One of the key elements to Phoenix is the relocation of items. This will be done for many reasons such as trade, colonisation, war, empire expansion and so on.

It is generally the role of the ship to accommodate this transfer. This is where the cargo section of the ship comes in use.

While most items can be carried in general cargo bays, dedicated transportation bays can be installed. There are restrictions placed on each type.

There are a number of types of cargo

Life Support
This gives the maximum mu's of life forms that can be carried by the ship. These include sentient life as well as alien creatures. Life form basically covers anything that would die in a cold vacuum. Life forms cannot be carried in Cargo.
Transfer of personnel such as troops and employees comes with an automatic charge of 1 stellar each time a personnel is picked up or delivered. As personnel are paid on a position's maintenance day, the transfer of a large number of personnel can be highly expensive when the various positions involved have differing maintenance days.


Ammo
Ammunition will explode if destroyed. If it is still on a ship this could be disastrous. Installing magazines gives some measure of safety to the ship. There is no imperative to install magazines and ammunition such as missiles and torpedoes can still be used directly from cargo. But Ammo Bays offer more protection to the ammo if the ship should come under fire. They do this by having any ammo exploding within the ship first inflict its explosive damage on the magazine rather than across the entire ship.

Ore
Due to its resilient nature, ore does not need custom fitted housing or life support or thermal regulation. As such, compared with normal cargo bays, those designed for ore have greater capacity for the same volume of installation space.

Space Fighters
Space fighters can only be launched from specially designed bays. While a ship with cargo bays could transport more space fighters than it is capable of launching. In such a case only the maximum number of space fighters will be launched. However, should some fighters be destroyed in the day's combat, fighters not launched will be used to supplement those destroyed.

Cargo
Any items, apart from life forms can be carried in cargo. The programs work out the best possible location for each item. There is no need to specify where an item will be placed.

Defence
These represent an extra line of defence. Damage that would normally be applied to life forms is first applied to these items and only damage that penetrates will be applied to living items.

These orders are used to transfer goods around the Affiliation. Other players regularly require large stockpiles of various items moved around from 'a' to 'b', and this sort of mission is often offered to new players because there are comparatively few ways of triggering an accidental all-out interstellar war, which isn't to say it's impossible. Just unlikely.

Of the two - 'Deliver' and 'Deliver Item Type' - the former is most useful for keeping strict control over what is being delivered. While the latter is helpful when moving large quantities of different goods. In the below examples, Deliver is for Metals (1) while Deliver Item Type is for Ores (49). As metals are a subset of ores, if the ship only had metals, both would be viable, but if the ship had both metals and basic elements but only wanted to deliver metals, then Deliver Item Type could end in disaster.




Delivery Authorisation is required in order to unload goods to another player's position. This is to stop just anyone from delivering a package containing incriminating stuff to anywhere they please.

Tip - Learn to use the 'if an error occurs - stop turn' function. It is possible that when you issue an order to buy a trade good, somebody else might have bought it before you, which will cause the order to fail. It can be extremely infuriating to issue a buy order which is followed by a jump order, moving your ship out of the system with a cargo hold that is empty because the previous buy order failed, necessitating a sheepish return and the loss of precious time units.

When dealing with starbase markets the buy and sell orders are required. These do not need authorisations. See trading.

Squadrons Using Item Type Transactions
When using a squadron (without copy order option), Pick-up and Deliver Item Type will use the total mass across the squadron rather than for each invdividual ship. This is generally convenient as it allows different item types to be transported without having to divide up the cargo into orders for each ship, i.e. when tranporting 10,000 shields and 20,000 modules the first ships in the squadron will fill up with shields and the last will take all the modules rather than allocating X shields and Y modules to each ship.
This convention predates the item groups upgrade below and has to some extent become less convenient as now pick up item 'anything' from item group ensures only items that want to be picked up are with just a single order.

There are many reasons for why a transaction (buy, sell, deliver etc) may fail. Below is a list of the more common reasons.

• Items not in cargo (may be installed).
  
• No authorisation or incorrect security code.
  
• Wrong ID used for item or position being transacted with.
  
• Insufficient TU's.
  
• No hiport (when transacting from orbit with a base).
  
• Appropriate side has no stellars (for buy and sell).
  
• Item no longer on market, i.e. others have beaten the position to the deal.
  
• Insufficient cargo space.
  
• Item cannot be moved e.g. attempting to pick up a complex or tooled tech.
  
• At wrong location (yup, happens more often than people admit).
  

A base can have a great many items present on it manifest. As these are all listed alphabetically, it can prove something of a wall of text when attempting to determine quite what is present. To aid in separating a base's manifest into sections they have the option of creating item groups. These then show in separate sections of the manifest.

This feature can also be used to limit what items can be picked up by ships (and other positions) through the use of Pick Up from Item Group. This is extremely useful if for example when building outposts and starbases. The Base Editor can be used to define what the final base (at least to begin with) should look like, including employees and troops to defend it. If it is going to be a starbase then there are even options for working out what merchandising will be available (though this will be lower if there are already merchandising starbases on the world). It is even possible to import an existing base - speeding up the operation if you have an existing base you simply want to clone.
Once you have done this, you can select the base where you want to create the item group and press the 'Create Item Group in Base' button as show in the example below:



This will create the item group and populate it from the items in the base, if they exist.
Then it is simply a case of pick up from item group and delivering to the desired destination.

More details on Item Groups can be found in Orders.