Introduction
Warehouse ownership is only available from the Home of Light DLC. They are also unique in the way that instead of possessing production lines they can be set up to buy & sell any ware. As with other stations, ships can be assigned to their crew to Protect, Trade and/or Mine, with harvested resources bought/sold just like other wares.
...
- Trading of wares for profit.
- Ability to acquire or stockpile wares, even when hostile to major factions.
- Automation of supply of harvested resources to other stations via Trade ships (see below).
- Cost-effective strongholds, covered in guns.
- Fleet resupply for any drones it may purchase.
Selecting a location
As with any station, identifying a suitable location is key to keeping the Warehouse busy and helping you in whatever task(s) you plan for it.
...
- Any station without a Command Relay (the big radar dish) can only trade sector-wide. Can its ships acquire (or sell) the wares you want them to?
- Whether your customers and suppliers are your assets or NPCs; where they are located (& how dangerous is it for them to get to you)?
- If you'd like to harvest particular resources, where are they located (see also point 2 above)?
- With up to ~300 weapons, where would you like to place your fully armed and operational
Death StarWarehouse? Note that this is constrained by fixed build points inzone
Construction
Warehouses are built like any other station, but only the Terracorp Construction Vessel (available from the Home of Light DLC) has this option. The first stage of a Warehouse requires surprisingly few components, costing ~2.5 million credits.. although it bristles with the ability to mount surface elements, so an aditional 16 million credits offers 102 HIT/MA, and 56 Plasma/MAs, 2 V Launchers and assorted Force Field Projectors.
Note that the initial stage only offers Container storage. Whilst that is a popular & profitable class of wares to trade, it is worth emphasising that this means that the Architect must extend the Warehouse with additional storage modules before Bulk, Energy or Liquid wares may be stored and/or traded.
Station management
In general, Warehouses are set up and managed just like regular stations, with crew and Manager settings such as Supply Options. Where they differ from other stations is that the Manger has an additional option called "Manage trade offers" instead of "Manage trade offer prices", with which we can add or remove wares to the list of items the Manager may trade.
...
As noted above, the first stage of the Warehouse may store, and therefore trade, only Container class wares. Until the Warehouse is extended with further storage modules, Bulk, Energy or Liquid wares will be greyed out within the initial "Add Trade Wares" menu.
Setting up a mining hub
For various reasons we may want our manufacturing stations in inconvenient locations with respect to the location of the harvestable resources they may need. Or, we may have many stations needing harvestable resources and some of our Mining ships may be standing around idle some of the time. The unique ability of Warehouses to sell anything means that if we wish we can set them up to collect and supply things such as Ore and Plasma just like other wares; then our Bulk and Liquid Trade ships assigned to our other stations can collect what they need from the Warehouse.
...