Silicon bottlenecks

[GONDAL]

I am trying to run 4 computronic substrate fabs simultaneously yet 20 L size miners aren't able to keep them fed? Am I missing something? How do they consume so much?

[Tiberius]

Station miners only travel (max) 5 sectors away from your station and only to area that you have explored.

Different sectors have different amt of yield, so if you're mining in a "poor" yield sector, having tons of miners dont matter. Too many miners in a sector also deplete the asteroid real quickly (altho the asteroids will respawn after certain time)

Use this map to find out where the "rich" sector is: https://www.qsna.eu/x4/map

[Wraith]

Sound to me it a skill issue more then a miner issue

Make sure your miners are skilled when mining silicon

It make a massive difference in time

I have 10 miner and a few medium and small miners and my 4 computronic fab is keeping up

[GONDAL]

Originally posted by Wraith:

Sound to me it a skill issue more then a miner issue

Make sure your miners are skilled when mining silicon

It make a massive difference in time

I have 10 miner and a few medium and small miners and my 4 computronic fab is keeping up

Ah ok. Is there any particularly fast way to level pilots or do you just have to buckle down and wait? They are already in a rich silicon sector

[ScootyPuffJr]

Originally posted by Azure:

Originally posted by Wraith:

Sound to me it a skill issue more then a miner issue

Make sure your miners are skilled when mining silicon

It make a massive difference in time

I have 10 miner and a few medium and small miners and my 4 computronic fab is keeping up

Ah ok. Is there any particularly fast way to level pilots or do you just have to buckle down and wait? They are already in a rich silicon sector

In vanilla? No, but there are plenty of mods that can decrease the amount of time it takes to skill up

[Chico Rodriguez]

This should not be an issue. I have 2 - 3 large silicon miners feeding a megastation with 30 - 40 substrate fabs and never runs dry. PIck a different, denser system to mine in. If not possible in your current station system or very close to, then you need to establish a logistics chain with a centralized mining hub/depot that receives silicon from miners in a distant sector. If you do this, I find medium transports can utilize superhighways and faster resupply production load than L/XL suppliers(but creates more lag so you have to balance with late game playability in mind).

[Daddy Shark]

Terran goods require a MASSIVE amount of raw resources. They're WAY more expensive than the commonwealth stuff. My main terran foundry has 8 of each module and 100 L miners in the asteroid belt can't keep it fed with the shipyards are in action.

[Azrelus]

Are those terran L miners by any chance?

[Gibbo]

Yeah I'm finding it takes a lot more miners to keep factories fed. This is also where resource probes are handy as they make sure the miners go to the closest sector. Things got a lot better when I switched to all large miners. I personally like the Crane. Very slow, but huge cargo and shields like a space station so only a massive attack takes them out.

[blackphoenixx]

Silicon mining speed is heavily affected by pilot skill, number of mining drones and travel distance. And which miner you use of course.

A Chthonios Sentinel can manage ~30k silicon per hour if you give it green mods, 10 mining drones, a 5-star pilot and don't have it make any jumps.
On the other hand an unmodded Hokkaido with a low-skill pilot that has to jump a sector or two every trip pulls maybe 5-8k, if you're lucky.

If you want to improve the efficiency of your miners i'd suggest the following, in order of difficulty:
- use resource probes; being in the radius of one increases mining speed
- use maximum number of mining drones: your factories have cargo drones so your miners don't need to carry any
- remove the need for your L miners to jump - build a mining station and use M miners to transport minerals if necessary, your L miners should never have to use a jumpgate.
- apply green mods - drag mod on chassis, Digger mod on your mining lasers, Nudger or Reaver on engine increases miner performance by 30-40% for a tiny cost and some common drops. It's well worth it
- use better miners: Chthonios, Crane and Donia are good, Wyvern and Hokkaido are terrible. A Chthonios Sentinel mines ~30% more per hour than a Hokkaido under equal conditions so you need less ships (and less pilots) to fill the demand.
- increase pilot skill: This is the biggest influence on mining speed but also the most annoying one to improve. It's still worth running some missions for pilot seminars for your silicon miners because the difference is huge.

