Commercial Shipping

Aurora tries to automate mundane tasks (like shipping colonists and factories to new worlds) as much as possible, without abstracting it. Although you can do these things yourself, that's the job of private companies. All you need to do is design ships for them and tell them what items you want to have transported.

Commercial Ships and Shipping Lines

Commercial Ships owned by private companies do not require shipyards, fuel, maintenance, crews or precious raw materials. As soon as a commercial design with freight or passenger capacity is available, the shipping lines will slowly begin building them. If shipping is profitable, more companies will be founded.

Select "Shipping Lines" in the Empires menu to see the details of these companies. You can see how much wealth they currently own. They will pay dividends to their shareholders from that money and use the rest to buy more ships. To encourage shipbuilding, you can subsidize them. Each click on the "Subsidize" button adds 1,000 wealth to their coffers. You'll slowly recover that expense, though, because they pay taxes for every shipment they make. The amount of taxes generated by shipping can be seen in the Wealth tab of the Economics window.

• If no civilian ships are built in your empire, make sure that suitable designs are available and that the shipping lines have the wealth to buy them. The cost of a ship is equal to its Build Points.
• To prevent shipping lines from building certain ships, mark the class as obsolete in the design window.
• You cannot give orders to private ships. To prevent private ships from traveling to a system body (planet, moon, asteroid, comet), click Ban Body in the System window (F9).
• Private shipping lines will never buy a jump-capable ship, nor make use of such ships parked at Jump Points to reach a colony outside your home system. To enable civilian shipping between systems, you must build Jump Gates. Remember that you need a gate on both sides of the JP, or the ships can't return.
• Civilian ships will slowly be retired after 10 years in service. Remember to update your commercial designs when better technology becomes available, then mark the old ones as obsolete.
• A Cargo Handling System on a freighter dramatically decreases loading and unloading time. You can see the basic loading time (which can be further decreased by spaceports) on the left side of the design window.
• From a forum post: "Be careful what commercial builds you leave half finished. They will build something without cargo handling systems and with one engine and 32 cargo holds. It will travel at 42km/s and move half a colony but take 60 months to load/unload."

Moving freight and colonists

One colony must have a Supply contract for a certain good, another a Demand contract. You can set these in the tab of the Economics window. For example, to have the civilian ships move mines to Mars, add a supply of 50 mines on Earth and a demand of 50 on Mars. The civilian freighters will begin shipping mines to Mars now. The contract list will be updated to show how much goods are still waiting. You will be notified if a ship tries to pick up freight that is not available on the planet. If more than one colony has demand for a certain item, you cannot control which one is served first.

Colony ships (with either cryogenic chambers of passenger modules) will automatically pick up colonists and transport them to your colonies as long there is enough infrastructure to allow population growth.

• Private lines do not transport minerals. You have to take care of that yourself.
• They will only look for contracts within 4 jumps of a system.
• Although ships can land on any colony, you should consider building a Commercial Spaceport on high-traffic worlds to speed up loading and unloading.

See Civilian contracts for more details. Also see Trade System for details on Civilian Trade Goods and how the civilian sector builds infrastructure.