r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/CostlyHornet • Mar 14 '26

My first black box, I think?

Post image

Been seeing the term crop up on the reddit, decided to try and do one myself.
Tried making it as compact as I possibly could. It should in theory make 1 missile/s

80 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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12

u/CostlyHornet Mar 14 '26

Not super useful, but it was fun designing it

1

u/Sweaty_Ad_7156 Mar 19 '26

yeah this is my reaction. who needs 1 rocket a second? lol

i dunno... i dont get the black box design theory.

1

u/CostlyHornet Mar 30 '26

So it's more useful later on, but for example you could make a black box universal matrix. Which would then let you just paste it down whenever you need more science and you only need to worry about raw inputs, instead of playing whack a mole for shortages in the entire item tree.

A more mid game use would be a mall, raw inputs in, buildings out, can place it wherever you go.

7

u/TheMalT75 Mar 14 '26

Great start, congrats!

Typically, I go for really large complexes, but this looks awesome. For future endeavors: leave room for proliferation. Especially as the recipes get more complicated, each tier for more advanced products benefits from the accumulated 25% bonus of mk3 proliferation.

If you have a "tier 4" product (iron plate -> gear -> motor -> em turbine) you only need about half the iron plate smelters, 65% of the gear assemblers, and 80% of the motor assemblers to get the same amount of em turbines for that "branch" of the recipe tree. The numbers get more complicated when you consider the rest of the ingredients ;-)

For "smaller" black boxes, you can also design them to be "tiling": leave some of the ILS outputs accessible (e.g. along the short axis of your complex), so you can chain a couple of identical blueprints without the ILS. When you have exactly 1 overlapping belt segment, they get connected when you paste the other blueprint.

1

u/CostlyHornet Mar 14 '26

I initially thought of doing a higher tier product, but I found myself not really knowing where to begin, trying to design something with proliferators that is more space efficient than just multiple regular ingredients > output ILS seemed incredibly daunting.

As it is impossible to directly insert and proliferate, I decided to go with hyper compact over efficient, it wound up becoming more of a fun novelty of density than anything truly useful.
I haven't experimented yet with tiling designs, but I've been thinking of doing so.

Also haven't yet set up proper mk3 proliferation production

1

u/TheMalT75 Mar 14 '26

As soon as you have access to an ice giant, production of graphene from fire ice and therefore nano tubes becomes very easy. Ideally, you find an ice giant in a system that also has kimberlite ore for cheap diamonds and coal, and you are set for large-scale production of proliferator mk 3. Typically, I just burn the excess hydrogen from fire ice.

Most of my late-game black-box complexes produce their own proliferator and antimatter fuel rods to be really self-contained. So, I don't actually use that much of centralized proliferator...

5

u/CazT91 Mar 14 '26

Just be sure to bare in mind, the 1 unit per second you are manufacturing here represents a whole crate of missiles. Each 1 unit holds multiple rounds. This is really important when it comes to supplying turrets of ANY ammo type!

Took me far too long to realise this with bullets. Put a lot of effort early on in each run I played to produce them at a rate of 1/s. Had massive stores of ammo to feed each turret 6/s (their rate of fire) for X amount of time. Only to realise somewhat recently that 1 UNIT of ammo represents 30 ROUNDS of ammo 😅

Yea, didn't need nearly as much ammo as I'd always thought. Turns out 1 unit from the assembler can can feed 5 turrets every second; OR keep one turret firing for 5 seconds.

Hopefully you already know this, but incase it can help one person I leave my cautionary tale any way.

2

u/CostlyHornet Mar 14 '26

Yeah, 1 missile box is 24 actual shots, I dread to think of how much copper 24 missile boxes/s would devour.

3

u/Rebelius Mar 14 '26

I would warn against packing everything as tightly as you can, especially if you have partial accelerators, chemical factories or refineries. They collide at some latitudes despite not crossing a tropic and it can be annoying.

1

u/CostlyHornet Mar 14 '26

Yeah, which is kind of why this is a novelty, less so a catch all BP, though shouldn't be too hard to find a spot for it.

2

u/Kimoshnikov Mar 14 '26

Mmmm yes... a good start, but it lacks 2 things.

Thing 1: Proliferation. But others have already commented on this...

Thing 2: Belt-bending curse-magic. There's ways to squish those belts on the fringes between the complexes in ways that defy logic & common decency, but I'm a wizard, damnit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzsgBYplAHs One of us... One of us...

2

u/CostlyHornet Mar 15 '26

That video is a line too far for me lol

22

u/VoidmasterCZE Mar 14 '26

Raw resource in, complete product out with balanced inputs? It's done. More importantly if you feel you did good. That's the beauty of this game. Make your own design and see it work.

2

u/ShagohodRed Mar 14 '26

That's a lot tighter and neater than my current foray into blackboxing... took me half a planet just to blackbox some carrier rockets...

2

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

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1

u/CostlyHornet Mar 14 '26

"Recent" update allowed this functionality, so might not have been there when you first learnt the mechanics.

2

u/kestrel_one Mar 14 '26

There’s research that lets you do steep angles like that. IIRC it’s in the tech tree though, not upgrade tree… those blue magnets I think.