Planning on a 100% selfsustaining Shipyard complex.

[Dreez]

Grand plans for only being back just a few days ago, but i've always loved building huge factory complexes
and the AI doesn't seem to be able to run their own shipyards very effectively, always running out of some resources.
Question is tho, what's the differense between a shipbuilding and a shipmaintenance sections ?.

The goal is for a complete shipyard complex that can both build all ships from all races, and give full service.

[spankahontis]

Maintenance sections just sell Upgrades, Missiles, drones, satellites etc.
Fabrication sections builds Ships but can also give your ship the upgrades of the Maintenance section.
I don't think you can use a Shipyard to upgrade your ship after that? Might be Wrong?
But the NPC ai will use Maintenance Modules to restock on missiles or flares etc. Unless they are part of a fleet with an auxilary ship, to which the aux does the shopping at the Maintenance Module and brings it back to the fleet to stock up it's ships.

Given that it's difficult to find an area where all raw resources are available and abundant? You'll need to build some Storage Facilities in areas that have the Gas and minerals your super shipyard needs, have 10-20 miners running round the clock to fill the Storage Facility and have other miners/gas miners deliver the resources to your Shipyard via Repeat Order command.

I think you can have an all-in-one Fabrication/Maintenance super station, but the resources it'll require will be astronomical, especially Terran Based products/ships; very resource hungry.

[Nort The Fragrent]

Better to do your research first regarding resources. Then Build Shipyard at the centre of the Catchment Sectors. Have Raw material stations process the Raw’s Then Intermediate stations that then supply the shipyard.
You can put everything into one large Build, It works, but the station has to be in the right place!
Take a look @ Construction Community in the Main forum. Go to ( All Sorts ) there you can find some all in station builds. They take a long time to build, and cost a fortune, and even more to fill ! And get up to speed.

[paraskous]

Shipbuilding is building yard, shipmaintenance is only outfitting and repair. I hear that maintenance yard might also increase the productionline capacity of shipbuilding modules but take that with a grain of salt. So: With maintenance yard alone: No ship building.

[jakotheshadows]

Grand plans for only being back just a few days ago, but i've always loved building huge factory complexes
and the AI doesn't seem to be able to run their own shipyards very effectively, always running out of some resources.
Question is tho, what's the differense between a shipbuilding and a shipmaintenance sections ?.

The goal is for a complete shipyard complex that can both build all ships from all races, and give full service.

I strongly recommend against having an unrestricted shipyard. Very quickly conflict is going to erupt outside as multiple warring factions order ships that will then start fighting right in front of your shipyard. Eventually, stray shots from these conflicts will hit your property and cause damage to your assets or worse yet, cause your assets to defend themselves leading to an incident which escalates into negative rep with the factions you were just selling ships to. At least make sure to set up trade rules so that, for instance, you're not selling to both HOP and PAR out of the same shipyard.

[ADMNtek]

Maintenance sections just sell Upgrades, Missiles, drones, satellites etc.
Fabrication sections builds Ships but can also give your ship the upgrades of the Maintenance section.
I don't think you can use a Shipyard to upgrade your ship after that? Might be Wrong?
But the NPC ai will use Maintenance Modules to restock on missiles or flares etc. Unless they are part of a fleet with an auxilary ship, to which the aux does the shopping at the Maintenance Module and brings it back to the fleet to stock up it's ships.

Given that it's difficult to find an area where all raw resources are available and abundant? You'll need to build some Storage Facilities in areas that have the Gas and minerals your super shipyard needs, have 10-20 miners running round the clock to fill the Storage Facility and have other miners/gas miners deliver the resources to your Shipyard via Repeat Order command.

I think you can have an all-in-one Fabrication/Maintenance super station, but the resources it'll require will be astronomical, especially Terran Based products/ships; very resource hungry.

fabrication modules can do everything a maintenance one can. and you can use them for your own ships on your own stations. however maintenance modules need less workforce. cost less to build and i think and i think they need less money in the account. and while terrans are resource hungry you do have the benefit that everything is made from the same 4 materials.

[spankahontis]

fabrication modules can do everything a maintenance one can. and you can use them for your own ships on your own stations. however maintenance modules need less workforce. cost less to build and i think and i think they need less money in the account. and while terrans are resource hungry you do have the benefit that everything is made from the same 4 materials.

Terrans are more Xenon in that regard as their production chain is smaller than the Commonwealths. Faster production and less logistics, so more resources is a fair balance exchange.
Though I can see now why the Xenon are not doing so good in this playthrough.

You would need an adequate sized workforce in the Maintenance Module for when you want your ships filled with Crewman/marines, don't know if they still recruit from that pool?

[Midnitewolf]

Don't do it, it is a pain and the ass and not necessary. Also I don't think it can truly be done, not and never ever run out of resources or have pauses to production anyway. Also it isn't necessary as you can usually just import all you need.

If your bound to do it anyway, this site can be helpful.

http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator

Unfortunately because the consumption rate of resources for ships is unpredictable, you can't just plug in a S/M Fab module and have it "Autofill" what production modules you need but the site if very useful for figuring out how many "Refined Metal" production modules you need to manufacture X amount of Hull parts and stuff like that.

[Ezarkal]

Shipbuilding is building yard, shipmaintenance is only outfitting and repair. I hear that maintenance yard might also increase the productionline capacity of shipbuilding modules but take that with a grain of salt. So: With maintenance yard alone: No ship building.

I can confirm: Maintenance docks are counted as building modules if the corresponding module is also present on the station. If you have 1 L maintenance bay and 1 L fabrication bay, both will be able to build at the same time.
If you only have maintenance, you are unable to build.

... or at least it used to be this way prior to 4.00. I have no idea if they fixed this. (Or if it even needs fixing.)

