supply for me me me!
every ... single .. time
The Colonia region as a whole has a population of 10 million. The bubble has at least a couple more people than that and goods production reflects this.
Look on the Turo, Tiburnat, Aitvani systems, for example.
All of them: But engineers in Colonia must be!Players: We want a more realistic economy! Supply and Demand!
Also Players: But not in Colonia! That should have high demand but infinite supply for me me me!
every ... single .. time
How many carriers are parked outside the stations in those systems?
Yes - the advantage of the bubble isn't so much that its Tritium markets are individually larger than Colonia's (although some of them do have several hundred thousand tonnes in stock) but that the bubble has somewhere over 10,000 stations which sell Tritium, and Colonia has just seven.
So in the bubble, somewhere like Turo - 1200t of Tritium at the last Inara update a week ago, and that on an outpost with no large pads - sure, no-one is particularly going to buy that all up. And if they do, there's 10,000 other stations around the bubble with similar or greater amounts, so it doesn't matter anyway.
In Colonia, the baseline stock of Neugebauer Mines (another medium-pad outpost) is around eight thousand tonnes (about six times the size of Turo). But it last had that sort of stock shortly after the Fleet Carriers patch, and never since, because with only seven stations selling, all of them get drained very quickly.
The total baseline Tritium supply of the Colonia region is maybe 30,000 tonnes (or enough to fully fuel about 1 carrier) and once that's sold out it takes about two months to regenerate, so the important figure - total daily production - is around 500 tonnes a day (maybe double that on a good day) which usually goes the moment it appears.
The total baseline Tritium supply of the entire bubble is hard to estimate accurately but is probably around 200 million tonnes (or enough to fully fuel about 10,000 carriers); total daily production is therefore going to be around 3-5 million tonnes a day (or enough to fully fuel probably 200 carriers a day). Even with there being far more players and their carriers in the bubble, the 10000:1 production ratio means that the bubble will never in practice sell out of Tritium, at least at any plausible levels of player activity.
But to get the Colonia region up to even the 25,000 tonnes a day required to fuel a single carrier, would need its Tritium markets to be 50 times bigger. And they'd still run out, even then. The region already has significantly boosted commodity production (around 3.5x normal) - pushing it to 200x normal production would be silly.
So the straightforward choices at this point:
- accept that deep space Tritium is deliberately a bottleneck to make taking carriers out there harder; Colonia might have a small supply but it does still count as deep space
- reject that it should be a bottleneck: remove Tritium from the game and just charge carriers an equivalent credit cost per jump
Obviously Frontier have been consistent on the first so far, even if they've made Tritium 4x more efficient since the original FC Beta, but if they're looking at further changes to make it easier just getting rid of it entirely would be the simpler one.
To nitpick this a bit, the high demand for tritium over such an extended period of time would have, under normal supply and demand conditions, stimulated further investment in the mining industry and increased the production by now. It doesn't matter that there are so few residents of Colonia, if a significant amount of Commanders are coming in and throwing money at the tritium mines then the economic profile should shift to more tritium production.Players: We want a more realistic economy! Supply and Demand!
Also Players: But not in Colonia! That should have high demand but infinite supply for me me me!
every ... single .. time
Well, maybe. In a more realistic supply-demand sim than ED provides, you can't just produce 100MT of Tritium like that - it needs the supplies of High-Tech and Industrial goods to run the refinery, the Agricultural goods to feed the people who staff it, the supplies to run the farms, the other mining and refining to supply the raw materials to build all that up, places for all these extra workers to live, etc.
Sure, there could have been some specialisation in Tritium as an export commodity (the game does give each station its own specialisation profile in terms of both supply and demand) but that might only double or triple production; the actual demand is probably a hundred times higher than supply. Colonia could get hundreds of times larger to build refineries on that scale ... but there don't appear to be enough people who want to move out there.
So the easiest solution in that sense isn't to produce more Tritium in Colonia, but to import it from the bubble which has a substantial surplus. And that is something the game supports: advertise a purchase order on your carrier at 500k/tonne or more for Tritium and there's probably someone out there willing to make themselves a nice bit of profit filling it. The other side of supply and demand is that if demand exceeds supply, prices rise - and it's that price rise which funds the long-term investment in capacity. If people are only willing to pay 45k/tonne, why bother investing in meeting that need? Sure, there's a demand, but you're not going to get rich filling it.
(Certainly it would be an option to have an NPC megaship with prices at 500k/tonne+ and infinite Tritium supply to represent that inter-bubble trade without players having to provide it with their own tanker carriers. The question at that point isn't what's more realistic, it's whether the economy in deep-space Tritium being primarily player-driven or primarily NPC-set like the rest of the game is the desired outcome.)
Achilles's next breakthrough will be a new carrier FSD that doesn't use Tritium, but burns credits instead, without the intermediate step of buying fuel.
Initially, physical credits will be burnt, but then it will be possible to power the drives directly with wire transfers.
No more fuel shortages!