Seaplane Exploits

A friend on Discord built a seaport on land joined to a train station. Seeing that confused me. I wondered why anyone would do that. I also thought seaports and seaplanes were ‘dead’, for all intents and purposes…

So I asked and found out seaports (airports specialized to be on water) are possible but are meant to be built on sea tiles (at sea level), not on land. ‘Seaplanes’ are typically small airplanes that are refitable to oil are limited in supply but are available when you add the Aviators Aircraft Set (av8) NewGRF. See this Seaports Discussion and Building Seaports for more info.

I thought a good way to take advantage of this Seaplane ability to access Seaports would be to access Oil Rigs, since they are at sea. Ships are slow, and sometimes are quite distant from the nearest refinery. Ships also cannot go inland to a location with no waterway access.

The basic advise I got was that they should be built with canals or other ‘objects’ surrounding them and on sea tiles.

I looked up more information at the TT-Forum and found a step by step procedure:

1. Pause the Game: You need to not only pause the game but also have full access to make changes. That has to be set in the Advanced Settings. The setting can be found buy searching for pause or going to Limitations > When paused allow: and set it to All actions (the default is ‘All non-construction actions’).
2. Bulldoze 6×5 Area: to make way for the seaport you need to clear a 6×5 area of sea tiles in range of the oil rig so it momentarily is blank empty tiles. Since you are on pause it will not fill with water and will stay blank.
3. Build a Seaport (4×3): Build the seaport in the middle of the 6×5 blank spot you bulldozed in the previous step, leaving blank tiles all around it.
4. Add Canals (or some other object) on those extra empty tiles all around the seaport to prevent flooding (counter-intuitive). Basically you are shielding the seaport from the sea water around it by adding canals. I know it does not make sense, but it does work. Fake objects work also.)
5. Refinery Station (Airport): add an airport in range of a refinery if you do not already have one to receive the oil and make the produced goods available to transport.
6. Small Refillable Airplane: in av8 you need to pick a plane that is small and can be refitted to oil. Without av8 installed you will not find one. (Note: For av8 NewGRF to work you meed to set the Plane speed factor to 1/1. That is in Advanced Settings Vehicles > Physics. The default is 1/4)
7. Refit Airplane For Oil and set it to load up at the seaport/oil rig station and take the cargo to a refinery airport station.
8. Second Vehicle to transport Goods from the refinery to a town that receives Goods.

Large Seaport: Someone suggested I may be able to do the same thing with a regular, larger airport. I tried it and was successful! I was able to then use a larger airplane. I chose the Boeing 747, also available on av8 and refit-able for oil. It carries 140,000 litres of oil so that is a decent amount. (see pics below)

Conclusion

Chances are it would be better to just use ships in this situation. I wanted to learn how to do it and give it a try. It may be useful depending on the situation. It does open the door to new possibilities. For example, You may want to transport oil from an oil rig to an inland re­fin­ery or make an oil hub of sorts. With seaports you have little or no limitations on distance and can build a regular airport inland to receive oil from airplanes quickly and fairly efficiently. You are not limited to the regular 4×3 seaport with small airplanes. As I found out, any airport size works!