Ulite: Transporting goods to your station

Most modules - especially when you're building one of the higher levels - require a vast quantity of raw materials to build. The obvious solution to getting the materials there is to buy a gigantic ship, say, an Imperial Heavy Cruiser. However, this has some drawbacks:

• Unless you've been playing for years, you probably don't have the Manoeuvring and Navigation skill to captain such a ship.
• You might not be able to afford such a giant ship, and to kit it out.

The first point is probably the biggest stumbling block, especially if your alliance has some money and is helping you out finance-wise. As you've already found out - money is really only a small part of the battle when buying a large ship.

Option 1. Recruit help from your alliance

Assuming the rest of your alliance isn't busy building their own stations, you might be able to get help from alliance members. Make sure you have enough space at your station to deposit raw materials - a warehouse is very useful to have, as well as making sure you build an adequate basement. Make sure your Police Control is set up to allow alliance members to deposit goods (and of course, your police control grants them permission to dock in the first place).

Option 2. Use of Fleets

Fleets (other ships you own, but don't captain) can not only be used to trade independently of your ship, but they can also join your ship in a convoy. There are a number of advantages to building some fleet ships. Most basically you can simply set them to ferry goods to your station from nearby surrounding stations (if the distance is only 1 jump away - fleets can not directly use auto pilot). Then go off to do your own thing. If you need to collect scarce commodities from long distances and have access to wrap technology, a small fast ship with a military drive in a convoy with a larger wrap drive ship can be used to explore, collect and feed goods back to the mother ship as it charges in preparation for the trip home.

Another possible benefit, if you can find large ships for sale and then both the cash and enough leaders to pilot them, you can actually add ships larger than you could normally safely pilot to a convoy with your ship. This offers the following advantages:

• Strength in numbers - when attacked, all the ships in your convoy will defend.
• Convoy members don't need a hyperdrive/wrap drive - they can have a tiny little Interplanetary Drive, so long as your ship uses a wrap drive. This frees up lots of space for cargo.
• The crew on a ship that's in your convoy needn't be particularly highly skilled, since they will have the protection of your ship.
• Since non-player ships attack the best equipped ship first (i.e. yours!), convoy ships don't need much in the way of defensive equipment (unless of course you go looking for trouble with other players). This frees up even more space for cargo.

For example, if your ship is a 7200 tonne Lynx Bulk Carrier*, you'll probably find that after equipment, you've around 4500 tonnes to spare. Add a Panther Clipper as a Fleet, and have it join a convoy with you, and most of the Clipper's 2000 tonnes of space is free for you to use - an Interplanetary drive and a small amount of weaponry and shields (just for insurance) won't take up much room - you'll probably gain at least another 1700t in capacity. The important point is that the next bigger ship after a Lynx Bulk Carrier requires you have a higher manoeuvring skill - or you'll heavily damage the ship on each landing - but adding a Clipper to your convoy will add capacity but without demanding any higher skill level.

The biggest problem with larger fleets is finding a crew with sufficient leadership skill. Leadership is likely to be the only skill you're going to find wanting - however, visit a few Class 7 or Class 8 population systems, and you can probably find enough crew members with a higher Leadership skill rating to provide a captain and senior crew**. Don't forget you can hire crew members you don't need in advance of buying another ship to add to your raw materials convoy - so hire in advance.

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* This is a historical example from Ulite V3. Seems very unlikely that anyone who's been around long enough to find a Lynx Bulk Carrier would be reading this page - perhaps they were easier to find in previous versions.

** This also seems not to be the case in V4. Unless another player has sacked skilled crew at the station, you only very occasionally find crew with 3 or more. It's such a rare occurrence to find a level 4 or 5 leader that much of the skill levels required for active crew members to fly class 8 ships will have to come about through combat or training. A Stalker for example has lowest class 8 Leadership requirements of 25, divide that by the 6 active crew and you'd need to find 6 crew with Leadership 4+ in bars. A far quicker technique would be to maintain a highly skilled active crew such that you have one or two slots that may be used to train up rookies that you can rotate out of those slots once they reach level 4+.

Having said that, there doesn't seem to be a limit on the number of crew you can have.