Carmanor Class Cargo

The Carmanor Class Cargo is the biggest hauler in SFC2. One of them holds 125,000, which is five times a Hercules and twenty five times an Atlas. Nothing else you can build comes close.

It is also the slowest thing with an engine, and it is the only hauler that never gets an engine upgrade. That trade is the whole ship. If you are shifting resources around your own planets, or hauling loot off a target you have already cleared, the Carmanor does it cheaper than anything else in the game. If speed matters at all, it is the wrong ship.

Building one

Carmanors are built on the Shipyard page. You need Shipyard 6, Jet Drive 10 and Expedition Tech 4. One costs 18,000 ore and 18,000 crystal, and no hydrogen.

The Base column is the ship as designed. The Current column is what your research has done to it. Weapons Tech adds 10 percent to attack per level, Shield Tech adds 10 percent to shield, Armor Tech adds 10 percent to hull, and Jet Drive adds 10 percent to speed. The commander above is running Weapons 9, Shield 8, Armor 11 and Jet Drive 12, which turns 10 / 100 / 3,600 / 4,000 into 19 / 180 / 7,560 / 8,800.

Cargo capacity is the one number research never touches. 125,000 is 125,000 forever.

Every Carmanor that dies leaves 5,400 ore and 5,400 crystal in the debris field, the flat 30 percent of build cost that every ship leaves behind.

Cargo for the money

There are three ships in the game built to carry resources. Costs below are ore plus crystal plus hydrogen added together.

Ship	Cost	Cargo	Cost per 1,000 cargo	Hull	Base speed
Atlas Class Cargo	4,000	5,000	800	400	5,000 (10,000)
Hercules Class Cargo	12,000	25,000	480	1,200	7,500
Carmanor Class Cargo	36,000	125,000	288	3,600	4,000

The Carmanor is the cheapest hold in SFC2 by a wide margin. Spend 36,000 on Atlas and you get 45,000 of hold. Spend it on one Carmanor and you get 125,000. Against the Hercules it is still 40 percent cheaper per unit carried.

Fuel goes the same way. Per 1,000 of cargo moved, an Atlas on the Pulse Drive burns 4 hydrogen, a Hercules burns 2, and a Carmanor burns under 1. It is the cheapest ship to buy your hold with and the cheapest to run once you own it.

The engine that never upgrades

The Carmanor ships with the Jet Drive and gains 10 percent speed per Jet Drive level. That is all it ever does. There is no swap.

This is worth spelling out because the Atlas does swap. At Pulse Drive 5 the Atlas moves onto the Pulse Drive, its base speed doubles, and from then on it gains 20 percent a level instead of 10. The Carmanor and the Hercules stay on the Jet Drive forever, so the gap only grows.

Jet Drive	Pulse Drive	Carmanor	Hercules	Atlas
10	4	8,000	15,000	10,000
12	4	8,800	16,500	11,000
12	8	8,800	16,500	26,000
15	8	10,000	18,750	26,000
20	10	12,000	22,500	30,000
25	12	14,000	26,250	34,000

Jet Drive 10 is the floor, because you cannot build a Carmanor without it, so 8,000 is the slowest one you will ever fly. Pushing Jet Drive past that is not wasted either. The Hercules, the Artemis, both probes, both satellites and both recyclers all run on it too.

Moving your own resources

This is what the ship is for. Four Carmanors carry half a million in one trip, from Ardent at 1:2:8 to Meridian at 1:6:4, 3,080 distance, at the full 100 percent speed setting.

One thing that catches people out: fuel comes out of the hold, not out of the planet's stockpile on top. Those four Carmanors show 499,831 of capacity rather than a clean 500,000, and the missing 169 is the hydrogen for the trip.

Here is the same 500,000 moved over the same route by each of the three haulers, at Jet Drive 12 and Pulse Drive 8:

Fleet	Cost to build	Speed	Flight time	Hydrogen
100 Atlas	400,000	26,000	31:50	704
20 Hercules	240,000	16,500	39:56	352
4 Carmanor	144,000	8,800	54:39	169

The Carmanor takes about 70 percent longer than the Atlas and costs about a third as much to build and a quarter as much to fly. On a run between your own planets nobody is shooting at you, so the extra 23 minutes is usually the easiest thing in that table to give up.

Cargo is allowed on Transport, Deploy, Fleet Save, Harvest and Colonization. It is not allowed on Attack, Espionage or Group Defend.

On a raid

An attack cannot carry anything out. What the fleet brings home is what it takes off the target. A won raid takes 50 percent of each of the defender's three resources, 55 percent if you are at war, minus whatever their Resource Den is protecting, and that gets loaded until the hold runs out.

That is 60 Athena and 8 Carmanor against a planet holding 3,000,000, run through the in-game Calculator. There is 1,500,000 there to take, the fleet has room for 1,090,000, and 1,090,000 is what comes home. The Calculator also tells you exactly what would clear the rest, and it prices it three ways: another 4 Carmanor, or 17 Hercules, or 82 Atlas. That single line is the cargo table above in miniature.

Notice the plunder is split almost dead even across ore, crystal and hydrogen. A fleet that only just covers the loot comes home with a third of each rather than the ore you were probably after.

