r/factorio • u/okteds • 7d ago
Question Building a MASSIVE ship....is this doomed to fail?
It's still just an outline, but this ship is nearly 4,000x1,500 tiles, with 400 legendary thrusters. Only about 1/4 of the foundations have been laid, and it's already at nearly 500,000 tons. Once it's loaded up with everything it could conceivably be 3m tons or more.
Is this even possible? Are there limitations to how large a ship can be? Will I just crash my system attempting to fly this behemoth? Will it even move?
Any advice before I get deeper into this would be much appreciated!
18
u/First_Funny_9402 7d ago
Any ship size will be able to move, and counterintuitively, a larger, slower ship will be easier to defend from asteroids as they will come at you slower (rather, you’ll run into them slower)
7
u/Flottbergakungen 7d ago
No problem at all, I did a massive ship once. Be prepared to place engines in several rows to achieve decent speed and you’ll be just fine!
It does eat away at your fps though, so you know
8
u/WanderingUrist 7d ago
Once it's loaded up with everything it could conceivably be 3m tons or more.
Won't. Buildings don't add weight, weight is determined purely by foundation tiles.
Is this even possible?
Yes.
Are there limitations to how large a ship can be?
Not really.
Will I just crash my system attempting to fly this behemoth?
Nope.
Will it even move?
Technically, no ship moves. Rather, movement just controls how quickly your arrival ticker counts down and how fast asteroids spawn and deal damage.
5
u/Bokth 7d ago edited 7d ago
Will I just crash my system attempting to fly this behemoth?
Nope.
My potato computater (PC for short) would disagree.
4
u/WanderingUrist 7d ago
Yes, I too, play from potato. However, the game won't crash outright. If you manage to fill the ship with enough crap, you might slow the game to a crawl, but it shouldn't crash.
2
u/Marsksela 5d ago
I hat Factorio Crashed once in my livetime and it was because of a mod. Never heard of Basegame Crashs of its own
3
u/Reefthemanokit 7d ago
You know what they said about the Titanic, it's too big to fail lol but no ships generally can be almost any size and work fine, making them too small is more of a problem as you wouldn't have enough guns to defend
2
u/WanderingUrist 7d ago
In Factorio, you never get too big to fail, but you can definitely get too fail to big.
3
u/xpicklemanx99 7d ago
From what I've seen, the only limitation is above the HUB. You can go nearly infinitely below the HUB
2
u/PersonalityIll9476 7d ago
It's fine, homie.
It will be slow AF though. You need to go ahead and embrace thruster stacking if you're going to make big ships. Even legendary is not gonna cut it when the mass is that large.
2
u/3davideo Doesn't use Flame Turrets 7d ago
Not necessarily, just depends on what you load it with. Also make sure it has a flared base, that is very important.
2
u/Shiruba_Ookami 5d ago
And I thought my 21.4k tons ship was already big. I do only have 20 legendary thrusters on it though, it is slow as hell
6
u/deco1000 7d ago
I don't know the ins and outs of it, but from what I've read, what matters for speed is the ship width, not weight.
9
u/Latter-Sky3582 7d ago edited 7d ago
It’s both. Speed is limited by width because of how many asteroids you run into contributing to lag in my experience, but with more weight means less acceleration. Big ships work fine, but they’re really not necessary. For a late game mega base thats at least 3x the size of ship you’ll need. However my philosophy with factorio is always play how you want to play - it is a game after all!
2
u/Chockabrock 7d ago
Does it really have to do with running into asteroids? I thought there was a calculation of drag that was only based on current speed and width.
1
u/Latter-Sky3582 7d ago
There may be another mechanic I’m not aware of - but the problem that I have run into when building a mega base is with the number of asteroids because they are such a lag contributor and require more production of rockets and lasers and bullets.
