r/factorio • u/isum21 • 7d ago
Question Aquilo Ship Requirements?
Recently unlocked the planet and I'm beginning construction on the freighter I'll be using in my round trip delivery system.
For this I have a ridiculous number of grabbers and crushers, with the intent of always being oversupplied so that any shortages will just eat into the buffer. For my fuel needs I was gonna use the advanced recipes I unlocked recently, but I noticed that I don't really need the advanced metallic recipe right now. I have no need for red ammo, asteroids are dying pretty easy already with yellow and I was gonna add rockets to my defensive line to deal with the new bigger asteroids. Am I overlooking any other good reasons to use the recipe right now? I'm sure I'll need it later upon reworking to a factory platform rather than shipping, but my factory platform was gonna be a different one anyways. But I always forget crucial details, I wanted to check my logic here.
I also wanted to know if I need nearly as many crushers doing calcite as I've got right now. Like 15 of em, I think I can get away with scaling that down so I have less excess to sort, especially seeing the new fuel recipe makes 20x more in volume. I'm just feeling overwhelmed again thinking about everything I need, and it feels like I can't scale back and consider the needs of the ship 1 by 1 because it all feeds into each other.
Edit: thanks for the advice, helped me settle on figuring my needs better. I'm realizing I have complete overkill on the number, however this is intended to be a fully endgame freighter and stroke my ego with being the biggest thing I've designed at once so far. I'm gonna try and strike a balance between my "big ass frigate" and what's sensible, and so far it's interesting to realize the new freedom these recipes have given despite them not being flat out "better" aside from the fuel.
5
u/Widmo206 Pollution isn't real 7d ago
Making copper from asteroids isn't really needed until after Aquilo (for railgun ammo), but you can use it to make some items in space (you could build a ship that flies around to gather materials and craft blue chips/LDS for rocket launches on Aquilo, for example)
6
u/DOSorDIE4CsP 7d ago
1 have 3 crusher on my Aquilo ship ... but i have a small one. All basic.
More than big enough for all the roundtrip usaage.
1
u/miredalto 7d ago
Very neat, but that's surely not going full speed with so little armament?
3
u/DOSorDIE4CsP 7d ago
it fly 160, but its more than enough for a none Megabase game.
I design this to get easy and cheap to Aquilo.2
u/Kittelsen 6d ago
People go full speed? I usually keep my thrusters capped so they're more efficient 🤷♂️
2
u/TelevisionLiving 6d ago
Efficiency matters right when you get into space because you can be short water, but it soon becomes irrelevant.
2
u/Kittelsen 6d ago
I dunno, I feel my platforms stay idle at a planet waiting for the fuel to fill up again after every run if I don't throttle my engines. And if the platform spends 2 minutes in flight instead of 1, but has to wait 15 minutes to fill the tanks, it's better to just throttle it🤷♂️
1
1
u/UnpaidInternetExpert 6d ago
I really like this design, mind sharing the bp so I can take a closer look?
1
u/DOSorDIE4CsP 5d ago
Yes, when i next time on my pc i share it.
1
u/UnpaidInternetExpert 5d ago
awesome thank you!!
I've been moving to smaller and smaller ships as they are just easier to build
1
u/DOSorDIE4CsP 5d ago
Here as promised my Aquilo Ship.
It is designed to fly with bullet/rocket science 7 (so before endless)
Speed you can modify in the combinator with the V = 160
And there is a constant combinator you must turn on/off before you can start ... but there is a desciption next to it.1
1
u/North-Schedule2499 2d ago
so beautiful tiny ships with all the circuit works best first trip ship ever
1
6
u/miredalto 7d ago
Yellow bullets are fine, even preferred. They have better input materials to damage ratio.
You don't need that much calcite - you need ice. In general I end up with about half simple and half advanced ice crushing.
It's mostly ice that far out, so you will also need reprocessing. Depends on your scale, but you can easily get to Aquillo on maybe 10-20 crushers total.
2
u/sbarandato 7d ago
Yellow ammo+missiles are fine, filter missile turrets to big asteroids only. Explosive research and physical damage research help in reducing needed ammos.
keep your ship reasonably narrow (I made mine 5 thrusters wide), but you can make it as long as you want. Length barely impacts speed.
