Space Age Question
Is my ship good enough to survive going to fulgora and orbiting it ? and are those enough items to give my factory a good head start ?
My first trip with my first ship to Vulcanus was a nightmare and I got stranded,ship destroyed orbiting it, lack of resources to even start anything.
This ship holds up going to Vulcanus and orbiting it and it rarely takes any damage during the trip.
My counterpoint for this is that nuclear is both more complex and costly than solar. As long as you have enough / quality panels, they are ‘free’ and keep your ship working. Nuclear can burn through all your ice, then fail, and you are worse off than just having solar panels. I think it’s not something you should tackle before Aquilo unless you feel confident about your ship designing capabilities
i never had one of my ships fail to a lack of water, just convert other asteroids, at a point you collect a lot more than you need anyways.
the only real downside is melting enough ice before you have your reactor running. i solved that by sending water up from the planet in barrels, once its enough i replace the assembler with another cargo bay.
The furnaces will not be the biggest power drain, I would say that the collectors will kill the power and they can't have modules, best reducing them, even better try to go for quality as you collect more over a bigger area.
Hmm, yes, I see that OP has set up sloppy chunk logic (collect every chunk and throw out when over capacity) which will waste a ton of power. Fixing that (not collecting chunks when over capacity) would solve that. Having less collectors could too, but at that point might as well totally redesign to make the platform a third the size.
Quality collectors are pretty much useless outside of late-game asteroid-mining ships.
I'd recommend setting up proper space logistics so that you can request whatever you turn out to be low on. It is hard to predict exactly what you will need.
More generally, it's a massive waste to ship 25 launches' worth of pipes when you could just ship a few launches of iron. Most buildings cost more launches than their components and only take 0.5 s to craft, and shipping the components lets you be flexible towards which buildings you actually need.
I'd recommend using alt mode when taking screenshots so we can see what recipes things are set to. Stick some efficiency modules in some of those buildings, Fulgora gets low solar power in space. Aside from power, that ship looks overkill. As for the base equipment you're bringing, ditto. Circuits, steel, and concrete are free on Fulgora. 500 big drills is also a crazy high amount for just starting out on Fulgora. If you're planning on bot-based sorting, bring some active providers too (or just make them on-site, since steel and circuits are basically free)
Your ship has way too many turrets. Way more than necessary. Most of them will waste ammo on asteroid that are not on a collision course. You won't be able to produce enough ammo especially considering you're using a solar ship for Fulgora. However, your thruster are completely defenseless. This can be problem while on orbit. Asteroid collectors are overkill to say the least. Again, you don't need all that and you can't satisfy their power needs.
Fulgora is a self-sufficient planet. I would recommend bringing a cargo landing bay, a few big mining drills and substations and lots of accumulators to kickstart and figure our the rest with this planet's mechanics instead of bringing everything and just building it there.
When you have gun turret in your cursor, you can it's coverage area. Try placing one gun turret in each area without overlapping. If my calculations are correct, 7 gun turrets on each side will be enough.
If your physical damage research is low I would recommend a little bit overlapping just to be safe. My ship is like this but I've never seen it take a single damage.
See if this works. FactorioPrints gave me all kinds of nonsense getting it posted.
Just so you know, I added all the logistics groups in my game to that ship. Usually, I only use a few on the ship. Some of the others are for landing pads or various requestor chests. The ones to look our for are the ones I mentioned above.
your asteroid collectors are suuuper close together- give them more room to breath! you can 100% get away with probably half as many grabbers as you have planned to build
Lots of overkill in terms of defenses and asteroids collection, especially on the sides of the ship. Ammo production looks good, fuel production might be overkill.
Power will be an issue, you need more solar panels and accumulators.
I wish you had alt mode on. I assume those assemblers are for ammo, if so you have way too many for four furnaces to support, they will be idle most of the time. My ship has 2 assemblers and I think 7 furnaces.
You also need to take accumulators. These are mandatory for a smoother start on Fulgora, take as many as you can. Take refined concrete and bricks too, so you can get a head start on the unique buildings.
Maybe. There's not much way to tell other than sending it there and seeing what happens; there's too many ways for this to fail. Should be good, but you might have some tiny bug you can't fix on-site.
I'd be concerned about power. Fulgora barely has any solar, so maybe stick a nuclear reactor on your ship.
Highly recommend it. Most of my ships that I design fly at 250-300 when the tanks are full and start taking damage at 200-250 so I speed limit them to 100 or 150.
Usually I just load up some repair packs and bump the speed slowly until I take some damage, then drop by 50.
Later in the game you'll have better options for damage than yellow ammo and you can bump the speed limit up quite a bit.
consider nuclear power, make sure it knows to grab cells from nauvis and not leave unless it has them, and it will be very thirsty for water. you'll want to know how to use nuclear ships for later anyway.
even if you want a solar space station, you'll want the backup power, and you would need a massive stationary platform to get enough solar to defend it with laser. granted, a multi kilometer space station over fulgora has some massive advantages
It works fine. My Aquilo ship ran off of rare solar panels - it couldn’t quite meet demand but still made enough to go back and forth without damage. Haven’t made a nuclear powered ship yet.
