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[nomadic_leader]

Summary:
Let player fleets create/harvest all commodities under certain conditions and/or terrains, using skills/hullmods/campaign abilities, at a cost of other commodities as ingredients. This provides fun ways to solve resource shortfalls while exploring or doing procurement missions, and more interaction with planets and terrains. No new commodities required.

Observations from 0.8:
- Exploration is fun
- Terrain is fun
- Using commodities for stuff is fun-- e.g. the Neutrino detector, heavy machinery for salvage; it adds new resource management challenges.
- Players get into pickles and run out of things in deep space
- Sometimes we want a few goods for a procurement mission but can't find them.

The suggestion:
A mix of skills, hullmods, and campaign abilities for creating all commodities at a cost of other commodities as ingredients, sometimes in specific conditions and terrains. Crew and heavy machinery would sometimes be required (as with salvage). Time is also required, since your fleet can do other stuff and use normal campaign abilities while this is happening.

Why:
-Entirely optional
-Adds new puzzles of resource management/crafting to get things you need
-Provides new ways to interact with terrains and planets you find.
-It's fun when the game provides multiple solutions to a problem
-Is a nifty star trek dilemma solving style, instead of just using distress signal or scuttling ships if you run into trouble.

FOUR MAIN AREAS:


Mining:
Requires: Mining Skill (somewhere in industry; unlocks campaign abilities), crew + heavy machinery; couple weeks (2-5  mins realtime- your fleet flies off and does something else)
Procedure: Leave heavy machinery and crew in pods for a month over either a planet (organics, ores), an asteroid (ores), or a ring system (volatiles). Planet type/conditions determine which commodity you get (tectonically active for metals, indigenous life or methane atmo for organics, etc). Chance of accidents or someone stealing your cargo pods.


Matter/Antimatter Scoop:
Requires: Hullmod/'weapon' (maybe unlocked in tech skills) that occupies a medium slot; time/distance.
Procedures: Harvests volatiles from nebulae depending on distance traversed, or from gas giant's orbit (much faster).
Also harvests Fuel from black holes, neutron stars, and magnetic fields, if you have volatiles and organics as supplementary ingredients. Based on time spent in terrain. The more ships with this hullmod, the more you get.


Manufacturing/Refining:
Requires: Manufacturing skill (industry skill, unlocks campaign abilities), Crew, heavy machinery; few days
Procedure: Use extra crew and machinery for a few days to make more heavy machinery, domestics, hand weapons, luxury goods, metals, rare metals, or supplies. Requires expenditure of various mixes of metals, volatiles, organics, ore, food, etc depending on what you're trying to make


Science Laboratory:
Requires: Tech skill unlocks? Science laboratory hullmod, which only fits cruiser/capitol (increases crew requirements, decreases cargo space); heavy machinery sometimes; days/weeks/months (depending)
Procedure: Unlocks campaign abilities to clone crew, breed lobsters, harvest organs, make drugs, and grow food by expending various other commodities.
(In a pinch could also spend volatiles to synthesize metals/organics by spending few days in high radiation environments like neutron pulses, black holes, and coronas)

About Ingredients
Each commodity would use other existing commodities as ingredients. Rationale for ingredients follows from this:
Volatiles stand in for various low atomic number elements (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, water, etc)
Organics stand in for carbon based, plastics, hydrocarbons, petroleum etc.
Drugs stand in for all medicines
Rare metals = precious metals & high atomic number stuff
etc

In general we have raw materials, such as ore, volatiles, organics, refined materials (food, metals) and value-added materials (supplies, domestic goods, luxury goods, drugs, etc). Probably its best to not have any value-added material require another value added material to produce. It's just too much crafting to get what you want.  The most important commodities are usually crew, supplies, and fuel.  To get those things, you'd first have to manufacture or find their raw/refined materials and (for fuel) go to the right terrain type.


A FEW EXAMPLES (No I haven't thought about balance details):
Crew: You need science lab, plus some organs, food, and drugs to produce crew after a few weeks
Harvested organs: You need science lab, crew, and drugs. It only takes a day, and you get  organs -- however you also get fleedwide CR reduction (bad morale) and a chance of accidents (hint: the accidents are mutinies)
Volatiles: You have the matter/antimatter scoop, and the longer you fly over nebula or or gas giants, you get more volatiles.
Fuel: You need the matter/antimatter scoop. The lore says fuel is fullerenes (carbon, aka organics), hydrogen isotopes (volatiles) and antimatter. Wikipedia sort of implies you can find antimatter in magnetic fields, black holes, and neutron stars, so you'd need to have some organics and volatiles and be in one of those terrains to use this ability.
Food: You need a few days, plus science lab, and be in a system with a sun. The nearer you are to the sun the faster the food grows, but you need ore and volatiles as ingredients (for soil, water, & fertilizer).
Supplies: Manufacturing skill + heavy machinery + excess crew. Since these are a catch all for things like clothes, rations, and ammo, you'd need food, metal, and organics as ingredients.

[adimetro00]

First off, mining is the easiest resource gathering method to be implemented. Nexerelin even gives you the ability to do that.
I'm seeing that after the salvage system is implemented, mining will be next in line.

[Deshara]

Personally... I hope mining is implemented as a sustained campaign-tier ability. Fly to a terrain, activate the ability that's mutually exclusive with all other burn states and the game will periodically prompt you with "accident" pop-ups informing you of how much machinery you've lost, and or crew if you don't have enough machinery, and how much ore you've gained. Mining and repairing vessels at the same time runs a risk of accidents, you can't go dark while doing it and pirates know to search asteroid belts for mining fleets.

[nomadic_leader]

But then you have to sit their and do nothing while you mine. I prefer the idea of just leaving guys there for a couple real life minutes to do the work, while you go and do something else.

[Deshara]

But that would involve no conflict.

[nomadic_leader]

My way has conflict. In practice yours does not. Consider:

Most of the empty systems you'd be mining in have no enemies ; the player would just sit their doing nothing.

No, let the player leave the guys/machinery in orbiting cargo pods to do the mining. With the risk of enemy fleets stealing the pods. There's the conflict. If there are no enemies prowling around, the player fleet can go look for treasures while they mine.

[Deshara]

If you come back and pods r gone you've lost all your investment without interaction. Either you'll never do it again or you'll stick around, which functions the same but less smooth

[nomadic_leader]

My friend, have you ever gone to the empty systems? The chance of some enemy even being in the system, much less finding the low emission pods is awfully low in most of them.

Plus you could do sensor burst every once in a while to keep an eye on them.

Plus, the pods could do a system wide distress call if anyone approaches them. There, your objection has been solved.

[intrinsic_parity]

This seems like it is encroaching on the part of the game that outposts will occupy

[nomadic_leader]

The fleet should only be able to do it at a small scale. Basically the point is to give them a way to synthesize a bit of fuel, supplies, and crew and keep  going when they are out in deep space, if they can find the right planets/terrains. Or get just enough of something else to fill a small procurement mission.

But yes indeed, outposts should be able to do this at a large scale to supply the player's large war armadas. But it doesn't seem like there is much clear information on what outposts actually will do, or what the designers' plans are for them. And as of 0.8 the dynamic economy is broken.