Planetary ports and Inter Astra (IA)

[wolf]

Some of you have probably been to planetary ports and found the IA seat empty (not settlements but ports). It looks like there has to be a shipyard before the IA is operational and an employee is actually at work there. Otherwise all you can do is load new 'Ship Display' adds by clicking on the keypad

Is this correct or is it just a bug?

[Kosevich]

There is planetary outposts and planetary ports.
Only second one has a shipyard. So I presume Frontier made a nice looking gallery window on planets surface (near barman) and just don't bothered to create a separate settlement model for planetary outposts.

[wolf]

I know it's confusing with those names but planetary ports actually do come without a shipyard, and those are the places where I can't find the IA employee

Outposts (afaik) are the smaller space stations (little brothers to starports) but none of these are planetary as in surface.

At a planetary body you can find various types of settlements and then ports. Ports are always orange (Horizons creations) and only some of those have shipyards. This is my problem because then I can't recall any of my ships to these locations

Edit:
These ports always have circular icons with a tall skyscraper inside the ring, yet there is no indication of wether they have a shipyard or not. For that you have to go to the description (sys map). Why is everything ED so complicated

[ShelLuser]

Yah, they changed this and I also don't like it. Because while the area may not have an official shipyard you can still place ships there in storage (so: land a ship, grab a shuttle back to another base and from there select another ship).

I actually used this to have several of my smaller ships stored at a planetary station. But yah, after this change I couldn't even get them back without paying for transfers. Really bad change IMO.

[Kosevich]

Double checked again.
Planetary ports has huge wall all over the city and several skyscrapers. ALWAYS has a shipyard so as Inter Astra employe
https://www.edsm.net/img/stations/6.png

Planetary outposts - several small building with no walls. Pretty rare has functional shipyard
https://www.edsm.net/img/stations/5.png

And i have no idea how to separate those two types of ground settlements.

I found only EDSM can see the difference:
https://www.edsm.net/en/search/stations/index/sortBy/distanceCMDR/type/5/type/6

[wolf]

Thx for the effort Kosevich I stand corrected about those names. So there are both a planetary and an orbiting 'Outpost'. Well that makes it all so much easier to remember and explain to others lol

As long as it has a shipyard I can store as many ships as I'd like, but when it doesn't the trouble begins, and the local IA is just an empty store

I can still dock underground and all that, but I cannot order any of my other ships to this place, most likely because *sigh* there is NO shipyard at that port... this is just flat out bad game design What if Frontier invented ... the garage, tadaa