ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
I think maybe what FatR is suggesting is using existing home island-based superfluous xAKs and xAPs as fuel stores for fleet combatants. Q-ball did some calculations a ways back about exactly how much fuel was sitting in HI supply shipping bunkers. It's stunning-well over 1,000,000 tons of fuel available for fleet uses. I intend to do this 'near the end' when xAKs and their lot are more restricted to home waters and less useful ferrying unnecessary resources, fuel or oil back home.
The calculations were not exact, but a swag. There's alot of gas there though. The ADEN-Class alone, which is the most common xAK and also pretty much a "Mid-Size", has 1,146 in fuel. If you have upwards of 800+ AK/AP, that's close to a Million Tons sitting in ships bunkers.
Of course you can't pull that out and put it in a factory, but you CAN either:
1. Only run transports that have GAS, and dock all the ones that don't. Permanently. You can just rotate through your Resource convoys, and dock ships that are low on fuel; don't refuel them.
2. Use them to "Replenish at Sea" with Warships in the hex. Realistically, it's hard to get 100% of the gas out, but 50%, or about 500,000 tons, is certainly doable.
You are right that this is a 1945 expedient. If you need to do this in 1943, you are in really deep trouble.
As a side note, did you notice that new ship construction comes with a full tank of gas, whether you have fuel or not? So, theoretically, you can use HI points to "create" fuel that way, though that's a pretty expensive way to do it. I'm just saying.