Also assign some combat ships to your mining grounds to keep the Khaak under control. They may not kill L miners but they certainly slow them down if you don't destroy them.

[GONDAL]

So, I set up shop in a denser system two systems away. I have a few M size miners to set to haul ore from a depot to the main wharf. However, it says that there are "no trade offers in range" evne though I made buy orders for all of the ore types mined and there are 3 star managers. Why won't they haul?

[Lastman]

I hope you have enough docking moduls and drones because i run my 4xCompu with 4 Mirage L miner and 2 Mirage L gas.
Okay not everyone have the Mirage Ship, but at least 8-10 TER miner and 4-6 TER gas Min
should work, did you limit their sector activity?

[GONDAL]

Originally posted by Grumpy:

Originally posted by Azure:

So, I set up shop in a denser system two systems away. I have a few M size miners to set to haul ore from a depot to the main wharf. However, it says that there are "no trade offers in range" evne though I made buy orders for all of the ore types mined and there are 3 star managers. Why won't they haul?

Manual buy up to full. Manual set price. Manual sell price and manual sell all but 1. Apply only your faction trade rule.

I set this but they still refuse to trade

[Gregorovitch]

The biggest single factor with silicon mining in my experience is yield. The game has been set up to make silcon much more sensitive to yield than ore is. If you are trying to mine silicon in an area with yields of <1 per km^3 for example the rate of extraction will be very low.

On top of that the Terran production modules require vast quantities of ore and silicon to operate. Hence your problem.

The yields in Terran Space are typically terrible. From a lore point of view that's 'cos the Humans have been mining out the Solar System for hundreds of years. It's also why the Terrans are now so keen to invade into Commonwwealth space now the gates are back on line of course.

A wise operator in Terran Space will send scouts out to find sectors that have better silicon yields - in the range of 6-8+. That sorts out the problem. Although it presents another in terms of getting the stuff back to the factory but there are ways to to do that over significant distances once you know how.

[Charles]

I find that with Terran stuff sometimes accepting some inefficiencies is the best option. It might be easier to look at the consumption rate of your solids and calculate a rough idea of how many ships you need for any given resource.

For your example, with a L Terran mining ships, you would need about 37.8 trips an hour to satisfy the ore/silicon needs of 4 CS fabs. If we assume that you are making 2 trips an hour then 19 ships should cover the solid needs. It could be more trips or less trips that are actually happening. If you were to up the ship numbers to 37 that would probably make the problem go away. But It might be worth looking into why they are finishing so few trips an hour. It could be docking/cargo transfer speed, low skill, poor/depleted yield, long travel times, poor allocation by the manager, low number of mining drones, or maybe something else. Once you check over what they are doing that could help. Resource probes might help them find stuff faster also.

If you just throw ships at the problem you can reallocate excess ships latter. With the added bonus that their crew might have a few levels on them. It can get very expensive if you aren't producing your own ships/resources for them so consider that.

To clarify where my math is coming form. I am taking the number of solids needed for 4 CS fabs. It is 72k silicon and 72k ore. I am then multiplying them by 10 as 10 is the volume of 1 unit of ore/silicon. I then add those numbers together resulting in 1440000. That number is the volume of 144000 units of ore/silicon. The volume is different than the number of units. I then take the total volume and divide it by the cargo capacity of the desired ship. With the Hokkaido that would be 38000 volume. This results in the number of trips that ship needs to take an hour to fulfill the needs.

[Charles]

Also CS in particular is comically inefficient in my opinion. I wouldn't even bother building habitats on CS factories. The bonus is so small that it is more efficient to build another factory or add on to the current one depending on resources available in the system. This is especially true if you are using Terran hab modules exclusively. So with CS it is special in the sense that it is probably the single largest resource hog in the game, and there is not much to be done about it besides improving the efficiency of your mining/transportation.