New trade station

Introduction

Warehouse ownership is only available to you in Home of Light. 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 Mine, with harvested resources bought/sold just like other wares.

Taking into consideration the presence of NPC traders throughout the galaxy, examples of things they offer include:

1. Trading of wares for profit.
2. Ability to acquire or stockpile wares, even when hostile to major factions.
3. Automation of supplies of harvested resources to other stations via Trade ships.
4. Cost-effective strongholds, covered in cannons.
5. Fleet resupply for 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.

Things to take into consideration:

1. Any station without a Command Relay (the big radar dish) can only trade system-wide. Can its ships acquire (or sell) the wares you want them to?
2. Whether your customers and suppliers are your assets or NPCs; where they are located (& how dangerous is it for them to get to you)?
3. If you'd like to harvest particular resources, where are they located?
4. With up to ~300 weapons, where would you like to place your fully armed and operational Death Star warehouse? Note that this is constrained by fixed build points inzone

Construction

Warehouses are built like any other station, but can only be built the Terracorp Construction Vessel (Home of Light DLC). 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 additional 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 class of wares to trade, it is worth emphasizing 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 like regular stations, with crew and Manager settings such as Supply Options (new to v4 vanilla). 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.

After pressing "Add trade wares" and selecting one, we are presented with  number of options:

1. The ability to select whether the Warehouse will Buy and/or Sell the ware*
2. A definable Stock Limit.
3. Definable Sell price (default = maximum = approximately 7.5% above base price in the encyclopaedia).
4. Definable Buy price (default = one below the maximum).
   
5. An 'x' button for removing the ware from the list; (at the bottom of the list (scroll down if necessary) is the 'Add trade wares' button)
   

*The option to both buy /and/ sell wares is available only to a manager with 5* management skill; this restriction is shown in a tooltip

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.