[Ezarkal]

Don't do it, it is a pain and the ass and not necessary. Also I don't think it can truly be done, not and never ever run out of resources or have pauses to production anyway. Also it isn't necessary as you can usually just import all you need.

If your bound to do it anyway, this site can be helpful.

http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator

Unfortunately because the consumption rate of resources for ships is unpredictable, you can't just plug in a S/M Fab module and have it "Autofill" what production modules you need but the site if very useful for figuring out how many "Refined Metal" production modules you need to manufacture X amount of Hull parts and stuff like that.

There are a few examples of autonomous shipyard megacomplexes on the forum.
Of course you will always have one resource that will end up bottlenecking your production. It's part of the shipyard dynamics.
Doesn't mean the shipyard can't churn out ships without any inputs other than primary resources. It will simply have some downtimes and limits.

Back to OP:

Biggest problem I see now is the new mining dynamics that came with 4.00. Supplying a full shipyard will require a ton of miners, especially if you want to include terran tech.
Pick your location carefully, and maybe look into forward mining bases.

I'm doing something similar: The shipyard itself will not produce wares except maybe energy cells and it's own required food/medical stuff, but every wares will be produced within the same system (Getsu Fune, in my case), and I plan to include terran tech as well. Having multiple stations simply means it's easier to scale up the production of any ware that ends up bottlenecking the production.
Supplying terran stations is already one of the biggest challenges I foresee, even if there's plenty of resources in the neighbouring systems.

[ADMNtek]

fabrication modules can do everything a maintenance one can. and you can use them for your own ships on your own stations. however maintenance modules need less workforce. cost less to build and i think and i think they need less money in the account. and while terrans are resource hungry you do have the benefit that everything is made from the same 4 materials.

Terrans are more Xenon in that regard as their production chain is smaller than the Commonwealths. Faster production and less logistics, so more resources is a fair balance exchange.
Though I can see now why the Xenon are not doing so good in this playthrough.

You would need an adequate sized workforce in the Maintenance Module for when you want your ships filled with Crewman/marines, don't know if they still recruit from that pool?

i have all 3 fabrication bays as part of my HQ and when i go into the upgrade ship screen it says i have 7493 crew available the HQ itself has a workforce of 8481 and is currently at 94%. and while the number don't match I do think that the shipyard draws from the station population resulting in a drop of efficiency of your production modules whenever you build or fill up ships. this is where the fill whole habitat function makes sense to have the spare population for ships. however one thing i haven't tried is what happens if you have a shipyard or maintenance bay with no habitat at all.

[Fenris321]

It wasn't that much of a pain, just really time consuming. I built one over the last few days that has two of each fabrication bay (probably would have been ok with 1 of each tbh), and 1 of each maintenance bay (realized too late I could have skipped those) and can build any ship; Commonwealth or Terran. Well once I get all the blueprints I want anyway. Self sustaining except for energy which is no big deal, I have a large energy producing station 3 jumps away and just have a few large transports on repeat orders to buy there and sell at the shipyard. If you build with Terran Habitats, be prepared to have a lot. Mine is up to 60 L habitats now and will get bigger as I teak the station more

Location matters, mine is in Oort Cloud so has everything except sunlight. Reserves are spread out so it does take a lot of miners, but since I can build all the ones I want ...... I would use the station calculator that was shown earlier, it is a life saver. Some advice, if you're building in Terran space I'd build some of your shipyard's hull factories first. You will need a lot of hull parts, and I mean a lot, so you don't want to waste time sending transports halfway across the map and back to meet your needs. Be prepared to spend well over a billion credits for blueprints and your initial building materials. Computronic Substrate is another one you will want to get done early in your build for the Terran stuff. That stuff is expensive at over 8,000 credits for each one. I have a small self contained Computronic Substrate plant that has two Substrate factories on it and it makes 10 to 15 million an hour, you really dont want to have to buy that stuff in large quantities. I'd also buy and use your own builder for the construction, for crew just fill it up with service crew. They will max out very fast, then you can transfer them to your large miners. Large miners with maxed crew do mine faster, and since silicone is slow to mine you'll probably want that. After you get the initial station done with every production plant known to mankind you'll see what you may want more of. That's where the station calculator comes in really handy as a guide for what you'll need. Just remember that the calculator shows what your station will output at 100% worker capacity. So while it's filling up your numbers may be lower.

For mining, since you will need a lot of materials I only give a hand full of miners to the station manager to raise their manager skill, because they are idiots. And set the rest to sector automine, then pick which resource I want each to mine. Since I have the station set to only deal with my faction I can up the price "payed" to max since no money really changes hands. My miners see the maxed price and always "sell" to me. I find I fill up my resource inventory much faster that way.

Then again, my station is only for me. Yours will probably be much harder

I could go on, but I already wrote a book here

[Virtualaughing]

Do not make food chain. Ice water this and that and medical block.
Build a mini food complex next to it and set that to trade with you only. Maybe set it up in a way that it buys from locals but not sell.
Habitation is key in shipyards.

[spankahontis]

i have all 3 fabrication bays as part of my HQ and when i go into the upgrade ship screen it says i have 7493 crew available the HQ itself has a workforce of 8481 and is currently at 94%. and while the number don't match I do think that the shipyard draws from the station population resulting in a drop of efficiency of your production modules whenever you build or fill up ships. this is where the fill whole habitat function makes sense to have the spare population for ships. however one thing i haven't tried is what happens if you have a shipyard or maintenance bay with no habitat at all.

Yeah, it's a good feature, I'm glad they added that.

[flatbush71]

I've already done it with the HQ.
I use the modded and repaired HQ with no stupid rock and the center up and down is full.
(Stack factories everywhere up and down)
It was fun but tedious and took a lot of time.
That's real X Gaming !!!