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FINALLY... YOU CAN BUILD YOUR GRAVING DOCK

by Hazed

After a long, long, long wait, the code for graving docks was put into the game today. Plutocrats can now start to construct the facility they will need to produce a blish city, one that can move around the cartel and attach itself to other planets.

The testers worked hard over the past week to find bugs, but there is such a lot to test that they couldn't try out every aspect of the new code. We also got some late comments about messages not informing you of what's happening in certain places. But rather than hold off putting the code in any longer, Alan decided to go ahead and turn it live today. We'll fix the message problems over the next few days. Meanwhile, if you find anything you think might be a bug in the new code please email the details to feedback@ibgames.com (put Fed2 in the subject line) right away.

All the instructions for building a graving dock were in the Star a few weeks ago, but to save you having to flip back to previous issues, here they are again.

A graving dock is an orbital shipyard - all spaceship shops have them in order to construct the ships that you order, and Jarrow's on Earth is the largest in the known Galaxy, although the Imperial Navy's own graving dock runs a close second in size.

Plutocracts will use graving docks to construct Blish cities, which are spacefaring cities that can move around from star system to star system, adding production points to the economy of whatever planet they are in orbit around. They are built by the cartel, and can then attach themselves to any planet in the cartel, producing income for the cartel as well as production for the planet.

They will have an additional benefit: while a Blish city is being built, the planets in the hub system of the cartel will not suffer any disaffection, because all the troublemakers will be on their best behavior as they hope to be chosen to populate the new spacefaring city.

But that's getting a bit ahead of the technology: right now, all you can build is the graving dock itself. It is constructed on the cartel's prime planet, and that's where the cities will subsequently be put together.

Building a graving dock isn't like other planetary infrastructure builds. It takes money, time and commodities. You start by issuing the command to build a dock, which is 'BUILD GRAVING DOCK', at which point the cost - 20 meg - is immediately taken from the cartel's treasury. Then you have to start collecting the materials needed (see table below), transferring them to the partially-built dock's warehouse facility. The build takes 5 days to complete, and each day at reset one-fifth of the commodities will be taken from the dock warehouse and put towards the build. If not all the commodities are there, no building will happen that day. You can put more commods in than will be needed - although you won't be able to get them out again, they won't go to waste because they will be used later to build the Blish cities.

Here's the commodities needed, in tons:

Graving Dock: 20 meg 5 days
Alloys - 9,450
Clays - 6,000
Nickel - 3,000
Xmaetals - 4,050
Mechparts 1,950
Polymers - 4,125
Droids - 1,125
Lasers - 2,025
Nanos - 675
Synths - 3,000
Tools - 4,875

In order to get the required commodities into the dock warehouse, you need to divert goods that would otherwise be delivered to your exchanges. Once you have issued the command to build the graving dock, you then type 'DIVERT'. After that, whenever any goods are delivered to any of the planets in the cartel's hub system, if they are required by the build then they will be diverted to the dock's warehouse. This will happen with goods that are sold to the exchange, and loads delivered by haulers. When the warehouse has enough of a particular commodity to complete the build, no more of that item will be diverted.

You can stop the diversion happening with 'UNDIVERT' which turns off all of the diverting until such time as you turn it back on again.

You can only build one graving dock in a cartel.

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