Now the catch. Look at the travel time: 54:39 each way. Those 60 Athena move at 34,000 on their own and would be there in 27:51. A fleet only ever moves as fast as its slowest ship, and the Carmanor is the slowest ship in SFC2. Adding it doubles your round trip and doubles the window in which somebody can see your fleet coming and react.

60 Athena plus	Hold	Flight time	Hydrogen
nothing	90,000	27:51	10,560
200 Atlas	1,090,000	31:50	10,685
40 Hercules	1,090,000	39:56	8,304
8 Carmanor	1,090,000	54:39	6,348

The fuel column surprises people. Adding 8 Carmanor to that fleet makes the whole trip cheaper, not dearer, because fuel is charged against how fast the fleet is actually moving. Slowing 60 Athena from 34,000 down to 8,800 saves more hydrogen on the battleships than the Carmanors themselves burn.

So the rule is: use Carmanors on targets you are sure of and are in no rush to reach. Use Atlas or Hercules when you want to be in and out before anyone notices.

Rapid fire

Rapid fire gives a ship a chance at another shot in the same round every time it hits a unit it has rapid fire against. The More Info button on the Shipyard page shows both lists.

The Carmanor rapid fires	Rating
Genesis Solar Satellite	x5
Helios Class Solar Satellite	x5
Hermes Class Probe	x5
Shadow Probe	x5

Rapid fires the Carmanor	Rating
Zeus Class	x125
Hades Class Battleship	x2

The four things the Carmanor rapid fires are probes and satellites, which is a polite way of saying it rapid fires nothing that matters. Those all die to a stiff breeze anyway.

The list pointing the other way is the interesting one, because it is the shortest of the three haulers:

Hauler	Gets rapid fired by
Atlas	Apollo x3, Hades x3, Zeus x250
Hercules	Hades x3, Zeus x250
Carmanor	Hades x2, Zeus x125

No Apollo rapid fire at all, and the Hades and Zeus ratings are both lower than they are against the other two. The Apollo is the cheapest ship in the game with real weapons and nearly everybody stacks them early, so that is a real edge when you are flying haulers into somebody's defended planet.

In a fight

3,600 hull, 100 shield, 10 attack. That is the best hull and the best shield of any hauler, and it still does not make the Carmanor a warship.

Parked and caught, it dies like everything else. These are engine runs with Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10 on both sides, against 100 Carmanor sitting on a planet, using attackers worth the same 3,600,000 the Carmanors cost:

Equal-cost attacker	Result
423 Apollo	all 100 Carmanor dead in 5 rounds, attacker loses nothing
900 Artemis	all 100 dead on the 6 round limit, attacker loses nothing
60 Athena	all 100 dead on the 6 round limit, attacker loses nothing

Where the extra hull does pay is in what the attacker walks away with. Same 500,000 of hold, same 50 Apollo hitting it, and all three haulers die either way:

What was parked	Rounds to clear	Debris handed to the attacker
100 Atlas	3	120,000
20 Hercules	3	72,000
4 Carmanor	2	43,200

Debris is always 30 percent of build cost, and the Carmanor is the cheapest way to own that much hold, so losing your Carmanors is the cheapest way to lose that much hold. It is still a loss. It is just a smaller one, and it leaves less floating there for the attacker to recycle.

Its own attack of 10 is not worth counting. A shot that lands for 1 percent or less of the target's shield rating does nothing at all, so at equal tech a Carmanor cannot scratch anything with a shield rating of 1,000 or more. That is the Zeus, the Hephaestus, the Decoy and the Large Decoy.

Evaluation

Advantages

The cheapest hold in SFC2. 288 resources per 1,000 carried, against 480 for the Hercules and 800 for the Atlas.

The cheapest to fly. Under 1 hydrogen per 1,000 of cargo moved, and it never pays the fuel penalty the Atlas picks up when it swaps to the Pulse Drive.

Fewer ships to manage. Four Carmanors do the job of 100 Atlas, which means one line in the fleet form instead of a lot of counting.

The lightest rapid fire vulnerability of the three haulers. No Apollo rapid fire, and the Hades and Zeus ratings are halved compared to the Atlas.

Smallest debris field for a given amount of hold, so if your haulers do get caught the attacker gets less back.

Disadvantages

The slowest ship in the game, and it stays that way. No engine swap, ever. 10 percent a level on the Jet Drive is all you get.

It sets your fleet speed. One Carmanor in a stack of Athena drags the whole fleet down to 8,800 and roughly doubles the round trip.

Locked behind Expedition Tech 4 and Jet Drive 10, so it is not an early ship. Expect to be well into your first colonies before it is worth unlocking.

Lumpy. The smallest amount of hold you can add is 125,000, so on small jobs a lot of that ship flies empty.

No use on a group defend. That mission does not allow cargo, so a Carmanor parked over someone else's planet is 36,000 resources doing nothing, and it costs 4 hydrogen an hour each to sit there.

Requirements

Capitol 2
Shipyard 6
Research Lab 3
Energy Tech 1
Jet Drive 10
Espionage Tech 4
Expedition Tech 4
Carmanor Class Cargo

The research bill from nothing comes to roughly 470,000 ore, 135,000 crystal and 630,000 hydrogen, and most of that is the climb to Jet Drive 10. You want that anyway for the Hercules and the recyclers, so the part that is really the Carmanor's own price tag is Espionage Tech 4 and Expedition Tech 4, about 215,000 all in.