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The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgamesEARTHDATE: June 20, 2010
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GRAVING DOCKS ARE NOT QUITE READYby HazedFirst the bad news: graving docks are not going to go live this weekend. Alan has been working on the code but he hasn't quite finished it, due to yet another unfortunate incident... not werewolves, asteroids, or aliens but a massive infection in a tooth. And of course being a man he didn't want to do anything about this until it got so bad that one side of his face swelled up completely, and he had to rush off to the local hospital this morning. So depending on how long he's out of action because of this, graving docks will either go in sometime during the week or next weekend - barring any more emergencies! Incidentally, this also means Alan hasn't been able to write Winding Down this week. In previous issues I have explained some of the things you need to know about how they work, but to make it easy for you I am pulling all that info together here. A graving dock is an orbital shipyard - all spaceship shops have them in order to construct the ships that you order, and Jarrow's on Earth is the largest in the known Galaxy, although the Imperial Navy's own graving dock runs a close second in size. Plutocracts will use graving docks to construct Blish cities, which are spacefaring cities that can move around from star system to star system, adding production points to the economy of whatever planet they are in orbit around. They are built by the cartel, and can then attach themselves to any planet in the cartel, producing income for the cartel as well as production for the planet. They will have an additional benefit: while a Blish city is being built, the planets in the hub system of the cartel will not suffer any disaffection, because all the troublemakers will be on their best behavior as they hope to be chosen to populate the new spacefaring city. But that's getting a bit ahead of the technology: right now, all you can build is the graving dock itself. It is constructed on the cartel's prime planet, and that's where the cities will subsequently be put together. Building a graving dock isn't like other planetary infrastructure builds. It takes money, time and commodities. You start by issuing the command to build a dock, which is 'BUILD GRAVING DOCK', at which point the cost - 20 meg - is immediately taken from the cartel's treasury. Then you have to start collecting the materials needed (see table below), transferring them to the partially-built dock's warehouse facility. The build takes 5 days to complete, and each day at reset one-fifth of the commodities will be taken from the dock warehouse and put towards the build. If not all the commodities are there, no building will happen that day. You can put more commods in than will be needed - although you won't be able to get them out again, they won't go to waste because they will be used later to build the Blish cities. Here's the commodities needed, in tons:
In order to get the required commodities into the dock warehouse, you need to divert goods that would otherwise be delivered to your exchanges. Once you have issued the command to build the graving dock, you then type 'DIVERT'. After that, whenever any goods are delivered to any of the planets in the cartel's hub system, if they are required by the build then they will be diverted to the dock's warehouse. This will happen with goods that are sold to the exchange, and loads delivered by haulers. When the warehouse has enough of a particular commodity to complete the build, no more of that item will be diverted. You can stop the diversion happening with 'UNDIVERT' which turns off all of the diverting until such time as you turn it back on again. You can only build one graving dock in a cartel. Once graving docks are implemented, Alan will work on the Blish cities that you will build in your graving docks... and no, I refuse to speculate on when we'll see them! |
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