Shipyard and EQ Dock questions

[Honved]

Despite playing X3/TC for years, I've never tried purchasing a Shipyard or Equipment Dock. Is there any purpose to one of these, if player-owned? Do they actually do ANYTHING beyond serving as a docking point for capital ships and/or warehouse for various goods?

Sadly, the Search function only seems to come up with Station and dock ware manager mods, and the Extra Search function never locates a valid post for me, regardless of what I enter, so the only way I can find out (short of just trying it myself) is to ask here.

[Joe McCracken]

Do they actually do ANYTHING beyond serving as a docking point for capital ships and/or warehouse for various goods?

Short answer, In my experience, no.

[Alan Phipps]

In vanilla, player-owned Equipment Docks are good as large ship parking lots, operations bases and places to exchange goods between ships. They are poor as warehouses because they can only hold a few each of weapon type etc. They do not stock/sell ship tunings or softwares etc when player-owned.

You cannot buy a Shipyard in vanilla but you can buy Trading Stations. These are more useful than EDs as warehouses and as places to store and sell your stuff to NPCs, but they cannot dock big ships.

[Jimmy C]

The Boron EqD can dock an unlimited number of medium sized ships: transports, M6s and M8s.
While it's true that the Dock itself can only hold a limited number of wares, the fact that you can shove those wares into an unlimited number of docked ships means that you effectively have unlimited storage space.
EqDs are a good companion to a missile/guns production complex. You can store the output of the complexes in the Dock rather than clutter up the complex hub's docking ports.
Also, you can use the Dock as the sell point of an "infinite sink" selling operation. Selling straight from the complex can be annoying during complex construction, because the prices reset every time you connect a new station. Production output can also occasionally cause more of the product to be available to your Trade Loopers than acceptable, causing the Manual Trade Run to end, despite any clever CLS instructions. Via the Dock, you can control exactly how many of each product is available for sale using CLS.

[ancienthighway]

It's been so long since I've done anything with Equipment Docks in TC, but I think they all use the same model; two capital ship docks and 10 or 15 external docks for small and medium ships. In AP though, Boron Equipment Docks have unlimited internal docking for all ships smaller than capital.

As Alan said, in vanilla they are pretty much limited to parking spaces. You decide what they stock, but quantities are limited just as with the NPC docks.

If you are a fighter collector or have a large fighter fleet, an Argon Trading station with it's unlimited small ship internal docking is useful for ship storage.

There are mods in TC and AP that allow you to add software to the EqD, and you pay for them just as you would at an NPC dock. I don't recall if tunings were included or not.

As far as uses beyond parking, you can usually buy one of these before the vanilla Hub Plot is finished in TC, then using CAG and CLS augment the Hub in purchasing of wares for the Hub. Set up the weapons, shields and missile holdings with Dockware Manager, then let CAGs and NPC traders chase your needs down. You have total control over what is stocked at both the EqD and trading station. so you could use an EqD as a trading station that docks capital ships or a Trading station as a limited use Eq Dock.

[Nanook]

The Boron EqD can dock an unlimited number of medium sized ships: transports, M6s and M8s....

Not in TC, which is what the OP is playing.