Introduction
Once a station is built or upgraded, it's production lines can work straight away if you manually supply materials. However, for it to really work for you, it needs a Manager and ships assigned to the Manager (see below). The Manger will begin to advertise Buy and Sell orders for wares using a budget that you can define the size of within the Manger's Detail Menu. Those trade deals may be fulfilled by NPC traders, your manual traders or civilian ships that you assign to the Station Manager (recommended to reduce the chance of a ware shortage stopping production). Production Modules will often need multiple types of cargo (Bulk, Container, Energy and/or Liquid) in order to function smoothly, assigned ships offering relevent types.
Station construction
All stations are built from a very similar collection of wares (fewer types than ships):
- Reinforced Metal Plating
- Fusion Reactors
- Energy Cells
- Food Rations
- Bio-Optic Wiring or Plasma Pumps (Albion/DeVries/Home of Light vs Argon economies)
- Optional surface elements (weapons and Force Field Projectors)
Civilian ships working for stations
There are 3 main types of Trade ships:
- Carries individual types of cargo, such as Bulk (examples available in all ship sizes).
- Carries either Container and Energy, or Bulk and Liquid (Large ships only; segregated volumes).
- Carries any cargo (XL ships only) with either shared/universal storage (e.g. Lyranea) or segregated volumes (e.g. Scaldis).
Mining ships are described in more detail here. Essentially, Mining ships will collect harvestable resources that the stations needs if they can carry it and typically, a Mining ship cannot carry both Bulk and Liquid resources.
Ship assignments: Manager
Although the station will generate Upkeep Missions for missing ship types, as your stations grow you may need to invest in multiple ships covering the same type(s). Civilian ships come in Trade and Mine varieties, although the distinction is a little soft since both types can do fulfil both rolls with what they chose to do for a station being largely driven by whether they carry mining drones or not. See here for further details on Manager-controlled ships and about how to control where your ships will operate
Ship assignments: Architect
If you assign a Trade/Mine ship to a station's architect, the architect will try use the ship to help supply wares that the CV needs for whatever building or upgrading orders it has been given. The operational range of a CV is restricted to Sector, only. Given that there are few, if any, sectors that contain all station building materials, and you may not want to build in that sector. assigning ships to Architects may not be idea. However, if you've already supplied the local sector with a station(s) selling such materials, or have used a mod to change the range setting for Architects, it's a handy feature to consider.
Ship assignments: Defence Officer
Any ship assigned to a station's DO will be used to patrol the local zone. This includes Trade/Mine ships, not just Fight ships.
Useful info from elsewhere on the web:
- There's an interesting thread here about how trades are currently (v3.61/v4.00b) worked out, & why your station may stop trading for a time, with Dev comments/clarifications.