Thanks for the response, apologies I didn't make it clear that I was partially theorycrafting there.
At the moment we are in the early implementation and indeed it is 100 units per SCU however you can purchase units in a little as 1, They will just go in a SCU box and rattle around a bit. Knowing this game for the scope it intends to have and that almost every other game with cargo as a mechanic takes the size of a unit into account, even if it is a rather simplistic Small, Medium, Large or "this item = 5 Cargo per unit", I don't expect SC to be any less rigorous with cargo considering they are going as far as to take velocities into account with balistic ship weapons to make sure the amount of damage a bullet does to ship armour is + 1000m/s if the target is advancing on you at that speed and -1000m/s if the target is moving away from you at that speed.
For example:
Mugs and plates. Both these items are available to pick up and carry around in the 'Verse right now.
- Taking a dinner plate from my cupboard, it is just under 1cm tall and 30cm wide. We can get 100 plates in a meter tall stack with a little left over and can have 9 stacks in a meter square. 900 plates in total in an SCU.
- Taking a mug from my cupboard, it is 10cm wide and 10cm tall. We can have 10 mugs in a stack and 100 stacks. 1000 mugs in an SCU.
Here is a spreadsheet showing the difference between the two, and what would happen if you only put 100 of each in an SCU:
View attachment 14569
It'd be really wild if you could cross-populate a SCU, but i think that would be over-complicating things:
View attachment 14570
Also, items larger than 1SCU are going to be one unit, but multiple SCU. Small class components are going to be person carryable. Large and Capital Ship components are going to be larger than a person can carry. You have 20 Large class coolers to get over to the Drake shipyards, you're going to need something bigger than Cutlass to shift them those. To put a number on it, lets say a large class cooler is 2 meters long by 2 meters tall by 2 meters wide, that's going to be one unit at 8 SCU.
I will happily concede that I have no idea where cargo may eventually go and it may stay as it is if it is determined not to be a priority mechanic that would benefit from the resources it would take to get this in place.