Fuel

I like the strategy that refueling adds, but it’s too hard to find places to refuel at (at least for me). I was in Emerald and I quite literally searched six stations until I found a warehouse station that had a tanker ship nearby. I didn’t see any waystations or other such “hangout” spots in the system (but then again, I only looked in orbit of Emerald using the StarMap and I didn’t use the NavCom).

Tanker ships would offer the best fuel prices: a 1-to-1 ratio of fuel spent versus the cost of fuel sold. Tankers carry loads and loads of fuel from a manufacturing facility where they can get a bulk discount. Thus, even though they charge market value for their fuel, they’re still turning enough of a profit to cover the transportation costs of getting it from the refinery to your local waystation or hangout. If you can’t find a tanker, however, the ability to refuel any ship that docks to any station would be a godsend. Depending on the station class, the fuel would have a proportionate markup. Shipyards tend to fully fuel the ships that are manufactured once they’re rolled out of the dock, so they have adequate supplies of fuel on hand and charge only a tiny markup (5%). Entertainment stations aren’t renowned fueling depots and probably only keep a few pods of fuel for local emergencies: as such, you could buy the fuel from them, but they would charge a significant markup (40%). Other stations would vary between the two extremes.

I would strongly insist against it being automatic, however. Sometimes if you’ve spent some fuel but still have enough fuel for another jump or two, you’d rather defer paying for fuel that you don’t need so you can buy more goods. As such, refueling a docked ship should be a UniGUI menu option that appears when you’re adjacent to a station (naturally, it only works if a player-affiliated ship is actually docked to the station).

Another refueling feature I would like is to have docking drones or some other system of transferring fuel from the tanker to the ships that are requesting refueling. MegaTrucking and/or Spewer Ops added so much atmosphere that it seems inconsistent that we’re still stuck with the “magic” refueling.

One final feature I would like is the ability to transfer fuel from a pod to your own ship directly — by docking with the pod and choosing an appropriate UniGUI option. This empties the pod of fuel (unless it’s possible to use fractional accounting for the pod’s reserves) and refills your ship by the same amount of fuel.

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