Docks and cargo siphons

During the final stages of building FRG Thor, one of the key things I found was that having ships drifing nearby Dry Station was awkward and somewhat cluttered.  Additionally it was both slow and inconvenient to do several astronaut trips between a newly returned vessel and the station's Factory, using my own personal data banks as a shuttle to carry digital mass signatures to my facility.

So I drafted plans to build a dock at Dry Station and fit it with a system that would automatically siphon digital signatures from a drop box next to the docked vessel, so that I wouldn't have to travel any distance and therefore save me a bunch of time.

Dry Station with her initial compliment of docking arms fitted.

The docking arms were a continuation of Dry Station's simple and inexpensive alloy mesh structure acting as a support for the mammoth cables required to transmit digital matter signals.  e=mc2, which meant that even small amounts of matter converted into monstrous amounts of energy.  All that energy required very heavy duty cabling to avoid being burnt out during transmission and storage.

At the end of each docking arm I've fitted a drop box connected to the central factory matter signature storage facility.

The docking arms were capped with a labelled drop box into which I could drop all matter signatures without having to travel the distance from the docked vessel to the factory myself.  From the drop box the signatures are siphoned down the heavy duty cabling to a central storage box, which in turn feeds all matter signatures into the sorting box.  The sorting box (which has until now been my overall drop-box) then distributes matter signatures into various sorted boxes to make finding and accessing them much easier.

Thor requires the biggest docking arm to date due to her size.

Different coloured cabling leads to different docking arms.

Red is SVG Speeder's docking arm cable.
Yellow is SVG Excavator's docking arm cable.
White is CRV Alannis's docking arm cable.
Orange is the recently added docking arm cable for FRG Thor.

Black cable is for a recently wired in scanner complex.

The central siphon box is connected directly to the power grid to cope with the humongous quantity of energy required.  Matter signatures can be drained from all siphon boxes simultaneously and then fed at a steady pace into the factory's sorting box.

The entire set up allows me to disembark a newly docked vessel, and drop all matter signatures into the siphon box immediately adjacent to the docked ship.  From there Dry Station will automatically draw it into the matter signature facility and sort it into it's necessary home.  Whenever a new matter signature is encounted that does not have a home yet, it remains idle in the sorting box, and this acts as a prompt for me to either re-configure an existing storage box to receive it, or create a new storage box for that catagory of matter signatures.

The entire set up makes life much easier for me, and ensures that the factory always has a precise location to draw any particular type of matter signature from.