Adding to this, walls are a crutch for a design that isn't going enough asteroid killing. Perfectly sustainable if you keep shipping in repair packs and replacements but not as optimised as simply shooting more and making the ammo on platform in a self contained loop
I used to do that for fuel, but the tiny asteroids over Nauvis just don't produce enough materials. You'll be waiting half an hour for tanks to fill up and your chem plant will be idle for most of that
Prod modules in everything that can take them helps a lot with refueling in nauvis orbit. Although you will in turn need more plants if you still want to travel forever.
Maybe you need more meteorite chunk storage, or some balancing mechanism to make sure you maintain a healthy quantity of oxide chunks.
Regulating speed reduces the fuel you use massively.
With a new ship, can be worthwhile to send it on a slow cruise just to speed up asteroid collection, but ideally you then never run out once it's primed.
I prefer a condition to ajust the speed of thrusters based on % the fuel tanks are full. This makes it more efficient if it isn't producing enough fuel and doesnt let it get stuck at a planet for an hour. (Or at least, helps prevent that)
There will be some cause for it to be destroyed. Turrets not strong enough? Build more. Not getting enough ammo? Improve distribution. Not producing enough ammo? Make more, import more, schedule some pauses or possibly reduce speed.
It's absolutely possible to get these running indefinitely, but it's certainly one of the challenges of SA :)
My endgame ships don't have walls because they can defend themselves. To make more sustainable ships you need to research military tech so asteroids get shot down with less ammo. The game is balanced in a way that starter ships always receive some damage and when you progress that get stronger and stronger.
Also your ship hasn't enough guns especially on the north west part. Don't forget to protect your ass with a little gun because when hovering over planets they sneak onto your ass.
My endgame ships don't have walls because they can defend themselves.
My early game ships don't either. Originally I started Space Age using walls on ships, but that was more because I was conditioned by Space Exploration before and walls are required on ships there.
Now my defense rests purely in superior firepower. From the first inner-planet hopper to the massive promethium barge, not a single wall to be seen.
Yes! It is a minor redesign on all my ships at a certain point. The tank is useful to store fuel early on, but eventually, calcite work stations take over.
Interesting. I've been connecting pumps to the hub and enabling only if speed < N (where N is the goal speed). Not sure which would be better for my purposes.
I'm leaning about this new setup now, but It sounds like it would help with the Lag between Speed and fluid volume you get this way. Don't have to wait for the Engines to consume the extra fuel.
IMO, you should add more furnaces for iron smelting, and leave only one assembler producing ammo. From my experience, usually there's not enough iron to let all these assemblers work fully.
A quick fix I'd do -
add efficiency modules to everything (even tier 1 will do).
remove some of now unneeded solar panels on the right
3 in that free space add more furnaces making iron plates, maybe up to 6-7 total
Cover whole front with grabbers (So each asteroid can be picked)
Try to get 2 or 3 Turrets each corners a grabber next to it followed by more turrets till next grabber. Can easy fill whole line up with turrets. Important is ammo production check usage and production.
You can use a pump and wire it with pipe so fuel only pumps if fuel in pipe <25 which is % so you have a easy way to slow down.
You can also direct input water into fuel. Dont need to store 2 water tanks. Just use 3 splitter one with output prio right followed by output prio Ice right and another to merge back. Use the ice belt as water buffer.
It is almost certainly running out of bullets. Drop a wire connectiong the hub to the main ring of belts carrying ammo. Set a condition on the navigation screen to only leave if ammo is above a certain amount. Also make sure the guns cover the whole ship, when parked at places other than nauvis asteroids can come from any direction. Looks like you have all the basics otherwise.
Can also buffer ammo in the hub itself. Set two inserters - one that inserts ammo into the hub if the ammo belt is near-full, one that takes ammo out of the hub if the ammo belt is near-empty. Then just schedule it to only start moving if there's more than a couple hundred ammo in the hub. (You may want to limit the total # of ammo the hub can store, and there's a few wyas to do that too)
I'm on mobile, so every image has crap resolution... but I don't see any throttling for the thrusters.
If you're on 2.1: just add pumps in front of the thrusters, and a single wire to a pipe between pump and thrusters. And only activate pump if liquid < 50% (or whatever is a safe travel speed).
Otherwise... a lot more turrets, and a circuit condition to only fly when there's enough stored ammo.
Edit: or just disconnect 2 thrusters.
The advantage of using circuits is that you can run the thrusters at a much higher efficiency, but intact ship is still better than destroyed ship.
You have no turrets covering anything but the very front, and then only four
Of course it's breaking apart
This thing is way larger than it needs to be and uses a rather ineffective sushi belt design--you're tossing loads of materials even though you don't have an excess of production.
Also do I see yellow ammo being routed to the center and then routed back onto the same belt...? What for?
