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[Flying Dice]

Yes, fuel harvesters need fuel tanks; their process directly converts Sorium as it is mined, because there's no place for it to be placed on gas giants.

Unrelated note: With my survey ships, I tend to give them ~2-4 years worth of fuel once I've got them down below 1k tons; once I've pushed out to four or five jumps from Sol I refuel all my survey ships, then send them out as far as they can go, let them run out of fuel, and recover them whenever I eventually get a fleet group or colony out that far. Sucks for my crews, I imagine. :V

Don't that have crew morale issues nowadays? I remember geosurvey ships being rather annoying about that.

   Survey is affected but you can change the intended deployment. Also you could just let the survey rate slow down. I don't know what the floor of it is so if you have enough sensors you may be able to just ignore it.

Both of these are equally valid solutions. I tend to set my intended deployment time for 60ish months. You've got tiny crews anyways, so it isn't a huge volume cost.

[MarcAFK]

I generally run 5 day turns on auto and haven't noticed missing my ships autorefuel orders. You could just have a tanker follow around your survey ships, or what I usually end up having is my non-jump capable geosurvey ships waiting around the system for 6 months while waiting for the jump capable grav ships to finish checking for jump points, if a ship runs out of fuel generally theres a geosurvey ship I can send over to give it a refill. I usually have the grav ships in pairs too so when they get low I can send one home to pick up enough fuel for them both, or use a small tanker.

[Graknorke]

I've actually found this game a few days ago by chance (looking for space 4x games), and I have to say--I am having the hardest time getting into it ;n;
The premise and level of control is wonderful, but something seems to be in the way of enjoying it as would be expected.

Might be the fact it's pretty much spreadsheets and little displays. That turned me off the first number of times I tried getting into it.

Could end up coming back to it years later and finding that the game feels a lot more fun.

The more people say this the more concerned I am that I can't even navigate the menus properly. It doesn't seem very spreadsheety to me at all. They're only really in the design windows.

[Tarran]

Hey, don't worry, people at times can't even agree at what color some things are. People view everything differently.

[Flying Dice]

TBH "spreadsheets lel" is more of a meme than anything else. The heart of it is that the UI is a convoluted mess, the product of a long and highly personalized design process. It has amazing functionality, but so much of that is spread across a dozen different windows, often in obscure places, that it takes a long time before you'll get a good handle on even the most important 70% or so. It's not an exaggeration to say that even people who've been playing Aurora for years will still happen across rules/mechanics/buttons that they didn't know existed.

Frankly, the thought of writing a full manual for Aurora is one of the few things that makes me veer towards suicide as the saner option.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   From what I have seen there isn't really many screens that are directly spreadsheet but there are a lot of lists and such which are connected to them. Also the game is basically a graphical interface for a database which makes the data easy to layout in a spreadsheet like design. Though as Flying Dice also mentions it is somewhat of a meme at this point but in the end I believe that many people spend a lot of time on the design window which as you pointed out is one of the more spreadsheet like window. It is also one of the really interesting aspects of the game so one the things people remember the most tend to be that and since it is so remembered it skews peoples view of what the game is comprised of.

[firsal]

I want to harvest the MASSIVE deposits of duranium, sorium and other minerals on Venus. Can't colonize it, obviously, so how do I go about it? Use freighters to bring automines and mass drivers to Venus?

[Culise]

I want to harvest the MASSIVE deposits of duranium, sorium and other minerals on Venus. Can't colonize it, obviously, so how do I go about it? Use freighters to bring automines and mass drivers to Venus?

Yep.  Automated mines and mass drivers both require no population to run them, so you can set up a fully automated mining colony without a need for infrastructure, terraforming, or orbital habitats. 

[Bouchart]

That's basically the best way to go about it.  Venus isn't that far from earth.  It might be easier to use civilian contracts to move the equipment rather than your own freighters.

You can terraform Venus, but it takes a lot of time because you have to basically remove 100 atmospheres of pressure.  Some colony cost reduction tech can help with this by making the planet a bit more productive sooner too.

Genetically engineering a species is out of the question, because you can't genetically engineer a species to tolerate different amounts of pressure.

You can use orbital habitats and then ship conventional mines to Venus, but that would take far more effort than automines.

[MarcAFK]

Note that if you do dump Infrastructure onto Venus the population will be too busy on Agriculture and enviromental or Service Industries to actually do any work, I think you need to get the colony cost below 14 in order to get any manufacturing production.
Don't be tempted to mix infrastructure with orbital habitats, it'll drag down your productivity, for instance if you put habitats for 30 million onto venus, you'll get 58.4% productivity IE 17,520,000 workers. If you then dump 50'000 habitats onto the planet and add 20 million more population your productivity will drop to 12% which is only 6,250,000 workers. The smaller 30 million colony is more productive anyway.
To most cheaply terraform venus as discussed earlier in this thread build massive terraformers with a single habitat, you can construct them with industry instead of a shipyard, I aim for a total build cost approaching 3 times my yearly income then devote a large percentage of my industry towards the construction, also give it enough commercial engines to travel 200 km/s so it'll get into place in a month or so.
Keep in mind that with terraformers, habitats, fuel harvesters and mining modules only the first group to arrive at a colony actually counts towards production, if you add more to the existing task group they won't do anything. You need to move the whole task group away and then back for production to resume properly. A 5 second trip away and back will suffice.

[shx]

What are the range band radio buttons for in the Class Design screen? Can I limit with these how far out from the next refuel point a certain ship class is allowed to travel?

[Lord Shonus]

Those are for your weapon displays, showing the chance to hit a target at that range at the given speed (selected below.) At least, I'm 99% sure that's what they are.

[Reverie]

I've started reading the Trans-Newtonian Campaign on the Aurora forums, and I was wondering: is the multi-nation infrastructure of Earth in the story a literary flourish, or a nightmarish-but totally-doable exercise in design and micromanagement?

[QuakeIV]

The latter, he is manually controlling all of those countries.

[Culise]

It'll be better in 6.4, though; the new features illustrated in the Solarian Empires AAR include setting up the other Earth polities as NPRs, which will be much less of a nightmare to manage.