"The Lunar Dock allows your Hephaestus Attack Platform to undeploy and return to orbit around your moon." - In-game building description.
The Lunar Dock is a moon building with one job. It gives a deployed Hephaestus Class Attack Platform somewhere to come home to. Docking is the only way to turn a deployed platform back into a ship, and it will only dock at one of your own moons that has a Lunar Dock on it.
If you own a Hephaestus, build one of these before you need it. A platform parked out in the middle of the map with no dock anywhere in your empire is stuck out there.
Where you build it
On a moon, and only on a moon. It never shows up on a planet. You need a Lunar Base at level 1 first, the same as everything else up there. After that the Lunar Dock sits on the moon's Buildings page alongside the Capitol, the Oracle and the Warp Gate.
A moon has no mines and no Shipyard, so the 2,000,000 ore, 2,000,000 crystal and 4,000,000 hydrogen all have to be flown up from a planet with a Transport before you can start.
Every level also takes one of the moon's building fields, and a moon only gets fields from its Lunar Base:
| Total fields on the moon | 3 × Lunar Base level + 1 |
|---|
On a moon with nothing but Lunar Base level 1 that is four fields with one already spent, so a dock leaves you two.
Docking the platform
Once the dock is up, that moon appears in the Dock / Recall control on the platform's Overview page. Pick the moon, pick a speed, send it.
The same action is on the Galaxy page, the small tray icon on your moon's row, but it is only there while the platform is the base you have selected.
Things worth knowing before you press it:
- The platform burns its own hydrogen for the trip. Speeds run from 100% down to 5% in steps, plus 3% and 1% crawls, and slower is much cheaper.
- It will not leave while it has fleets in transit. Recall them first.
- When it lands, everything stored on it and every ship parked on it unloads onto the moon, and the Hephaestus goes back into that moon's ship list ready to deploy again.
- The dock is checked again on arrival. If it has been torn down in the meantime, the platform stays deployed where it is and you get a report saying so.
- It is untouchable the whole way there, the same as any other platform move.
See Hephaestus Class Attack Platform for the rest of what a platform can and cannot do.
Level 1 is all you need
Nothing in the game looks at the level of a Lunar Dock beyond checking that it is at least 1. Level 2 and up buy no extra function whatsoever. They cost resources, they eat moon fields, and they add to your Resource Spent Points on the leaderboard. That is the entire list.
One dock in your empire is enough as well. The platform can fly to any of your moons that has one, from anywhere.
Cost and build time
Each level costs exactly double the one before it, with hydrogen at twice the ore and the crystal. There is no level cap. Build time uses the standard structure formula with the Foundry part dropped, because a moon cannot have one:
| Time (hours) | (Ore cost + Crystal cost) / (5,000 × (1 + Capitol level)) |
|---|
The times below are for a moon with no Capitol on it.
| Level | Ore | Crystal | Hydrogen | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,000,000 | 2,000,000 | 4,000,000 | 33d 8h |
| 2 | 4,000,000 | 4,000,000 | 8,000,000 | 66d 16h |
| 3 | 8,000,000 | 8,000,000 | 16,000,000 | 133d 8h |
| 4 | 16,000,000 | 16,000,000 | 32,000,000 | 266d 16h |
33 days for level 1 is not a typo. Put a Capitol on the moon first and it divides straight through, so Capitol 3 brings that down to 8 days 8 hours. The Lunar Dockyard alliance perk speeds up every moon build too, up to double speed if your alliance has maxed the track.
Tearing it down
Unlike the Lunar Base, a Lunar Dock can be torn back down, and you get the field back when it goes. A teardown costs a third of the build cost of the level you are dropping to, and it takes time the same way a build does. Level 1 back to 0 is 666,666 ore, 666,666 crystal and 1,333,333 hydrogen, and 11 days on a moon with no Capitol.
The More Info button on the Lunar Dock row shows all of that, along with the next six levels.
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