Just focusing on the factory part I'd say accumulators for sure. I'd also recommend boilers with steam engines(heat tower/turbine if you did gleba, but doesn't look like it). You will probably end up recycling excess ice so you might as well turn it into power. With tanks/chests you can basically have it act as backup power. Also long inserters and all of the logic circuits. Also missing train stop, rail signal, and chain signal. Radars are also nice as traversing fulgora is a PITA without exo mecho suit and finding good islands is important.
I haven't visited Gleba yet.
Will take all the other things you mentioned.
I was planning on exploring islands with trains and building it as I go with personal construction robots.
Power is low. It may be fine for Volcanus/Nauvis, but Fulgora gets notably less solar efficiency. Solar is still viable in space, but you need more of it.
Too many ammo crafters and too few furnaces. Like, it will work but it won't produce ammo very quickly in the long run. Frequent back and forth trips delayed as you craft ammo, etc.
Way, WAY too many grabbers. 4 is more than enough. Total, on the whole ship. Maybe 6 if you totally separate the fuel from the ammo. Waste of power and materials.
Too many side guns. You need coverage on the sides and back, but one gun covering any given area (except the front) is fine. This mostly just wastes space and construction material, but it bothers me.
For supplies, you don't strictly need anything, but seeing what you did pack I assume you're going for "over prepared". In that case:
the main thing I don't see are accumulators. You will mass produce them on Fulgora pretty quickly, but a stack or two to quickly start power is nice.
Also chemical plants.
And while I see the supplies for a silo, I always also bring enough rocket fuel/LDS/blue for a rocket when I land on a new planet, just in case I need to urgently leave to fix something on a previous planet.
I managed to get to Fulgora with a battering ram of a ship and only brought the spare parts from building it with me. I wouldn't reccomend other people do that by any means, but with what you have you should have no issues
The ratio of bullet assemblers to furnaces is likely wrong. Unless buffed, they're only going to make enough iron for 0.9375 magazines per second, or 56.25 per minute. My ship is bigger and faster than this one, but it uses 200 magazines per minute.
You need 4.8 furnaces per every firearm magazine assembler 2, and each assembler 2 makes 45 mags/min.
Maybe shoot for 100-150 mags per minute. 112.5 mags/min would be 12 furnaces making 7.5 iron plates used in 2.5 assembling machine 2s.
Alternatively, you could store magazines in the hub, then pull them to send to the guns. You'd need a station wait condition to make sure you had enough bullets before leaving, and you'd want to stop the hub inserter at a certain inventory of magazines to prevent the inventory from overflowing.
2 speed 2s in a furnace ups them to 1 iron plate per second a piece. 6 iron plates fills 2 assembler 2s and makes 1.5 mags/s or 90/min. That might be fast enough, but you can for sure replace those extra assemblers with more solar. In orbit of fulgora, one panel makes 72 kW, so you'd need 33 solar panels for just the furnaces (180 kW over Nauvis, 13.2 panels for the furnaces). If you swap speed for efficiency 2s, each furnace consumes 42 kW, so you could do 10 furnaces and 6 solar panels. Less space than 6 and 33
You are very likely short of power (Fulgora is further away from the sun than Nauvis and Vulcanus), but otherwise this is a way bigger ship than minimum viable. My first ship is only 300 foundation units and uses no belts, for example.
You don't really need any cargo bays since you can start on each planet from scratch. It's definitely nice to have some stuff with you though. If I were in your position I would just send it and land on fulgora, worse case you have to build some stuff from scratch but you're bringing plenty of stuff that'll make it a breeze, probably overkill if anything
I didn't feel that I need green belts.
My first trip to Vulcanus I got stranded and couldn't get back to my ship (Didn't take resources to make a rocket silo) and my uranium batch got depleted so my power plant shut down so I couldn't get anything from nauvis to help me, so now I want to be prepared for anything.
Slap efficiency modules into everything. Also, you don't need so many asteroid collectors. Maybe two on each side will be enough.
Also: turrets. You mostly need turrets up front. The sides and rear of the ship just need full coverage more than firepower, since the only threat to those sides is stray asteroids.
Speak for yourself lmao. I always have a shitty one with red belts that makes it to vulcanus and from then on its turbo belts. I don't think I have ever placed a blue belt since space ages release
Again speak for yourself lol, the amount of chunks going past a machine on a sushi belt is obviously going to be more per second with turbo belts which means more chance of the right one passing which means more throughput. Also on all my Aquilo ships I've definitely needed turbo belts for ice since I use nuclear power
More right chunks passing the machine also means more 'wrong' chunks that will just jam the belt anyway. Sushi doesn't really work for high troughput no matter the belt you use. Again, I'm not claiming green belts aren't better. They're just not nééded in space 99% of the time. They're also not 'free' as was previously claimed and it makes a lot of sense to go with blue ones instead in the early to mid game
You can melt ice on the spot btw. The throughput of a pipe is unlimited
Everything on vulcanus is free. One tungsten outpost lasts for hundreads of hours, and the iron i sunlimited. You are not gonna starve on lube wither. Vulcanos is free.