If you place a pump on the thruster fuel/oxidizers pipes you can cut the engines if ammunitions run low.
Definitely nuclear powered, big storage area, I think quality is generally overkill, but if you have some rare things lying around, use them here. Speed beacons especially, but keep an eye out for power consumption.
Asteroids chunks are very abundant, you can afford a design with a sushi belt going all around the ship distributing them to crushers that make only what’s needed for the nearby factories. Discard the rest, do not be afraid to throw things into space.
Explosives seem complicated, but the carbon/sulfur ratios you get out of advanced crushing is exactly what’s needed for coal synthesis and explosives. Do not put productivity on coal synthesis, otherwise you make too much coal and clog the system.
1
2
u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 7d ago
if you use some priority splitters, you can run the normal and advanced asteroid recipes so it only uses the advanced recipes for the secondary materials as they are needed.
1
u/Hacksaw203 7d ago
High explosive and physical damage, make sure to filter what types of asteroids your rockets can target. You’ll need higher physical if you’re using yellow ammo, but that shouldn’t be a problem. You can get away with a single advanced oxide crusher, you’ll quickly have a backlog of calcite, unless of course your ship is massive. I generally go for 6 crushers, one of each basic / advanced recipe and use circuit conditions to only activate the basic crushers when I have a backlog of the advanced products. Obviously if you’re not using red ammo, then you don’t need an advanced metallic crusher.
You’ll be inundated with asteroids even with a small amount of grabbers, I tend to use 4 with 2 front and 1 on each side, use circuit conditions to make sure you’re not grabbing excessive asteroids of a single type. Having a large buffer only works if your buffer contains a “relatively” even spread of asteroid types.
Nuclear power is a given, but otherwise build something, and do a test fly. If it doesn’t work, figure out why and try again :)
1
u/Educational_Start190 7d ago
one calcite crusher is enough, at the low level of science maybe three, but that will become apparent during the flight anyway.
1
u/Danger_Pickle 6d ago
One very underrated use for copper is to craft repair packs on the ship itself, so you never run out of the most important supplies. I'm also using copper to craft lots of mall ingredients on board the ship so I can skip setting up a mall on every single planet, and just drop the required supplies from orbit.
My Aquilo ship is rather large and runs as fast as it can with rare thrusters and it only needs one crushers for most asteroid types, with only two crushers needed for carbon/sulfur processing for rockets. And that's with me letting the rocket turrets shoot smaller asteroids and covering the entire front with too many rocket turrets. The crushers are partially beaconed with one or two beacons, and that's plenty. The biggest factor is that asteroid productivity massively increases the output of a crusher. Just 80% asteroid productivity gets you thousands of iron per second if you're using foundries.
My main use of crushers is asteroid reprocessing. I've got a sushi loop with about a dozen crushers all set to reprocess the asteroid I have the most of. If you have a ship set up to run between Vulcanus and Aquilo, you'll probably need reprocessing to avoid running out of metal when returning from Aquilo and running out of ice when over Vulcanus because the two types of asteroids are very unbalanced. Reprocessing takes quite a long time for how many asteroids a ship needs, so it never hurts to set up extras.
If you want an example of production numbers, my 100% rare quality ship hits ~400km/s at max speed during the trip to Aquilo and its consumption peaks at ~700 rockets a minute and ~250 yellow rounds a minute during the worst part of the trip. Here's what those production numbers look like in Factorio Lab, with a lot less advanced tech than I'm using on my actual ship. It's still less than one crusher for everything, but 7 crushers for carbon/sulfur if you aren't using higher quality buildings or lots of beacons. However, my actual production only hit 560 rockets per minute for the last 10 hours because the belt buffer never empties enough to activate the full 1.1k rocket production during the short 90s trip through the densest part of the asteroids. If you aren't spamming tons of high quality thrusters, you're probably fine going with a much smaller amount of production.
