[X3TC] CLS won't wait at station

[Jimmy C]

I'm trying to set up a CLS loop to collect ore from a station and deliver it to my xenon hub. Because it's not in the adjacent sector, I have to use a jumpdrive and need to go to a third station to reload on ecells.

My desire is for the loop to go as thus

1. Fly to mine complex. WAIT until there's enough ore to fill out the ship.
2. With ore loaded, fly to the Hub and dump it.
3. Reload jump fuel at the third station.

What happens is the CLS keeps flying between the mine and the energy station. It won't wait to pick up any ore. I've seen this behaviour previously when I had a CLS that was supposed to shuttle nividium between two ships continually going to reload ecells instead of waiting for a load. I broke that by telling the ship not to use the jumpdrive at all, but that's not an option in this case.
Can anyone tell me how to get the CLS to WAIT for the ore? I've tried changing the refueling step from "reload jump fuel" to "load n energy cells" and it's still not waiting. This is wasting my ecells, time and credits. Please help.

[Vim Razz]

In the setup options menu, adjust the minimum load %, or whatever it''s called.

[Timsup2nothin]

This is a familiar problem and the load settings won't fix it. What happens is the ship refuels and jumps to the mine. Whether it loads or not it will cycle through its list and when it hits 'refuel' it will do it because it does need to top off.

Here are two possible solutions.

If the locations work out you can set the minimum jump range so the ship flies from the fuel source to the mines instead of jumping. For this to work you have to be using a fuel source that is maybe one or two sectors from the mine, so the flight time is just time it would have spent waiting at the mine anyway.

The second solution involves moving the fuel source. In situations like this I will add a 'fuel tank' to the mine. The fuel tank is a beat up freighter with no equipment at all (I get lots of those ). The ore shuttle uses a ship waypoint to refuel right there then waits to load up ore. All the fuel tanks all over the universe are kept full by a 'refuel truck' running out of the main e-cell supply. By adjusting the unload minimum on the refuel truck I keep it from jumping needlessly about topping off tanks, but it never lets them go 'dry'.

[Jimmy C]

In situations like this I will add a 'fuel tank' to the mine.

I would have preferred not to waste ecells to keep a fuel tank topped up, but I'll give it a try.

[Timsup2nothin]

I already set it to 100% of specified load. It didn't do anything.
While the ability of CLS to skip over waypoints that don't have the good available yet is appreciated normally, this is not the case now.

The 'minimum cargo' settings don't apply to refuel stops, and the refuel stop is causing your problem. It will only skip the refuel if it is completely up to the set fuel capacity.

Another solution is to remove the 'fly to station' command from the ore supplier, just leaving it a buy. The ship would then wait at the fuel depot until the mine had enough ore to trigger it to jump there for the buy. I generally don't use this because you end up with all kinds of ships hanging around at the fuel depot and docking can become an issue.

[Vim Razz]

Is there a particular reason for not refueling jump fuel at the ore complex itself? That bypass the problem of it bouncing back and forth between the ore site and the fuel depot.