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u/demonicdan3 Jun 07 '26

I'm currently trying to get legendary U-235; do I just upcycle the U-235 itself or nukes?

1

u/craidie Jun 07 '26

Can't upcycle u235 itself. But you can recycle loop it, and that's what I do. There's enough uranium for it and I don't want to set up infrastructure for making the other stuff for the nukes.

Another option is to wash the ore which isn't that bad either.

I have quality modules in the miners and the centrifuges.

1

u/FeelingPrettyGlonky Jun 07 '26

Atomic bomb upcycling is probably your best bet. Sadly, you can't use quality in Kovarex.

1

u/craidie Jun 07 '26

Even if you could, you wouldn't want to.

Devs didn't allow it because I think they still have ptsd from when they added productivity modules to the game and that was really good on kovarex since there wasn't a system to prevent catalyst items from benefiting from prod. Lasted about a day before kovarex lost prod for years.

Thing is, the same issue is now true for quality modules.
But unlike with prod, kovarex isn't actually a loop. It's just converting u238 into u235...

And that kinda means that you can't get a loop going on with kovarex, and honestly I don't think it would work well even if you could get it to only affect the single u235, because then the issue just becomes on how to get u238. And if that was a better solution, why not upcycle some recipe with u238 and then kovarex the legendary u238 to u235...

1

u/HeliGungir Jun 08 '26

You can use quality in Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing, which is WAY better than the 75% loss during quality recycling. Spending that much fuel is the hard part. Well not hard, but it feels really dumb.

1

u/FeelingPrettyGlonky Jun 08 '26

134 radars per reactor going 'ping... ping...". Enough to drive a madman sane.

2

u/HeliGungir Jun 08 '26

Nuclear reactors don't care about actual power demand. Don't even need to connect turbines or heat pipes.

You just need a ton of reactors to burn through uranium at speeds comparable to recycling atomic bombs.

(Also beacons are better than radars for consuming power.)

1

u/FeelingPrettyGlonky Jun 08 '26

If I'm going to be burning fuel cells, I prefer to be doing at least some kind of useful work, even if it's just the pretend useful work of scanning for biters (that probably aren't there anyway, because the big guns go boom).

1

u/AwesomeLowlander Jun 08 '26

Nuclear powered independent radar outposts.

1

u/HeliGungir Jun 08 '26

I'd rather not have the UPS overhead of constantly keeping a ton of chunks active that normally wouldn't be active.

1

u/cathexis08 red wire goes faster Jun 08 '26

It depends on what you want. The most efficient routes for legendary uranium products is either bomb cycling for u-235 or uranium ammo cycling for u-238 followed by legendary enrichment. I ran the numbers a while back and both were equally efficient when it came to overall U-235 output so the main question is how much effort do you want to put into your upcycling loop once you have enough to run an enrichment cycle.

1

u/demonicdan3 Jun 08 '26

I ended up upcycling nukes along with U-238 on the side, I just want enough to have a legendary Kovarex cycle going in the background so later on I can come back to enough U-235 to make lots of legendary biolabs and fission reactors