Use the Dry Dock as a fuel depot

[martyparty]

Here's one I'm experimenting with - when you keep a positive reputation with everyone in order to pick & choose your fights, you can go around to any of their planets and buy a cheap Freighter rank ship for around $10K and leave it in the Dry Dock. While that faction is not in a trade ban, you can load up some water fuel in that ship (40 units worth) and keep it in the Dry Dock as an emergency supply. Then at a future time when everyone is locked in trade bans with everyone else, you'll have a private stash of water fuel you can tap into as an emergency supply. Some strategically good worlds to keep a stash on would be Gamma Javat II (Javat), Kashtisha & Tennath Outpost (Rychart), Butakov Prime & Antronin (De Valtos), Zu Chong-Zhi (Cadar), Bellix-Thulon I & Galantia (Thulun), Xeen Prime (Steel Song).

For Gamma Javat II, Kashtisha and Butakov Prime I would probably leave multiple water depot ships, and/or additional ships I used earlier in my career but don't need anymore.

The benefit of using the Dry Dock for storing water fuel, as opposed to buying from an Independent world or caching in the wilderness, is that Dry Dock operations take zero time except for the urban zone landing, you can't lose it to treasure hunters, and you don't want to waste time landing multiple times at an Independent world to buy a little bit more each time if you're doing a contract and have to hurry.

There's a rumour that closes the military establishment to you, but thankfully it's a rare event.

[slayernz]

That's not a bad idea! Later on, it might even be worth upgrading those ships to freighters or some other vessels that have huge cargo. Also, a cheap W-F Hold upgrade gives you 25 more units of fuel at only a coupla thousand credits.

[martyparty]

Also, when you use a freighter as a taxi to go and pick up a new ship you bought somewhere, don't trade it in or sell it! Keep it there as one more fuel depot ship.

[Cory Trese]

That is exactly why I added the Freighter for so cheap. Glad it's working for you!

[martyparty]

Thanks Cory. It does take a lot of game time to buy a ship though - I guess we can't have it too easy.

[Cory Trese]

All things in ST are balanced trade offs, nothing is free or easy

[slayernz]

Cept death and expendable crew

[martyparty]

Additional points on using this tactic:
1. You can only own 21 ships at a time, so forget about keeping Freighters *everywhere*.
2. When you use the "trade in" option to exchange a Freighter for a big ship, you keep the crew number from the Freighter, i.e. your new bigger ship will start with only 10 crew. Now, this can be useful if you want to get good mileage while going around looking for Upgrades, or if you just like to save fuel all the time with that ship. It means you don't have to waste a few weeks in the wilderness reducing the crew numbers via harvesting.