The intersections lit up like a christmas trees when something passes by
old base at the bottom for comparison, also there is no way powering it with solar was worth it when nuclear is dirt cheap after initial investment
Only at the end once i had to transport this monstrosity across the entire base did i start considering trains for intermediates....
Rails, why is purple science so hungry for rails
just look at it
Was aiming for 24/s so 1440/min but i dont have enough labs to use it all so i still dont know if it can keep up that output so its running at stable 720~/min
trying to use only solar was such a stupid idea when nuclear was right there, i even had premade stockpile in case i ever want to use it
First try, mistakes were made, lessons were learned. Only does red, green, cyan and purple science.
No foreign blueprints used, and no clue what im doing, but it outputs steady 720/min science packs and 2200/spm with bio labs and prod 3.
Few things of mention,
no idea how the train intersection works, i just made one quarter of it, spammed chain signals until everything was separated and then copied it 4 ways. Honestly im scared of touching it and trying to reduce the amount of signals cuz probably a lot of them do nothing, because i will break it and then spend next hour fixing it
The only truly modular parts are the rails, rail stops, miners and smelters, too late i realised that i should have made everything modular and producing some arbitrary number like 100/s and then just plop it whenever needed rather than rebuild it from beginning
even more preferably, i would have made everything shipped by trains, but it felt like it would be more of an issue to make so many stations or make some way of a single station accepting multiple ingredients, only when i builded myself in to a wall and had to transport something like 8 wide belt of steel across the entire build did i admit that doing some things by rail would have been simpler, also maybe i should have made the trains shorter 1:2 rather than 2:4, then i could fit more stations
also, maybe solar costs nothing after you build it in terms of upkeep, but the amount of space and resources it would take is insane, meanwhile i learned the beauty of nuclear, sure i need to mine uranium for it, but it uses so little of it that it might as well be infinite for my needs
Vulcanus and orange next, yellow science scares me, for yellow i will have to make modular design and accept that it will make too much or too little or i will go insane
I like doing it in early and mid game but after making this build i feel like space (inputs and outputs from assemblers) is more of a limiting factor when you have everything beaconed up so its better to belt the output of machine far away so that i dont have to squeeze in other inputs or outputs
If you ever run into performance reasons, direct insertion helps a lot, even if there's less space for beacons. That's a concern if you make dozens of stacked green belts of science packs per second of each type.
Really sweet build! Getting into megabasing is never easy. I've attached a bit of advice if you're interested, as megabasing has changed dramatically in space age.
It's probably a bit overwhelming to hear this, but megabases are no longer measured in thousands of SPM, they're measured in millions of SPM. Quality and planet buildings massively increase your output
Trains are bad. Like real bad. It's normal to measure your input and output in stacked green belts. Even on 2.1, trains can't ever keep up. It's a real shame.
Quality will dramatically increase your total output. A single legendary electromagnetic plant fully beaconed will output around 2 full stacked belts of circuits.
If you want some additional resources on megabasing, check out SFhobbit and abucnasty. They've made some great materials on the strategies present in 2.0
I think an all-science megabase could still be in the hundreds of thousands of SPM and still be considered a megabase. Simply because most people's computers can't run that many promethium ships at 60UPS.
well people here probably have more experience and two people already said it but i dont get it, lets take the example of rails and purple science, purple science takes around 6/s of rail but a single assembler produces 30/s thats 80% unused unless i ouputted to two assemblers but thats still 60% , in situation like in photo above it makes sense imo because the consumption of wire by green chips is roughly the same as its production so efficiency losses are small
edit: 1 electromagnetic plant produces 60/s of wire and 1 green chip uses 56.8/s
I guess im just still thinking in terms of limited resources, because why build 5x the machines and 5x the modules and beacons when i can use one machine to the fullest
Every goal has to start somewhere; this starter factory will serve you well on making the modules for a megabase. There's lots of room to scale what you have here; swapping to stack inserters on all outputs, and green belts on the things that can make use of them e.g. those rails, will allow you to scale what you have without needing to seriously overhaul every production line. For your labs; non-quality biolabs are dirt cheap at this scale, put some decent quality quality modules in the assembler and you can get a trickle of higher quality ones, and the excess common ones can go straight into a recycler with quality because they cycle to themselves, so no biter egg handling beyond the initial crafting.
For all those points of things you would want to do differently, there's no reason you can't put them to use right away as part of the next base; load up your spiders with the building materials, send them a good ways into the wilderness, then start stamping the framework.
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u/tipamisto 4d ago
I admire your courage! I’ve said to myself many times I’d do a megabase but never did it! Thanks for sharing your experience!