Originally posted by innesbrad:

my initial thoughts are to take the original plate factory production needs.
120 chemical compounds, 320 energy cells, 240 food rations, 160 nividium cubes, 600 refined metals to make 120 plates in 15 minutes and replace the components with stuff that would like make sense tto have on a ship.

Could make sense to stick purely to mineable resources, too. That's, lemme see, ore, silicon, crystals, nividium, ice, hydrogen, plasma, and ions? When I was trying to work out a sensible production method for reinforced metal plating using only resources available in DeVries without it industrializing yet, I worked this out:

<production time="1800" amount="15" method="smups" name="{20206,201}">
<primary>
<ware ware="energycells" amount="760"/>
<ware ware="foodrations" amount="480"/>
<ware ware="ore" amount="640"/>
<ware ware="silicon" amount="560"/>
<ware ware="nividium" amount="200"/>
<ware ware="refinedmetals" amount="1500"/>
</primary>
</production>

Uses refined metals because it was for a plot station project, and the station already has refined metals production. Worked the rest out by finding what each resource is made up of, and adding a penalty to simulate having to make, for example, chemical compounds out of energy and food rations, and other stuff. Can't remember what I substituted for ions and plasma which I avoided because they're hard to find in DeVries.

In the case of your factory ship, using lots of different kinds of raw resources might be a good thing, thereby forcing the player to move the ship around to gather different materials that will all rarely be available in one place.

And, yeah, fuel cells in place of energy cells sort of makes sense. They still need to eat, though, unless you're imagining it fully automated.

I like your numbers, my original thought was to maybe pack a few more refineries into this ship... one for nividium cubes, one for refined metals so basicly it crunches ore and nividium into base materials for plates, then i would use fuel cells instead of energy cells to do all the power related stuff, ions and plasma well the cool thing is my ship has a universal bay so if i wanted i could run those internally to make chemical compounds. but the coding would be a lot more work if i made it make each eliment that it needs on board using multipe production facilitiies.

im going to try your other sugestions for modifications to the code and try to see how they work out on my test files.

Would be awesome if you could make a Xenon Version that manufactures Xenon M's, L's and P's.
It recieves basic materials Ore, Nvidium, Crystas, Silicon etc. and makes Xenon ships.
imagine having to go up against that in CWIR, it would make the Xenon a scary advasery to face.