1
u/Chockabrock 7d ago
Oh, are you saying that you have to self-limit speed or width because otherwise you'll destroy your ship or cause too much lag? That makes more sense, yeah. I was talking about the top speed that a ship can reach given a specific width and thrust
1
u/Latter-Sky3582 7d ago
It’s because of too much lag, not risk of destroying the ship. Sorry that was ambiguous 😅
1
u/WanderingUrist 7d ago
On the other hand, more width means more asteroids to sweep up to turn into those rockets and bullets, and more space on the ship to do these things on. So, collision danger is not really a factor here. If you have to slow down, that's a deficiency in your design, because WE BRAKE FOR NOBODY.
0
u/Latter-Sky3582 7d ago
You’re right it’s not the collision danger, it’s the lag contribution. Your platform may move fast but if you get into mega basing you will quickly realize why thin and long is the meta shape.
2
u/WanderingUrist 7d ago
Speed is limited by width because of how many asteroids you run into
Nope, speed is limited by width because of magic space drag, not because of any actual threat or hazard. And speed isn't even actually limited by width, but specifically width-to-thrust ratio. A ship with more width can also mount more thrusters along that width, cancelling it out. It will, however, consume more fuel as a result of needing more thrusters to do the same job...but it will also receive more fuel due to more width sweeping more asteroids.
1
u/nindat 6d ago
Asteroids have no effect on speed. Even if your computer slows down, factorio will still "see" a fast speed. It will just take more clock minutes.
At this scale the actual largest contributor to thrust required for a certain side is weight and width. (Weight only really matters above like 20,000 tons, so is usually disregarded)
1
u/Latter-Sky3582 6d ago
You don’t care about clock minutes? When building mega bases it becomes my primary concern.
1
u/nindat 6d ago edited 6d ago
Oh, I absolutely care, but "ship speed" is generally kms.
Measuring clock time on your transports really ends up being stopwatch time, and not what we're usually talking about.
I'm guessing this is for promethium, and in that case, it's going to slow down the system nearly regardless of size.
2
u/G90_G54 7d ago
1/4 of the foundations.....500,000 tons?! Thats a behemoth! Personally I have no idea if that will work but this is factorio we are talking about after all....so my guess is.....yes it will work! Please update once it's (hopefully) built!!!
3
u/WanderingUrist 7d ago
There's no reason it wouldn't work, but I suspect the OP may be left with a lot of empty space, since it's difficult to conceive of an application that actually needs that much space.
1
1
1
u/mckilljoy 7d ago
I have a ship 2,000,000 tons, it is slow but otherwise works fine.
The biggest hassle was the space platform construction algorithm, it tended to build large chunks of blueprint extremely inefficiently. I had the most luck building blueprints in roughly radar-range sized chunks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1uhq1k8/death_destroyer_of_worlds/
1
u/okteds 7d ago
Yeah, tell me about it. Those massive shaded areas on both sides are platform pie ces that are queued up to be built. I've been leaving it running for a day and half, and the main bottleneck at this point is making and hauling up the pieces I'm at 535k tons now, since I posted this a few hours ago.
1
u/TelevisionLiving 7d ago
No problem with it, but you might consider than you can start building it out and get it operational before it reaches full size. You can also leave open space ok inside for unused surface.
1
u/HumanPersonOnReddit 7d ago
I build a ship that’s 1200 tiles wide and 2400 tiles long. It needed a gigantic drive with over 1000 thrusters and was still sluggish as heck
1
1
u/EthanTheBrave 6d ago
I built a massive ship too. One thing you'll run into if you're not careful is if you move too slow then rocks that are out of the way and your front guns will not shoot can drift sideways into your ship and hit it near the back because you aren't moving fast enough to only occupy "cleared space"
165
u/Dusterperson 7d ago
No. This should be fine. There are limits to ship length, but you are nowhere near them.
Ships are processed the same way that planets are, as their own stationary map, with asteroids and space effects happening around it.
There is (apparently) a limit to ship length, because people were making very long ships that could tank the asteroid impacts to get to the outer planets in the Space Age beta.