At the moment there is an inbalance in the Cargo Devices in the game.
Modular Crates are pretty much the best way to get ores from A to B, and raw ores are by far the Best way to get money, as hauling an Asteroid reduces the total price by way to much.
Ignoring that though, there are 2 other ways to transport cargo.
First there are Cargo-Lock-Beams and secondly there are Cargo-Lock-Frames.
Both function similary, they lock an object on to your ship to transport it, but for this post i will primarily talk about Cargo-Lock-Frames, or shortened to CLF's for the rest of the post.
1: The Problems
As mentioned above, one thing the CLF directly suffers from is the fact that selling raw ore straight up makes more money than hauling.
It does this less than a CLB though, due to the sad reality that most ships dont contain a frame large enough to carry asteroids due to how huge a CLF would need to be for that.
So what can it do to make money?
In the Closed-Alpha i have seen 2 uses for Cargo-Lock-Frames:
The first method named reduces the ship cost by minimizing the amount of Modular Ore crates on the ship, as those get quite expensive.
Those designs usually make you gather ore, wich is then taken out of the Modular ore crate and placed in to the CLF.
This is quite obviously something only made for people that dont want to spend to much time in the Beginner Jobs. The amount of time lost by doing the busy work of putting the ore in and out of the crates could have easily been spend on the beginner job to just get a ship that uses Modular ore crates instead.
This inefficieny will just become more problematic the bigger your ship is, and is at that point not worth doing over modular crates anyways.
The second useage of CLFs is the salvaging of ship parts. This comes with multiple problems.
First off, there is obviously less salvage than there are asteroids. Salvage will appear in more populated and dangerous areas, and is by that a lot more competitive and risky to make money from.
Finding some is more time intensive than mining and has a chance to end with you finding nothing valueable, where in comparison mining just rock could make you richer. Through the higher rarity of salvage, increasing your ships size wont have much of an effect on the money you get in return, as you will struggle with filling the CLF with worthy goods.
The biggest problem im seeing here is, that the CLF becomes entirely useless mid- to late-game.
It doesnt have anything that sticks out and is better compared to the other methods of hauling and mining.
2. Solutions
In my eyes, the CLF is and should be a hybrid between Mining and Hauling, not the best at both, but able to switch between both tasks reliably.
But as we have established, it fails to do any of both in the mid- or endgame.
So i propose a few ideas on how to improve CLF's, wich by far wont be perfect, but hopefully give some improvements to them.
1. Ore Dispensers
Ore Dispensers would be a big device wich can hold a few stacks of Ores, similar to Modular Cargo Crates. Holding ore in them would be inefficient though, as it holding ore will have a electricity-penality.
Its main purpose is to temporarily hold ore and then turn it in to Ore Cubes in a Size you yourself set.
This idea bases on the problem the first option of using CLFs had, wich was scaling the system up. Placing all those 1728kv cubes in a huge CLF would take ages, so to help that this device can put out ore cubes of any size you want, aslong as you have the resources for it.
Those cubes would still be more size-efficient than just keeping the ore in Modular crates, and saves the contruction money too.
2. The Building of CLF's
At the moment, the only possible way to build CLF's is like this:
That is good and all, but it comes at a problem, wich is size. Cargo-Lock-Frames need to be ridiciliously big to match the Hauling Capacity of CLBs at all.
This is a problem, since fitting one on your ship becomes increasingly hard as you have to make sure that the hauled object fits in to it easily and that the integrity of it is fine, wich in most cases requires all CLF's to be bolted to Beams.
This way of Building a Frame should be kept in the game, but i would propose an additonal way one should be able to build a CLF, wich would be like this:
As you can see, the CLF is not fully enclosed on this picture.
My idea would be to be able to make Cargo-Lock-Fields to extend further than the frame.
This would come at the cost of harder to manage integrity and higher power cost, but would return in the ability to mount those easily on the side, top or bottom of a ship, without using up to much space. To add to that, it would make it easier to get Asteroids inside of the field itself, without risking to break the frame itself.
In the frame controller you could setup the length of the field, with its cost increasing faster the further you go.
This would not outdate the fully enclosed CLF, as that one will still have lower power costs and an easier time with integrity.
This feature would mostly be introduced for midgame Ships.
3. Reduce the Asteroid-Hauling Penality.
I can see the reason for why the penality is in, but having your pay reduced by as much as it does at the monent does not feel correct.
This was obviously added to make Modular Crates not irrelevant, but the thing is that they just have enough positives to make up for the longer mining time.
Modular Cargo Crates do not slow you down as much as CLB's or CLF's do, by a far margin.
The time you gain from hauling a roid instead of mining it with a pickaxe is easily lost from the strongly decreased speed you will have.
Once the mining laser is added, this becomes even more important of a point, as getting ores in to the ship with the laser will be far faster than hauling a whole roid.
Thanks for reading this, hope my sleep deprived grammar wasnt to bad, hehe.
