Gonna be a long night . Ffs . <| sep |> No I don ' t . I have never sent a PM <| sep |> Salted meats last nearly indefinitely thoughEspecially ones that are sealed in metal containers <| sep |> Hey man , you ' re not alone . I ' m having a beer in your honor . Happy Thanksgiving ! <| sep |> I posted that a few days back . <| sep |> hour man gets random ? powers for 1 hour by taking drugs . <| sep |> They remain useful for a variety of reasons throughout the entire game . As a poster below said , you can use them to slow a fleets progress through your systems to a crawl by forcing them to warp into the center and have to travel out . You can also create relatively effective death blossoms , which abuse the current combat AI , where the AI gets stuck attacking 46 stations in opposite directions , and the fleet becomes disorganized and stuck trying to reach an equal distance between all the current targets . I ' ve seen a death blossom of 4 fortresses surrounding a platform kill a fleet 2 x their combined strength . Here is why , the stations individually are easy kills , but they are fighting sometimes only 14 th of the actual fleet strength , their shields capacitors out regen the damage , and the entire fleet is unable to focus fire as it gets pulled in multiple directions and it is killed flawlessly . Third use , dropping defense platforms in key bottle neck systems after you wipe an AI fleet . The AI will still try to sneak ships and transports around piecemeal . They will do things like blow up your science or construction vessels , or try to back cap a planet you ' ve captured and moved on from . A platform with an anchor in a strategic location can frag transport after transport and most individual ships that the AI will send out alone , leaving you relative peace to leverage your fleet for purely offensive actions . Putting the anchors in the center of a system can also give you time to catch up to any fleets the AI puts back together that could cause some mischief . They also work as fantastic supplements in a setpiece battle . They are tanky , way more tanky than anything else , so they can be used as the initial sponge , soaking a significant amount of damage while your fleet with its much higher firepower maintains its maximal firepower longer and can do work . It also allows you to exploit the combat AI by attacking an enemy fleet from multiple directions which causes the AI all kinds of problems . Another advantage , they work fantastic for locking down fronts in multifront wars where one front consists of numerous , but much weaker enemy AI . A fortress death blossom can be an unassailable wall of death for these weaker AI , which allows you to virtually ignore an entire front while slamming your D in the B of the main threat . Without those static defenses , you would need to either split your fleet off and create a force strong enough to fight on the weaker front , while weakening your force on the main front , or , ignore a number of smaller fleets that could fly around blowing up stations and infrastructure and potentially cap planets while you play ring around the rosey with the real threats . So , are they a replacement for a fleet in being ? No . Can they be uses as force multipliers , or in other sensible situations where it makes more sense to use a defensive station , than using ships which could be with your main fleet doing what the main fleet should be doing ? Yeppers .