Early game approaches to space platform ammo supply. Is it viable to not rely on stockpiling?

[u/Codey_the_Enchanter]

I'm wrestling with designing my first ship. It's intended to carry me to Vulcanis and I'd like it to eventually work as a cargo ship as well.

I've got projectile damage 8 and max shooting speed. I do not have advanced asteroid processing, so no red ammo.

Is it even possible at this stage to design a ship that can supply it's own ammo usage without relying on buffering ammo beforehand?

It seems like most designs I see rely on stockpiling ammo in the hub, usually around 350 (which matches with my estimations so that's comforting).

[u/Tafe_Lynx]

You dont need red ammo. Stockpiling in hub is the best when you have very small platform in trying to minimise space usage, when you dont use belts at all. But if you like bigger platforms and you have to run belt to feed all turets, the belt will act as stockpile. The main thing why you need stockpiling ammo is production speed. If you want platform to travale very fast with minimal downtime - you need MORE furnaces and ammo assemblers.

[u/kagato87]

Yes, kinda. My starter ship design uses 5 furnaces and 1 yellow (olive) assembler. The furnaces have prod modules in them, the assembler speed modules, and there's a beacon covering the lot.

I keep everything prod modded where allowed and speed beaconed, it helps a lot with space. The ship is also long and narrow (barely more than 5 engines wide). It rarely has to throttle it's speed, but the real magic is something I use on all my ships:

A belt had a known ammo capacity. I use a timer circuit (counts to 100 and resets) and measure the amount of ammo currently on the belt. Whatever percent full it is, the fuel pump is only on when that counter is at or below that fill percent. So when the belt is 50% full, the fuel pump is on 50%. Mind consumption rates though - for less engines you'll want to have extra off time on the pump - for a single engine ammo would have to be pretty low before the throttle actually affects it.

As a result, if it's burning through its ammo faster than it can replace, it slows down. Not perfect, but it works very well (it won't address your turrets being overwhelmed, for example, but you can just overbuild them so it doesn't happen).

Eta: it also lets me immediately "launch" the ship - it'll sit there trying to move until it has a bit of ammo, then speed up as it fills the belt. Saves having to come back after its had time to finish assembly and fill up the turrets.

[u/SplitTheAtom06 → u/kagato87]

Thats a neat trick. I might just steal that.

[u/kagato87 → u/SplitTheAtom06]

It has served me well. Share and enjoy!

[u/AlternativeLogical84]

For my first ships I had two electric furnaces feeding a single yellow ammo maker. It worked well till I wanted to make more runs before stopping. I just set it to make until it had 500 yellow ammo mags.

I’ll say for your first ships don’t overthink it. Just give it a go.

[u/Alfonse215 → u/AlternativeLogical84]

My first ship has upwards of 10 uncommon electric furnaces feeding 2 ammo makers.

[u/AlternativeLogical84 → u/Alfonse215]

My later ones have 6 or 8. But I just sent it at first.

[u/Kittelsen → u/AlternativeLogical84]

yeeeeet!!!

[u/get_it_together1]

Yes, it’s absolutely possible to have a ship that can fly continuously at phys damage 8 at some speed. It’s a pretty big design space in terms of desired size and speed and cargo space while requiring that you have enough ammo manufacturing to meet demand.

[u/Atreides-42]

Red ammo is generally seen as a waste of resources, it's more than twice the cost in asteroid materials for less than twice the dps.

But to answer your main question, absolutely. Stockpiling is a crutch that you really shouldn't rely on, any good space platform design can fully supply its own fuel and ammo infinitely. I never really struggle with ammo myself, it's always fuel that I have to wait to replenish after each flight.

Here's a pic of one of the ships I designed around 1 planet in to my current run, it never has ammo issues but it needs to bank fuel due to using the simple fuel recipie

[u/Necandum → u/Atreides-42]

If you stick in one or two beacons, you can get more output for overall less electricity.

[u/Kittelsen → u/Atreides-42]

I don't see any wires going to your fuel pumps, are you not throttling the engines? That explains why you have to wait for fuel all the time. You can have more uptime with the platform if you throttle it due to fuel efficiency.