Modular Crates are pretty much the best way to get ores from A to B, and raw ores are by far the Best way to get money, as hauling an Asteroid reduces the total price by way to much.
Ignoring that though, there are 2 other ways to transport cargo.
First there are Cargo-Lock-Beams and secondly there are Cargo-Lock-Frames.
Both function similary, they lock an object on to your ship to transport it, but for this post i will primarily talk about Cargo-Lock-Frames, or shortened to CLF's for the rest of the post.
1: The Problems
As mentioned above, one thing the CLF directly suffers from is the fact that selling raw ore straight up makes more money than hauling.
It does this less than a CLB though, due to the sad reality that most ships dont contain a frame large enough to carry asteroids due to how huge a CLF would need to be for that.
So what can it do to make money?
In the Closed-Alpha i have seen 2 uses for Cargo-Lock-Frames:
- Cheap beginner Ships, by converting the Ore in to Cubes to fit them in to the CLF
- Hauling Systems from wreckages to sell them for money.
The first method named reduces the ship cost by minimizing the amount of Modular Ore crates on the ship, as those get quite expensive.
Those designs usually make you gather ore, wich is then taken out of the Modular ore crate and placed in to the CLF.
This is quite obviously something only made for people that dont want to spend to much time in the Beginner Jobs. The amount of time lost by doing the busy work of putting the ore in and out of the crates could have easily been spend on the beginner job to just get a ship that uses Modular ore crates instead.
This inefficieny will just become more problematic the bigger your ship is, and is at that point not worth doing over modular crates anyways.
The second useage of CLFs is the salvaging of ship parts. This comes with multiple problems.
First off, there is obviously less salvage than there are asteroids. Salvage will appear in more populated and dangerous areas, and is by that a lot more competitive and risky to make money from.
Finding some is more time intensive than mining and has a chance to end with you finding nothing valueable, where in comparison mining just rock could make you richer. Through the higher rarity of salvage, increasing your ships size wont have much of an effect on the money you get in return, as you will struggle with filling the CLF with worthy goods.
The biggest problem im seeing here is, that the CLF becomes entirely useless mid- to late-game.
It doesnt have anything that sticks out and is better compared to the other methods of hauling and mining.
2. Solutions
In my eyes, the CLF is and should be a hybrid between Mining and Hauling, not the best at both, but able to switch between both tasks reliably.
But as we have established, it fails to do any of both in the mid- or endgame.
So i propose a few ideas on how to improve CLF's, wich by far wont be perfect, but hopefully give some improvements to them.
1. Ore Dispensers
Ore Dispensers would be a big device wich can hold a few stacks of Ores, similar to Modular Cargo Crates. Holding ore in them would be inefficient though, as it holding ore will have a electricity-penality.
Its main purpose is to temporarily hold ore and then turn it in to Ore Cubes in a Size you yourself set.
This idea bases on the problem the first option of using CLFs had, wich was scaling the system up. Placing all those 1728kv cubes in a huge CLF would take ages, so to help that this device can put out ore cubes of any size you want, aslong as you have the resources for it.
Those cubes would still be more size-efficient than just keeping the ore in Modular crates, and saves the contruction money too.
2. The Building of CLF's
At the moment, the only possible way to build CLF's is like this:
That is good and all, but it comes at a problem, wich is size. Cargo-Lock-Frames need to be ridiciliously big to match the Hauling Capacity of CLBs at all.
This is a problem, since fitting one on your ship becomes increasingly hard as you have to make sure that the hauled object fits in to it easily and that the integrity of it is fine, wich in most cases requires all CLF's to be bolted to Beams.
This way of Building a Frame should be kept in the game, but i would propose an additonal way one should be able to build a CLF, wich would be like this:
As you can see, the CLF is not fully enclosed on this picture.
My idea would be to be able to make Cargo-Lock-Fields to extend further than the frame.
This would come at the cost of harder to manage integrity and higher power cost, but would return in the ability to mount those easily on the side, top or bottom of a ship, without using up to much space. To add to that, it would make it easier to get Asteroids inside of the field itself, without risking to break the frame itself.
In the frame controller you could setup the length of the field, with its cost increasing faster the further you go.
This would not outdate the fully enclosed CLF, as that one will still have lower power costs and an easier time with integrity.
This feature would mostly be introduced for midgame Ships.
3. Reduce the Asteroid-Hauling Penality.
I can see the reason for why the penality is in, but having your pay reduced by as much as it does at the monent does not feel correct.
This was obviously added to make Modular Crates not irrelevant, but the thing is that they just have enough positives to make up for the longer mining time.
Modular Cargo Crates do not slow you down as much as CLB's or CLF's do, by a far margin.
The time you gain from hauling a roid instead of mining it with a pickaxe is easily lost from the strongly decreased speed you will have.
Once the mining laser is added, this becomes even more important of a point, as getting ores in to the ship with the laser will be far faster than hauling a whole roid.
Thanks for reading this, hope my sleep deprived grammar wasnt to bad, hehe.
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