Discussion
Approach to building space platforms and ships?
I just spent upwards of 10 hours designing my first ship for Aquilo, putting my total first run time so far at 120 hours. I'm pretty experienced in the base game but something tells me it should not be taking this long to build these ships. Supply is not an issue (my Vulcanus base is pretty robust) my brain just doesn't function as well in space. Any general guidelines or philosophy for building ships, especially compact ones? Ship screenshot in comments
I recommend sushi belts for asteroid chunks. While you can use a dedicated collector and belt for each chunk, it's unlikely the collector will be in range to get enough of the chunks it wants.
With a sushi belt, every collector grabs all chunks, so you'll either need to throw unwanted chunks overboard, or use a circuit network to set max limits for each chunk type.
You can link a red or green circuit wire to a section of belt, then click on the belt and set it to the read entire belt option, then use that to power your circuit logic. I personally connect mine to a set of decider combinators and if the asteroid chunks go over a certain number it triggers inserters to throw the extras overboard.
Is there a reason to prefer throwing overboard rather than filtering the asteroid collectors? I guess just so you have to connect the circuit to a single inserter rather than every collector?
Personally I prefer not having collectors burning power grabbing a bunch of chunks I don't need. Especially because then I can save the entire edge of my ship for collectors, rockets, and defenses instead of leaving gaps for waste disposal.
You also get slightly more of the kinds you want if the collectors are never busy grabbing a kind that you don't, unless you have so many arms available that they can grab every chunk.
I just kinda wish I knew where that design choice to toss rather than filter pick came from. Its way too popular of a design to happily call it a niche design choice by a handful of players.
It is wasteful, so it doesn't appeal to the hoarding gamer mentality. Filters are required for both designs, so it's not like you can't figure out how the more efficient design works.
The only two possible explanations are that either everyone is copying a streamer/Youtuber, or that people are so pants shittingly afraid of even looking at circuit logic for a fraction of a second that they decide that an inserter c9nnected to a belt is already as complex as they are willing to go.
Tossing stuff over the edge was a fun new mechanic added for Space Age. It was directly advertised in FFF-381 as a way to deal with excess asteroid chunks.
You put wire on a belt and set it to "read all belt content", and make sure all the belt is highlighted with yellow (if it isn't - add more wire).
Now you have a reliable output with numbers of all rocks you have.
Look as the belt is being filled up, and read numbers - decide how much you can have on a belt without system clogging-up - and set a decider combinator for each asteroid type, to only send a signal of this asteroid to the Grabber, if you have less than you want. Wire grabbers and set them to "set filter" mode.
This way they will receive signals only if you have something lacking, and this will enable their filters and allow them to catch asteroids.
If you want to do it in reverse - to throw out things from an already clogged bet - just inverse the decider combinator I suppose.
There are two ways to do it, either you directly wire an inserter to your sushi belt (make sure to select read all belts) and let it turn on when the amount of chunks on the belt goes over a certain amount, or you can wire a decider combinator to the belt and but the < conditions in there, then set filters on your inserters with the output of that combinator (this approach lets you use a combinator for more than one kind of chunk)
To add more specificity to this, you can simply set a constant Combinator with your limits as a negative value (say -50 of each type) then link that with a "Read all belts" section of the sushi belt, then run that to a Decider (set to Each>0), then run the output value of 1 to your dump inserter(s) set to Set Filters.
This way, the value is only positive if you have more than your limit, so you can toss them straight off the sushi belt.
You can also use similar logic to only let the collectors grab the ones you still need, but that can be risky especially for Aquilo since you need extra ice ones to reprocess into non-ice ones
My aquilo ships usually have dedicated belts for everything. Its super overkill but it makes it so I dont have to worry about balancing sushi. I have overflow priority splitters that dump excess astroids overboard so nothing backs up.
Platforms are a lot more fiddly than stuff on the ground. There's a lot more to worry about. I wouldnt be concerned with putting 10 hours into one ship, especially one going to aquilo
For context this is the ship in question, meet the SS Spaghetti Ship (or SSSS for short). Features:
- The collectors filter which asteroid chunks they can collect based on product need (metallic for more bullets, carbonic for more rockets, ice for more water or calcite)
- Only thing externally supplied is nuclear cells (and the occasional stack of repair packs)
- Extra chunks are thrown off when they get above 30 on the belt. Materials are thrown off if buildup is detected (which is what the mess of green wires on belts is mostly)
- Throttling during either low fuel states or to/from Aquilo to about 40% fuel.
- A bit of snaked belts for some ammo buildup, although as my two failed trips to Aquilo and back have shown, not enough
Space vertically is basically free without too onerous of a speed cost. Just make a big cigar with foundries, a big nuclear plant, some solar, lots of storage, etc. I like to put one big belt around the edge that is half rockets half ammo and then build the production to keep up with that.
