Protheroe
UMEC
0
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Posted - 2011.11.09 05:20:00 -
[1] - Quote
Grady Eltoren wrote:Have you done a time analysis on building the blocks versus just doing the math? I bring this up because after having fueled many POS's for years I am just NOT seeing it. To me the math was never a problem; I just used one of the many free websites like chucker's out there. Now we have to build/wait/run an array/haul/move from array to array...etc This new process seems like it is saving time, and just curious as to who it is saving time for?
I think this is a good point. The purpose of these changes is to simplify the process of fuelling towers and to make it easier and less time consuming, so would they achieve that in their current form? It seems to me that in some cases they definitely would, but in other cases they might make things worse.
When the cost of fuel is a minor consideration (for example if the tower isn't being used for making money, or where the fuel cost is insignificant relative to the income the POS generates, such as mining high value moon materials), then fuelling will just involve buying some blocks from the market and hauling them to the tower. To compare the steps involved in the current and new processes:
Current process:
- Calculate fuel quantities neeeded, taking CPU and PG use into account.
- Purchase various quantities of eight different fuel types.
- Haul fuel to the tower.
- Transfer the fuel over to the fuel bay.
New process:
- Purchase a number of fuel blocks from the market based on the number of hours needed. No other calculations needed.
- Haul fuel to the tower.
- Transfer the fuel blocks over to the fuel bay.
In this case there are fewer steps involved, with the first and second steps in the current process either removed completely or greatly simplified.
However, the fuel blocks will obviously sell at a premium to the cost of the materials needed to make them, and so buying them will be a trade off between convenience and extra cost. When the fuel cost consumes a significant amount of the income generated by a tower, or when multiple towers are involved and the added percentage cost of buying fuel blocks becomes significant (e.g. if fuel blocks are sold at a profit of 10%, the additional cost to an operation running ten towers of buying fuel blocks relative to buying the individual fuels is equivalent to the expense of running an extra tower), a lot of people will turn to manufacturing the fuel blocks themselves to avoid the extra cost. In that case, the comparison between the current and new processes would look like this:
Current process:
- Calculate fuel quantities neeeded, taking CPU and PG use into account.
- Purchase various quantities of eight different fuel types.
- Haul fuel to the tower.
- Transfer the fuel over to the fuel bay.
New process:
- Calculate fuel quantities needed for manufacturing the required number of fuel blocks. CPU and PG use can now be ignored.
- Purchase various quantities of eight different fuel types.
- Haul fuels to a fuel block assembly line.
- Transfer fuels over to the hangar for manufacturing.
- Install fuel block manufacturing jobs.
- Wait for the fuel block manufacturing jobs to complete (at five minutes per block: sixty hours of manufacturing time for thirty days of fuel blocks for a single large tower, divided between however many manufacturing slots are available).
- Haul the completed fuel blocks from the assembly line to the tower, if an array at the tower was not be used.
- Transfer the fuel blocks over to the fuel bay.
It seems that in this second case that although the calculation in the first step is slightly simplified, there are potentially more steps involved in the new process than the current process requires, and there is a delay between the time that any new fuel is purchased and the time it can be transfered to the tower that does not exist in the current system. The significance of this delay would vary depending on the circumstances; for example it could be relevant for a manufacturing operation, where the added time needed to make fuel for the tower would displace whatever other activity the required manufacturing slots were usually in use for. In circumstances where a POS was being used for very long manufacturing jobs, it might be necessary for a fueller to reschedule their manufacturing based on the need to intermittently use their factory slots to produce fuel blocks for the tower.
Some of the additional steps in this case could be avoided by, for example, allowing towers to consume both fuel blocks and the current differentiated fuels, or keeping the current differentiated fuels and introducing fuel blocks as a sort of marketable cargo parcel that could be unpackaged or refined inside a fuel bay. However, some of the replies to this thread have already indicated that those types of solutions might require impractical coding changes.
The only other solution I can think of to mitigate some of the extra hassle that people taking the second option of making their own fuel blocks might encounter relative to the current system would be to reduce the manufacturing time for fuel blocks down further from 5 minutes to seconds. Although there might still be a few extra steps involved in the entire proces, if the amount of time required for manufacturing were trivial it would not present any problems to people for whom losing manufacturing slots for extended periods would be a meaningful loss. |