Vehicle Delivery

[Mountainhigh]

So I have a lot of hours playing this game(roughly 900hrs) and one of the things that still confuses me, and kind of frustrates me is vehicle delivery. Maybe I'm just not doing something right. I always have my Vehicle production facility building vehicles, so I always have a stock pile of vehicles. How is everyone getting those built vehicles(specifically the slow ones, like excavators/pavers/bulldozers) to there respective CO's, Dist offices, etc? Right now I've been sending the equipment to a close by depot, load it onto a waiting truck, and then making the open hull truck unload at the site then drive back to depot. But I find sometimes this doesn't work. Such as right now trying to send a excavator to a CO halfway across the map. The truck just comes back and unloads the excavator at the depot.
it would be really nice to be able to just have a truck able to pick up the equipment right at the production facility.
How is everyone else doing it?

[ChalwaBechatex]

+1
managing vehicles is tedious
I hope it will be more automated in next update with maintainance of vehicles. I’ve got some ideas but I think internal testers and devs have them too so no need to elaborate here.

[Silent_Shadow]

The main distinction is whether the vehicle is considered "new" or "old:"

• New vehicles are bought at the customs house menu or the beyond the borders menu or are created at factories.
  
• New vehicles become old vehicles when they are assigned to a line, told to go somewhere via the "change depot/workplace" button, or if they are brought to a depot, parking lot, workplace, or car dealership (mostly).

Weight is ignored; instead, the size of the vehicle and the carrier's deck/flatbed determine what can be carried by what or stored in what. In a vehicle's menu you can see what it can carry or what can carry it (depends on its new/old status and the exceptions above), by clicking on the button with a truck and a blue (?).


If "old," then you typically have to make the vehicle relocate under its own power. The only three exceptions are:

• Mechanisms, which you can load onto flatbed trucks and move via the "change depot/workplace" button between depots and road COs or load onto helicopters at heli COs and moved to other helicopter COs. You cannot move mechanisms directly between heli COs and road COs/depots in this manner, but you can have the mechanism move on its own between them. Tower cranes are thus locked to one or the other.
  
  Mechanisms that can move under their own power can be moved in this manner for long distances and then be told to move under their own power for the last leg of a journey. For example, you could build a road depot near an area of bauxite mines and at another road depot, load excavators onto trucks and then tell the trucks to "change depot/workplace" to the other road depot. When they arrive, they will unload the old excavators into the depot and you can then tell the excavators to go to the bauxite mines.
  
  
• Cargo wagons at train distribution offices, which you can tell a locomotive to form a train out of and bring somewhere else and even load/unload as normal. There is no way to sort wagons by content or type however, and it is impractical to sort wagons by length.
  
  You can use this to create limited marshaling yards for train setups, but that is rather niche. The main purpose is for emptying train distribution offices of wagons without selling them.
  
  
• Construction offices can automatically move certain mechanisms on trucks/helicopters to construction sites. For road COs, you can force mechanisms to wait for a ride.

New vehicles can be moved much easier, but there are rules:

• No direct carrier to carrier transfers - Vehicles must be unloaded from a carrier into a space for vehicles before other carriers can load them. Fortunately, storages for vehicles are pretty cheap.
  
  
• Vehicles can be loaded and unloaded across a factory connection, but only if they are carried. Towed railway vehicles cannot be loaded and unloaded across factory connections; they must be within the same building for a locomotive to tow them. Similarly, railway production lines cannot push surplus vehicles they make into connected spaces for vehicles.
  
  
• Vehicles can only be delivered to workplaces by a vehicle unloading them directly into the workplace (mine, farm building, CO, etc.). You cannot unload the vehicle at a connected facility into the workplace.
  
  For example, you cannot unload a harvester from a helicopter at a cargo helipad into a farm building, even though you could unload it into a space for vehicles. You will have to either unload the harvester into a space for vehicles and then tell it to move to the farm building or directly deliver the harvester to the farm building by a truck.
  
  
• If you load rail vehicles onto flatbed train wagons, you will have to unload them into a space for vehicles before towing them to a depot or train distribution office to use them; otherwise they will remain on the flatbed wagons within the depot/TDO and be unable to be assigned to lines or other trains.
  
  
• Cableway stations will not accept cable cars until the cableway is finished, and light cableways will not accept heavy cable cars.
  
  
• The "wait until loaded" option makes a vehicle wait until it cannot load any vehicle that is present within the building it is loading from, or if that building doesn't have any storage for vehicles, then until it cannot load any vehicle that is present within a building accessible to the building it loads from.
  
  This option also seems to prevent vehicles from loading vehicles from customs houses, so don't use it for vehicles loading from there.

[zytukin]

You can have trucks pick up vehicles right at the production facility (or at least from a connected vehicle storage). I use open hull trucks to move them to the new city automatically.

1. Build a vehicle storage place in the city you want the things moved to.
2. Build a road vehicles depot next to your car factory and put a few open hull trucks in it capable of moving vehicles.  This will be their parking area until you need them.
3. Make sure the vehicle factory is stopped and has no vehicles in it that you don't want moved.  If you have trains picking up vehicles and taking them to export send them to a depot (I build one specifically for them next to my vehicle factory).
4. Queue up the vehicles you want made for a different city and checkmark the box setting the factory to stop producing when the queue is finished.
5. Set the open hulls from the road vehicle depot to pick up the vehicles and deliver them to the vehicle storage area in the other city.
6.  Sit back and wait as the vehicles are made and delivered to the other city automatically.

Manually rehome the vehicles from the vehicle storage area to the much closer construction offices, mines, farms, etc in the new city.

When the queue is complete, send the open hull trucks to the depot to await the next time you need them and restart any trains that where taking vehicles from the factory to export.

[Basil Peace]

> You cannot move mechanisms directly between heli COs and road COs/depots in this manner … Tower cranes are thus locked to one or the other

You can load a mechanism on a helicopter and move it from a heli CO to a road CO with a heliport.
IIRC, vanilla road COs doesn't allow to attach heliports anymore, but there are some mod road COs that still do. There are also mod road COs that have built-in heliports. But these COs aren't shown in the bottom menu, only in the 'buildings from workshop' menu in the left.

Road COs with heliports were proven to be buggy to do the actual construction, that's why the devs changed it a while back.
In my republic I have one such road CO with a heliport. I use this CO solely to move mechanisms.

[deCubaSoy]

Yes! You can delivery vehicles any where across the map. from point A to B. You need a big Storage for vehicles/containers and the loading and unloading helicopter platform connected to it. in both places. the pick-up location and the unloading location. then you need the cargo platform vehicle helicopter to get the job done. The Soviet Mil V-12 can carry 40t of cargo. so, basically you can easily load two Kmz 5410 refrigeration trucks.
I currently transport vehicles to another island this way!