how to use ships for oil transports

This tutorial describes how you can transport oil with ships.

Table of contents:
- Introduction
- Prepare the oil transport
- Scheduling a ship
- Rate this page

Updates

5/6/03		Added tip
5/3/03		Added german translation
10/27/02		Added some bug warnings
6/23/02		Created tutorial

Introduction

This tutorial shows how you can use ships to transport oil from an oil rig to a refinery. This tutorial builds on the how to use trains and signals -tutorial.

Image: Example

= Oil rig

= Dock of the refinery

= Refinery

You should not start a game with ship transports. It is a good Idea to tranport coal by truck or train at the start of a new game.

It is expensive to use ships. You should have 100000 Cr or more before you buy your first ship. You can quickly go bankrupt if you buy ships to early.

Prepare the oil transport

First you have to find an oil rig and a refinery which accepts goods from the oil rig. Refineries are often far away from oil rigs.

Situation 1: The refinery is near to the sea

Image: A refinery near to a sea

= Oil rig

= Dock of the refinery

= Refinery

You can transport the oil by ship from the oil rig to the dock.

Situation 2: The refinery is not reachable by ship

Image: Using a transfer station

	=	Oil rig
+	=	transfer station (Dock and railway platform)
	=	Refinery

If you can't reach the refinery by ship, you can combine ship and train transports.
You can transport the oil from the oil rig to a transfer station by ship. At the transfer station the oil will be loaded on trains or trucks. The trains or trucks will transport the oil to the refinery.

If you transport a lot of oil you should build a transfer station which is able to serve a lot of trains without jams. Each train should have an own platform at the transfer station. You can find more information about this topic in the how to build rail stations -tutorial.

Scheduling a ship

	You can add an oil rig to the schedule of a ship by clicking on the oil rig. You should schedule the ship to be full loaded at the oil rig.
	You can add a dock to the schedule by clicking on the water around the dock. You can't add the dock to a schedule by clicking on the dock.

Warning

Simutrans has some bugs:

you should save your game before you are doing anything with docks
you should not remove docks

How to reproduce some bugs:

Raise land in the sea and place a dock on it. A part of the dock (the sea based tile) will be corrupted
(fixed in simutrans 0.81.8exp on 26-October-2002)

Example:
Maybe placing a dock next to another dock with one emty tile between it gives also weird results.

Example:

You can find a list with Simutrans-Bugs in the Simutrans-Centre

I thank Marcel Detz for reporting this bugs

Tips

Items:1
Deleting a dock Updated on 2/29/04 by Webmaster	Comments (1)
Deleting a dock leaves a corrupted tile. However, apparently this can be fixed by raising and then lowering the tile. Author: Seth C. Triggs, 06-May-2003 Visit Seth C. Triggs's homepage