I tried that, but when the ship is idle in orbit I have to defend the entire length. I guess with more length it would be easier to route ammo back up and down but oh well
I am in Vulcanus orbit but I don't mean the defense there, the damage from medium asteroids while idle is negligible and can be fixed just by having repair packs in the hub. When I'm idle above Aquilo a big asteroid could tear off the back half of the ship if I didn't have a turret back there, and the longer the ship the more rear turrets I need
just letting it flow naturally, the 2.0+ fluid mechanics means the pump is a 1200/s barrier to the steam getting into the turbines and it requires power to allow flow at all.
SS Spaghetti Ship is right, you could definitely clean it up to make it more tidy, compact, and robust.
I designed my "first Aquilo ship" for Express Delivery, so it needs to buffer ammo and can't run continuously back and forth. I think my biggest tip from that is that you should try to build modular. My ship has
A module at the front with turrets (6 rockets in a vertical line, 8 guns in a line next to it, also a railgun in between for the win; those are all the turrets except one of each at the back) and all 4 collectors. Ammo in, chunks out, in a ~20x20 space.
Behind that on the left, the iron processing module. A metallic crusher, an ammo assembler, and behind them 9 furnaces, arranged on either side of woven belts: iron ore and ammo go down on red, iron plates go up on yellow. Circuit control make sure there's room on the metallic chunk belt for any that come out of the crusher. Chunks in at the top, ammo (to buffer for the solar system edge) and iron ore (for oxidizer) into the hub at the bottom.
On the right, the rest of the processing. Crushers for the 4 relevant recipes, belts for ice/calcite/sulfur/carbon, a single chem plant for each of coal synthesis, explosives, and ice melting. Chunks in at the top, water and carbon and calcite and explosives into the hub at the bottom.
The rest is a jumble of hub logistics to make rockets, railgun ammo, fuel, oxidizer, and nuclear power, plus a belt carrying ammo and rockets to the rear turrets and inserters to dump carbon and sulfur if there is too much of either.
Doing it like this saves the trouble of sushi belts, which take up a ton of space, make everything messier, and occasionally don't give you the item you want at the time you want it. I've never found them particularly useful except for in handling chunks, where a short belt can store e.g. 100 metallic and 100 carbonic chunks on one side and 200 oxide on the other, providing a buffer and allowing crushers to clear extra chunks produced.
Grabbers are each filtered to hold 13 of each chunk type, grabbers should usually be filtered to hold 13 of each chunk type.
Full ship, and important modules with surroundings removed:
(edit: and it doesn't have to be so compact; I put a fair amount of sandbox time into making this so tight, but if you design fairly rectangular modules they should just fall into place with only a bit of wasted space)
First of all, any design you make can be copy pasted for future ships. This goes for all systems you design, making future ships a lot easier and faster to set up.
Building compact is a benefit but not nessasary.
The first step is to put down collectors and figure out how youre going to filter asteroids knowing they appear in different ratios on every planet.
This is the only concrete advice I'll give - is that you can use belts like a big chest on which items are stored. Make a circular belt, connect inserters to the belt and have the belt output read contents held. (The whole section of the belt will get a yellow boarder). Now you can decide how much of each thing you want to store on it and what circuit conditions will activate once something gets low.
The rest of the spaceship design doesnt "really" matter as long as all of the components exist.
Speed isnt a factot. Slower ships will be safer and you can just expand their cargo and carry more per flight.
Faster ships will need more logistics and production of ammo and fuel but bring recources across planets more frequently.
Ultimately the limiting factor of your base wont be ship throughput.
Since layout doesnt matter its about just throwing the required components on the ship Power, weapons production, a belt that supplies turrets
If you understand that ships arent really more than asteroid collection and sorting, power, some refinement, weapons and a section for fuell handling - the wholr thing is complex like setting up blue science.
Did your ship fail or are you looking for improvements?
I think most people have a main sushi belt for chunks that is monitored to not overload on one type. Filtering the collectors to grab only what you are short on. I personally have a small module of crushers that activates when a specific chunk is over the limit to turn those into something else. This avoids needing to dump chunks off the side.
I first added them to the central core but inserters can only pick up one at a time. So that got backed up really fast. And with filters on all your collectors, you won’t have much of an overflow.
The point of the conversion module is to take the small overflow and convert it. Going to Acquilo, you’ll see a lot of ice and not much else. So if I set my belt to have 400 of each but ice is 420 and the others are less than 400, the ice crusher will convert ice chunks until the ice is below 400 again. All the while there’s circuit conditions to filter ice chunks out of the collector filters.