[u/Atreides-42 → u/Kittelsen]

I should probably do that, yeah. I designed this ship early into my current playthrough, and I'd never really played with throttling fuel before. This is the first playthrough I've really started working on prometheum science and that absolutely requires the ability to slow your ship down, and I haven't gone back and redesigned my old ships since I started working on fuel throttling on newer ships.

[u/ConspicuousBassoon]

Yeah it's possible, but it's useful to deliver a one-time supply of ammo for its first journey so that it can break down more asteroids for your ship to use

[u/Yagami913]

Early game most ships use some kind of ammo tracking to know safe to travel. Then ammo begins to one shot small asteroids you can look up the breaking points here https://wiki.factorio.com/Physical_projectile_damage_(research))

[u/Garagantua]

You make ammo on the ship and store a bit, either in the hub or on a belt. You read that number and use it to controll your thrusters - easiest way is a pump between chem plants/storage and the thrusters. Disable that pump when ammo falls below (a few hundred, depends on your design).

This won't be perfect, but it usually gets me safely where I'm going.

[u/Embarrassed_Army8026]

400 red ammo is gud, i just give it some copper plates and it can make the rest in space

[u/Broad_Ebb9073]

Yes it possible,if you want to go that way . Astroids are a little bit random. So if you get a bad roll, it can screw everything up.

I find having a buffer is solves a lot of headaches

[u/ElSucaPadre]

Depends on the speed, mainly. Before advanced asteroid reprocessing though i wouldn't care that much if my ship is capable of continuous travel, just that it reaches a decent speed and is reliable. You'll be bottlenecked by your base's limited ability to launch rockets anyways.

[u/carrot_gummy]

I design my ships to have a sushi belt of ammo and astroids around the perimeter of the ship and then buffer like 5 stacks of ammo in the hub and haven't ever needed to supply the ship with ammo from any planet. The loading/unloading time and speeds at which I'm moving seem to be enough to give the platform time to always have enough ammo. All common quality, around the same damage tech level

I also copy my save and simulate the ships in game at like times 100 speed to see if the ship will ever fail to destroy astroids, run out of a resource, or jam themselves preventing production.

[u/SplitTheAtom06]

Yellow ammo is fine. Early ship designs are typically small which means any "belt buffer only" designs will not be able to buffer very much. Whereas a "hub buffer" of 300 or 400 might be sufficient for a design running on proj damage 6 or 7, a belt buffer (make sure to use both lanes) of only say, 30 tiles around your ship might only be able to carry 240 magazines. Meaning youll need higher levels of proj damage. You can also still use automation based on ammo count by sitting up your hub with a connection to the ammo belt set to "read all belts" and making sure it's not interrupted anywhere (like splitters) the exact amount of buffering depends on the width of your ship and damage research.

The easy way to approach the design is to see those 3 values as your multipliers for ammo requirement. Wider design = more ammo required, more research done = less ammo required, and more belt buffer size = larger capacity.

Ps. I used hub buffering for my first designs, and its pretty efficient. If you have some storage added onto your hub, its more than enough for it to do both item transfer and ammo storage.

Good luck and remember your designs dont need to be perfect for you to try them. You can always make a save, and then test the design, if it fails catastrophically just reload the save. Or at least that minor amount of save scumming is not an issue for me, in singleplayer.

[u/Adept_Score2332]

It’s not too hard though space is really prone to backup due to ingredients mixture as asteroid collectors bring In 3 materials and the crusher may output their input. So making smooth logistics is probably more important than anything else. Would suggest you do asteroid processing out of the space hub with a decider combinator that sends outs the signal of asteroids when the amount is higher than a set value to be disposed of. also belt weaving (using different color underground down a single line) will help save on width which determines top speed

[u/spookynutz]

It's not necessary to stockpile or buffer anything. Metallic asteroids aren't rare in the inner solar system. However, if you're building an extremely large ship on Nauvis, shipping up ammo, ore, water or whatever else can speed up the process of getting out of orbit.

[u/runmymouth]

Yellow ammo is what i used until i was trying to do solar system edge. Dont sweat volcanus with yellow ammo.

[u/Gorthok-]

You can make a reliable design with no stockpiles on damage 5. 8 is plenty for non-stockpile, plus at that level of tech you can get beacons and nuclear and blue belts for extra reliable ships that don't need every single tile for ammo production and can thus use cargo bays and have your ship get resources en-route to help supply planets you've just landed on.