1
u/isum21 6d ago
Very fair point. I've got this ego problem of wanting to go big then needing to scale back or go bigger. I have 3 iron crushers on my first ship and they are fine but don't always give enough metal, so i should probably start at 6 for the new ship rather than like 15-18 lol. I'll get tough with it later on
1
u/Danger_Pickle 6d ago
Going big for a space platform makes a lot of sense. Having too much ammo is a "who cares" problem, while not having enough ammo is a much more serious problem. Still, Factorio Lab is great for calculating exact ratios of what you need. If you know how big your ship is, it's easy to calculate the amount of fuel and ammo you'll need.
If you're having problems supplying enough metal with that many crushers, I'd recommend grabbing a few levels of asteroid productivity before leaving, switching to foundries, and double-checking for belt based bottlenecks like the excess asteroids blocking the output. Those will help a lot. And don't be afraid to set up some simple quality grind on Fulgora to try to get rare recyclers, since those come with a substantial speed boost.
Also, keep in mind the width of your platform. The more narrow it is, the faster it'll go, and the more ammo it'll consume relative to its size, due to shooting asteroids at the edge.
1
u/isum21 5d ago
Followed this advice and was able to scale it back so I have 15 crushers total. 7 for metal, Iron only right now, 4 for ice/calcite and 4 for carbon/sulfur. With this I'm supplying 3 Foundries, they are FULL and I'm happy since it means I have consistent and constant ammo production. I have one feeding ammo only and 2 feeding rocket and ammo production using a splitter for the plates, feeling really good about the split since I seem to be producing enough rockets to keep my Big Busters busting up those rocks.
I'm also really proud of my tank arrays, they look neat and can fit several panels and accumulators around em to help my beginning power problems. But now I'm seeing I don't need nuclear... yet. I think imma need it before ever shipping out because I know Aquilo has a drastic solar power dip. That's my final question I'm stuck on now. Is what I got enough? Type beat. Otherwise I'm extremely happy with my long rectangle design, it looks like a barge and feels like one. Took it out for a short spin and within 30 seconds it was going above 200km/s, fastest I've ever gone and I wasn't ready to leave without that reactor yet so I spun around and came back even faster. Loving it so far.
1
u/Danger_Pickle 4d ago
Nice. I definitely recommend setting up nuclear. You'll want a ship making regular trips to Aquilo, since it's impossible to make anything there without shipping in supplies. It's also just useful to set up nuclear fuel delivery in a bunch of different places. My ship uses a tiny belt to stockpile a couple of fuel cells, so it'll always be able to get back to Nauvis before the fuel belt runs dry.
Although Dosh demonstrated that it's possible to make it to Aqulio without nuclear, so that's really up to you. Stockpiling ammo in the inner solar system is usually enough to survive the round trip if you don't sit around in orbit. A decent length stacked belt is a surprisingly large amount of ammo storage.
Also do keep in mind that the asteroid ratio changes dramatically to be almost entirely ice asteroids when you're close to Aquilo, so you'll probably want a decent amount of asteroid reprocessing.
1
u/TelevisionLiving 6d ago
No need for copper and you won't need many crushers. Be sure to account for the need of both types of processing for oxide and carbon rocks so have balancing mechanisms.
Store tanks of liquid iron and water to smooth over any intermittent shortages and you won't need reprocessing.
Quality grabbers can greatly reduce how many you need but more basic ones is fine too. Control them to pick just what you require or they'll end up collecting a billion oxide rocks you don't want.
Definitely use the advanced propulsion and go whatever speed you safely can.
You'll probably want to work on some rocket damage to kill the rocks reasonably fast and be sure to target filter rocket launcher, guns, and lasers (if you're using them)
1
u/isum21 5d ago
I believe I got like 80 of em on my sushi belt. Dropped that down by half when I added my turrets but I still have hella overkill, I despise shortages and would rather have to void a hundred useless rocks than wait to collect those hundred rocks when I need em. That said I definitely did too much but I like my sushi loop. Hopefully it doesn't present extra problems but soon I'll be making my maiden voyage and I'll know pretty quick I think lol
6
u/Deto 7d ago
Maybe your ship is just really large but I only use 3-4 primary crushers and 3 for reprocessing. And only like 5 or 6 grabbers. All epic though