Cargo Transfer (Ship to foreign Ship)

It is possible to transfer cargo from your ship to an enemy (or allied) ship. Fuel, minerals, supplies and colonists can be transferred. Money, torpedoes and fighters can not be transferred normally but are transferred by various beam transfer friendly codes.

In order to transfer something to an enemy or allied ship, the two ships need to be in the same place in the beginning of the turn (i.e. at the client-side period of the turn, before movement). When transferring to enemy ships, the transfer will be cancelled if the enemy ship cloaks in the turn you transfer cargo. Allied ships are handled the same if the 'allow VPA features' setting in the hostconfig is set to NO. With that setting to YES, you may transfer cargo to cloaked allied ships as long as they are in the same location as the transferring ship before movement. Be aware of these rules when transferring to foreign ships - if host.exe will not carry out that order because it is not allowed, the transferred cargo will be put back in your own cargoroom.

If the foreign ship (cloaked or not) does not have the cargoroom to accept the transfer, the cargo will be placed back into your cargohold. Therefore, you need to have room for the transferred cargo in your cargohold. There is a possible conflict here: if you load up your cargohold again after transferring to a foreign ship and the transferred goods are placed back onto your ship, your ship will be double-loaded.

How host.exe handles this possible conflict depends on the 'allow VPA features' setting in the hostconfig. If it is set to no, host.exe uses the following rule: The sum of the cargo on your ship plus the sum of the cargo in transit may not be greater then size of your cargohold. If you break this rule, cargo you are trying to transfer will vanish even if the foreign ship has enough room to accept the transfer. If the 'vpa features' are enabled, cargo will be placed back onto your ship, your ship will be double-loaded for a while and then trimmed to it's maximum cargo capacity during the first moment in the hostrun that this is checked.

When you have various types of cargo, trimming is done proportionally (a LDSF with 1200 clans and 1200 supplies is trimmed down to 600 clans and 600 supplies, even if you only had only transferred clans to the foreign ship).

In order for a transfer to be successful, the transferring ship must have fuel left after the transfer. If the transferring ship transfers all it's fuel to an enemy ship both the fuel and the transferred cargo disappear. Nothing gets transferred to the enemy ship.

This type of cargotransfer is not to be confused with transfers between ships of the same owner, which are handled during the client-side of a turn and are checked at the very beginning of a hostrun.