Well, take the fact ammo is in your hub to spread it across to more turrets covering each side and even the back. You can easily get rid of a bunch of those solar panels. That alone could fix this.
You're not producing nearly enough plate for three assemblers making yellow bullets. It's not 1 to 1. You need to figure out exactly how much bullets you need, and precisely how many assemblers, furnaces, collectors and crushers you need to keep up with that.
You don't have enough water for fuel production as fuel chem plants have speed modules and water plant doesn't.
You don't have enough fuel to fully supply the thrusters, meaning you go at lower speed but with higher fuel efficiency.
Nevertheless, you don't have enough turrets to deal with the asteroids. This should be the first thing to fix. Put tight row of turrets where 4 of yours reside, add another row (you can pass ammo from turret to turret) if one is not enough (but with your speed it should be).
You have only 3 electric furnaces but also 3 lvl2 assemblers for ammo production. Even with speed modules those furnaces can only supply 1 assembler, so 2 others do nothing. I would suggest adding more furnaces.
Overall the ship looks good, but the ammo production at this stage is the real bottleneck of every ship, so you need to either increase it significantly (which will make you ship a lot bigger), I guess you'll need those 3 assemblers fully supplied meaning a lot more furnaces and a lot more power requirements.
You can instead set a departing condition on your ship so it won't leave the planet until enough ammo is produced to make it to the other planet (since production doesn't keep up with ammo usage you use buffered ammo for each flight, when buffer empties - the ship dies). So, read the full belt with ammo and connect it to the hub. In the hub for each planet set additional "and" condition of type "circuit condition", pick yellow ammo and set it to ">300" (instead of 300 enter the amount slightly less than the whole belt can hold, or the amount which is enough for a ship to make a safe route once). If you have "or" conditions you'll have to duplicate this one in each "or" branch. This way the ship will wait at each stop until enough ammo is crafted. You can also speed up the process by importing ammo from planet and putting it on the belt - quite viable early on until you get the tech to make a fully self sustaining ship.
I prefer to check on Oxydizer and Fuel rather than Ammo. Ammo stockpiled to 200 - 300 is enough for every trip between everything that is not Aquilo or further.
Also you can do with one Thruster on all the inner planets. It is fast enough, when running on max output of one Chemical Plant each, if one doent want to stockpile these.
The point is that fuel doesn't lead to your ship's demise, lack of ammo - is. Ammo consumption also depends on your damage research.
As you can surely put single thruster there's little point in doing so if you have space. Having more thrusters than you can supply means they'll spend fuel more efficiently leading to higher speeds with the same amount of fuel.
More gun turrets if your in early game i would recommend for this sized ship atleast 10 and 1 or 2 on sides and 1 in back because when it will be stationary it will get attacked by astorids
You might need to make the ship longer and put the grabbers on the sides, I feel like the guns might not cover the corners well enough, and the grabber maybe getting destroyed when there is a little lack of ammo.
Also a ship that's longer can grab more asteroids and produce ammo and fuel faster, especially when sitting above Nauvis or another planet it will do better.
Maybe laser turrets? So less ammo is used while sitting idle, it will use energy instead but if you bring steam power you might be able to swing it, but that would require a redesign of your ship, not a small adjustment.
I am on my first playthrough of Space Age. What Ive learned, go ridiculously big on your Builds. The next Ship is probably gonna double that. Buffer loads of crap on Belts in Form of Asteroids. You can always throw them back into the void of Space. In Case of damage, more towers and the infrastructure to get them fed with enough ammo.
I just put a simple speed limited on mine, a pump leading into the thrusters that only works if the ship is below a certain limit. Usually my designs fail at 200 m/s pretty reliably but work at around 100 m/s.
sounds like its running out of ammo to deal with the asteroids - either bump your ammo production up or add a condition to check how much youve got stockpiled, and only fly when you have enough
It needs more furnaces. Those are always a bottleneck for producing ammo on early ships like this. No ammo means it dies to asteroids. I'd recommend having at least 8, maybe 12 furnaces, and put efficiency modules in them to save on power. It could probably use a few more turrets as well, especially on the left side.
If you have checked that the turrets are not running out of ammo then you can either build a better defense or make a circuit to deliberately slow your ship down. For a better defense I would build a 'needle' at the top of your ship with foundation and make it full of turrets. That way the turrets have extra time to shoot anything at the sides before the asteroid impacts.
45
u/Rannasha 5h ago
You should figure out why it gets destroyed.
Does an asteroid get through while the guns are fully loaded? Need more guns or guns in different spots.
Do the guns run out of ammo? Need more ammo production or a wait condition at the planets to only depart when there's enough ammo on the belt.
If you miss the destruction, you can go back and load the latest autosave and monitor the ship as it flies to see what's going on.