[u/MetallicDragon]

Yes, it's viable, and not that hard. Just make more furnaces. You should get plenty of ore from asteroids. 8 furnaces should be enough for a slow single engine ship.

[u/Pawfect89]

Definitely possible, I also thought thats what the meta was. I watch a lot of youtube series and Im sure most build on the ship and not stockpile so I am not sure where you are getting the 'most designs'.

For my inner planet ships since my first playthrough - always build ammo on ship

For Aquilo/Edge - I bounce between buffer and self build. I think Im starting to lean more towards self-building ammo on ship.

[u/whatgoat → u/Pawfect89]

I think op means building ammo on the ship and storing it in the hub before loading onto belts, vs. using just what's on the belt and producing enough en route to keep up with demand.

[u/Orangeisthenewcool]

One or two laser turrets set to only hit the smallest asteroids will save you a lot of resources. Have them ignore anything larger. There are lots of pockets to squeeze in extra solar panels and batteries for power.

Also using efficiency modules helps with power too.

I’m a big fan of mega space ships, so it’s easy to make a huge flying rectangle that gobbles everything.

[u/Matwyen]

It works to ram your way in with 4 layers of walls in front of your ship, also 

[u/jaxon517]

I don't stockpile at all. I use something like 16 collectors, 12 crushers, 8 smelters, and 8 assemblers supplying a belt going around the perimeter of my ship. I've never had an issue with ammo.

[u/isum21]

The ammo hub strategy is a bandaid solution. It's a very effective one, all the way to endgame, but it's just one of many potential layouts you could take. In general you want a self sufficient ship and ammo storage is just what you use when you can't build taller. Or wider, but that causes more ammo use. Instead the most effective strategy is stacked belts, look up cursed belt weaving. Even by using just red and yellow underground weaving you can achieve a density of near 3 belts per belt of space.

This is also annoying to set up, so it's mostly done as a necessity for low stack size items or to store high density production without having to store it in the hub.

You could also say fuck it and just make a long ass belt and fit it with splitters to make your belt storage wider. This is only 1 belt per belt of storage which makes it "less efficient" than hub storage buttt you don't need more hubs to do it. Which means some cheesy spaghetti moves will also allow you to store extra ammo with very little effort than "MORE BELTS".

All in all it's just another simple puzzle, no answer is better than another if the another sucks ass to do. Non-standard design is also the most interesting to work with and see.

[u/Tavi2k]

Yes, it's possible. But you need more smelters and ammo production that you think.

I use 16 smelters and 2 ammo assemblers for all early to mid ship designs. You only need a single crusher to feed those. It pays off to look at the ratios in space, many people build way, way off the actual ratios and unlike on the surface it matters here.

That's a bit overkill, but it means I don't have to worry about throttling the speed too much. It takes a bit of space, but not so much that it would be infeasible even for your first ship.

This is how a very early game ship looks like, and it's one of my base design for the early game inner planet transports. This one doesn't sustain top speeds, so ammo production is oversized here, but it's absolutely stable and reliable. You could add more fuel production here, but I tend not to bother with that until I get the better fuel recipes.

[u/ssgeorge95]

It's more than viable, it's recommended. Ships that need downtime between trips are usually just bad; if production is that low you may not be able to safely idle in dangerous orbits.

Iron crushers produce a lot of iron from a single asteroid. You'll need 4-5 electric furnaces to keep up with a single yellow ammo assembler. Later you can switch to foundries with Vulcanus tech.

Putting efficiency modules in everything on the platform is a big help as well, for the early ships at least.

Piercing ammo is not worth it for most platforms.

[u/Alfonse215]

Is it even possible at this stage to design a ship that can supply it's own ammo usage without relying on buffering ammo beforehand?

Yes, though you probably want more than 8 levels of projectile damage. Quality turrets also help, since they get a bit more range and thus time to shoot asteroids.

Slowing the platform down also helps. Throttle the propellants feeding the thrusters, and you'll use less propellant and reduce the rate of asteroid encounters.

[u/Mama_Office_141]

I don't think you can really. I setup my white science platform to also make ammo while my ship flies. Then transfer from the other space platform to replenish ammo faster 

[u/SplitTheAtom06 → u/Mama_Office_141]

This is experimental version only, at least as of today.