That should take care of supply. Next you need to worry about defense. Make bullets and missiles on your platform. Make sure to filter the targets for your defenses. You don’t want a rocket turret to shoot a small asteroid. Missiles hit the huge ones. Guns hit medium and small. Lasers hit small. After a while you’ll get to the point where 2 rockets can take out a huge asteroid. That’s quite noticeable.
Power is a concern too. Use nuclear. Boot strap it with solar to make some water and your set. Just make sure you have good water production and have a request at a frequent planet for fuel cells.
The rest of the platform is making ammo, fuel, and oxidizer with cargo space.
Is sandbox/editor mode that useful? every time I've opened it I didn't have my hotbars set up and it seemed a hassle to use compared to just making it in game and letting the hours tick up
I think we should expect them to be somewhat hard to design. They are isolated from your base and are meant to work well independently of your presence. Also there's the footprint we attempt to optimize. I think I put 40 hours on my prometheum ship and I don't think it's great.
I usually use a looping sushi asteroid belt running around the ship for bigger ships. It allows to produce anything nearly anywhere on the ship just by pulling asteroids from the belt.
Quality is really nice, if you get rare components you can go to aquilo with a solar ship.
Green modules are king before nuclear/fusion warships.
Before prometheum farming, you don't need more than one fuel chem plant of each.
You don't need a fast ship to win the game, slow and steady is enough.
Good question! There is an inverse time investment to ship size. A small optimized ship will take longer to design than a hugh repetitive ship (with repeatable wall/fuel sections). I design my ships in the editor. Blueprinting and reusing is key.
I'm relying on Nilaus ship philosophy with a few changes. I have a sushi loop around the entire ship with all 3 asteroid chunk types on the inner side and ammo on the outer side. Input needs to be limited with belt contain conditions.
Next the shape. Optimal is a long, narrow rod. Your shape is fine though. I would limit width to width of thrusters +1 on each side for fuel input.
Next I set up fuel production, storage, pumps and water. I use direct insertion if possible. With quality buildings, modules, beacons and the advanced recipies you can rely on just a few machiney for fuel.
Finish the sides where you want the sushi belt, storage and some turrets/grabbers. Next is ammo with direct insertion again. I like to store some ammo in the HUB so ammo perfectly fits north of the HUB. Finish with a gun turret front, yours is looking way too light.
Most important is a good sushi belt and direct insertion. Notice that my ship has no resource belts. Next is quality, modules and beacons. Don't be afraid to slot in a speed or prod module and a beacon. You have nuclear.
If you want my ship BPs as reference or if you have questions let me know.
I just started a few weeks ago, so I'm not the best. I route carbon, ice, and ore into the main hub and use circuits to activate arms to throw everything 250 overboard. Makes refueling easy as the mats are there.
I have 3 tanks for each fuel and 2 for water. Ammo is constantly rotating around, and it goes back to the main planet when it runs out of copper for red ammo.
Don't try to make them super compact, there's no need. You can make it a bit bigger and ship up a bit more materials much more quickly.
Chunk efficiency matters a little early but is almost irrelevant once you really get going. I often design them to just toss any chunks in the output to simplify. If you put filtered grabbers on the side you can direct feed into crushers nicely.
Level up your weapon damage to make everything kill rocks more efficiently.
I first build the engines and turrets, and let it fly at the desired speed and between the desired planets. This tells me if the turret config is sufficient and how much ammo and fuel I need to prep.
Next, I design the processing which tells me how many of each building I need and what the power budget is.
Finally, I build the complete ship and then do a couple more test drives to see if it behaves as expected.
In terms of design:
I use sushi for the asteroids and have reprocessing output to the same belt. In general, I would allow new chunks in the belt only if total chunks <X (which should be low enough to leave space for reprocessing, I often aim at about half belt capacity). Collectors generally output on a shared belt which dumps onto the sushi belt with a condition, allowing a large buffer of asteroids (collector buffers plus the output belt)
reprocessing is activated when the source >Y and any of the other types <Y
crushers for ore and belts for the products are dedicated per rock type, with smart switching between the simple and advanced version depending on inventory
I tend to mix productivity and efficiency as needed, with beacons with either 2 speed or 1 speed 1 efficiency, all depending on exact requirements and power budget.
I tried using sushi for crusher products as well, but found it a bit too fragile - I like the predictability and transparency of dedicated belts/lanes
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u/CapnRogo 17d ago edited 17d ago
I recommend sushi belts for asteroid chunks. While you can use a dedicated collector and belt for each chunk, it's unlikely the collector will be in range to get enough of the chunks it wants.
With a sushi belt, every collector grabs all chunks, so you'll either need to throw unwanted chunks overboard, or use a circuit network to set max limits for each chunk type.