Fleet saving
Fleet Saving is the act of sending your ships on missions for set periods of time in order to protect them from attack while you are not actively playing SFC. This could be to sleep, go to work or any other activity you need to take care of. There are a number of ways to accomplish this:
1) Send your fleet on a harvest mission. In order to protect your resources too, you can load up your ships with resources at the same time. This is called resource saving. As long as there is spare room on board, when you reach the debris field, the debris field will be mined and loaded into the available area. Don’t forget to adjust the flight time to half the time you will be away. The displayed time is the time it takes to get to the debris field. The return trip takes the exact amount of time.
2) Deploy your ships from one planet to another and resource save, if necessary. Adjust the flight time to fit the time that you will be away from SFC. Your ships and resources will stay with the target planet, so there will be no return trip. This method can be used when you want to deploy these ships to a different planet than which they came from. It also saves the return trip in case you wanted to use that fleet slot for something else.
3) Transport from one planet to another and resource save, if necessary. Adjust the flight time to half the time that you will be away from SFC. Once the fleet gets to the target planet, the resources are deposited on the planet and the ships return to the originating planet. The downside to this method is that your transported resources will be at risk for the length of time of the return trip. The upside is that when you return to the game, your ships will be waiting for you at the originating planet. There is no need to redeploy them there manually to transport another load of resources.
A variation of any of these methods is a method to avoid attack if you are actually online at the time of the attack. You can select a harvest, deploy or transport mission and select all your ships and as much resources as you can carry and execute the mission moments before the attacking fleet arrives. After the attack is over, you can recall the fleet.
Fleet saving is an important tool because in SFC, players receive points for destroyed ships. If you leave your ships parked at your planet, then another player can discover them and destroy them. If they time it right, they can also follow up the attack with a fleet of Dionysus Class Recyclers to clean up the debris caused by the attack.
