Skip Drive Problem

[FatBadger]

Hi all, what am I doing wrong?

I’ve finished research on the Skip Drive. But when I go to ask my scout ships to dock and upgrade, the popup says that the option is disabled as they are already using the latest design. But clearly they’re not, because their range hasn’t changed, so they can’t reach most of the planets in the system and auto explore is on, so if they had Skip Drives, they’d be hopping about all over the shop. In fact nobody is, civs either. What have I missed?
Thank’s
Badger.

[WiZz]

Did you check your ship designs?

[FatBadger]

Thank’s for the quick reply.
I checked the design page and if I’m reading it right, the design does not have a Skip Drive yet. I had set Base & Ship Design to auto, so I assumed that once the research was done, my ships would go to the station to upgrade automatically. (Indeed that’s what it looks like from the LP tutorial I watched prior to starting.)

I looked at manually upgrading the design to include the drive in effectively a mk2 scout. But it seems as though the only way to fit it would be to first remove a fuel cell. Also the upgrade mentioned three extra suggestions, that presumably had to be done before the new design could be saved and I wasn’t sure how to do them.

I must be missing something else. Nothing I’ve watched or read suggests it should be this complicated. How am I going to conquer the universe, if I can’t work out how to explore my own back garden!

[SirHoraceHarkness]

I've noticed that sometimes after a key tech finished it takes a bit for it to be applied to any new designs. Also if the places that will do the refit don't have the required materials to do it then the refit button will be disabled. How long has it been in game years since the tech finished?

[FatBadger]

Thank’s SirHorace, you were right on the money there.

It had been two years, which seems a long time, but I let it roll on and after seven years my state ships started jumping, then the civies. Seven years seems an overly long time to me, but I “suppose” it works thematically as the finished project wouldn’t just leap from the research table to the production line. I mean imagine it was being handled by my local council. They can’t even keep on top of fixing pot holes in the road, let alone organising stellar travel! Still, it might have been nice if the game presented a message telling the player what was happening, with a countdown to when Skip Drives would be fitted. (Unless of course that message is there and I just couldn’t see it.)

Thank’s again to all in the thread.
Badger

[WiZz]

Your immersion in the game world is a good thing but this is definitely a bug. Yes, there is some delay in the updating of ship designs however in your case it's too long.

[MichaelJ007]

In general, automated ship designs are updated immediately when a tech is achieved. However if the new design is not viable, it probably wont update.

Your best options are to check ship designs, and then to ensure that you have the required resources. It's happened to me once or twice that I over invested in ships that were using resources i hadn't discovered yet. Was stuck until i found a source and could mine it.

Not possible to know what your specific issue was, but my strong suspicion is that you had run out of a required resource. My current strategy is to review all my designs at game start, before 1 day has passed, and make sure they're only using resources that are available in bulk.