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and Fleet Auxiliary Ships.
Carriers are able to repair and rearm ships that can dock at them. In general, these are ships that are of size-class S or M.
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While repairs do not require resources; ammunition, units and deployables are built to order so, in order to fulfill orders for these items, resupply ships need certain resources.
Supplying Resupply Ships
Determining what resupply ships need:
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- You can manually order the resupply ship to purchase resources that it requires.
Note that the amount of scanning arrays is indicated in the trade menu in parentheses. - You can manually order one of your own freighters to deliver resources that it requires.
The number of scanning arrays that the Nomad needs is also indicated here in parentheses. - You can allow the resupply ship to acquire resources on their own.
- Both carriers and fleet auxiliary ships advertise trade offers for the resources that they need. Free traders will occasionally entertain these offers and spontaneously fly to these ships to deliver resources. Do note, however, that resupply ships deactivate these trade offers when they engage in certain activities such as going into combat. To verify that these trade offers are active, right-click on the ship's icon on the map and select Trade Offers.
This brings up a menu that details all of the wares and amounts that your resupply ship is trying to purchase. This is the most hands-off method, but also tends to be the slowest. - You can also tell your resupply ship to Get Supplies.
This will order the ship to look for trades on its own and buy all of the resources that it needs. As long as you know of trades fairly close to the ship that are selling the resources that it needs, this will result in a series of trade orders to purchase these resources. You can verify that the ship is going off to trade by looking at that ship's Order Queue.
Note the maximum gate distance over which the ship will look for trades at the bottom of this image. This gate distance depends on the Piloting skill of the ship's captain.
This is the fastest method to instruct your ship to automatically get resources. However, this is also usually the most expensive.