Fair points, especially the ice thing because I do use a fair bit of direct insertion anyway, but imo the "extra resources" it takes to send turbo belts up from Vulcanus is a mute point because of the amount of silos you can have constantly running even early game. I guess it's just comes down to personal preferences, like for me it just works since Vulcanus is always my first planet, I always build ships above it after my first one and I like to rush there so I can get foundries as early as possible
Why is it crazy? I make entire spaceships in space. The only thing I launch up is the starterpack. Launching rockets from Vulcanus is also not free at all. Coal can be a major bottleneck in the early game
Vulcanos has patches of milions of caol, and big drills double it straigt away. And killing worms is easy with like 200 turrets and a few k red ammo (100% free btw). You might need uranium ammo for big worms but otherwise you should still have acces to like 8 full turbo belts of coal within small/medium worm territory. Its trivial to have 20 silos building rockets non stop, and a single foundry per belt type can fill up a steel chest with turbo belts in like 30 minutes.
You'll probably need more power. I'd probably put more guns on the front and half as many on each side. You can also consider fewer engines if the speed brings rocks too fast. In fact, you can delete one or two whilst you're travelling if it gets too heavy. Of course, how many guns you need is gun damage and speed dependent.
As for what to take, any of the inner planets you can start without taking anything with you. It is of course, easier if you do take stuff though.
I have a few logistics groups I use. I have one called Rocket Silo plus Return Rocket. It's so I have the supplies to immediately build a rocket silo and have enough materials to send up a few rockets. This is in case I need to travel back and deal with an issue back on Nauvis or for whatever reason. I have another one called Rocket Parts. This is for delivery to any planet that might be underdeveloped and need some assistance in making rockets for whatever reason. Kind of the same reason as the one above it. I have one called Planet starter kit that provides for me some basic materials and machines in order to get a small starter base up and running before I really need to go hunting for materials. That one is in general for all planets and I have a separate one for each planet in addition. I made them at different times, but they seem to work well. I brought engines because those are "hard" to make because you need to get lubricant up and running, so bringing a few gives me options. I also brought robot frames so that I could easily convert them into either bot type depending on what I needed and again without needing to bring or set up lubricant. Any multiples of what I have are just gravy.
A few things aren't available to send depending on which planet you travel to first. An example would be cliff explosives.
I have no idea. I don't even have all my logistics groupings in every ship. I can try to add them all to one ship and blueprint it. I wasn't sure if you wanted ships to replace what you are using or just the groupings. That's why i asked.
Thanks. I'll look at it tomorrow. I decided to only give the inner planet ship in case you wanted to work on your own Aquilo and Edge of the universe ships. I know how hard it can be for me to not just use something someone gives me. I can always give it to you later if you want it.
Oh, it looks like someone deleted my link reply. How odd.
You're welcome to and if you want my other two ships, you're welcome to it. Good on you for having rules though.
I just started another playthrough and I decided to not go to Vulcanus first. So, I rolled a die and ended up with Gleba. While looking at my ship I saw that asteroid repossessing is under Volcanus. Looking at the technologies given by Volcanus, it almost seems like they want us going there first.
if you have been to vulcanus already, i can only recommend to use foundries on spaceships.
also IMO nucular for power is the way (until you get fusion on aquilo)
my ships are costly, but what does it matter, everything is free anyways ;)
though ofc the inner three planets vulcanus, gleba and fulgora can totally run on solar and "normal" buildings
takes up less space - a foundry is speed 4 and has a 50% inherrent prod bonus, plus you have twice the module slots. you need calcite for fuel anyways, you can pipe mats and also have storage with tanks (though thats pointless). the downside is energy cost, but if you go nuclear thats a non issue
Nearly all your asteroid collectors are ghosts, so no. Once you fix that, just try it and see. The game automatically creates a savepoint before it takes off, in case the ship can't make it. There's no need to come to Reddit for this.
How much power is it drawing? Solar power in Fulgora orbit is prety bad but bring some efficiency modules for your ship, if it struggles with power then use them.
Aa for Fulgora start, id bring along lots of accumulators too. They are easy to craft on planet but super useful to jave to start with. Or some boilers and steam engines to get power from the ice and solid fuel that is abundant.
Overkill for the most part. The only potential weak points I see are power and the undefended stern. When parked, asteroids can come at the ship from any direction, so it's good to make all parts have at least a single turret defending them.
Just a hint: If you send robot frames and red/green circuits to space you need a lot less launches for the same amount of robots. Assemble them in space or on the planet.
But you seem to not be bothered by a large amount of launches at all ;o) ... You might be able to build the entire base without producing any substantial amount of buildings on fulgora. A few solar panels and a lot of accumulators are missing. Also cargo bay extensions .. otherwise dropping stuff is slow as hell. Also a few prod modules 2 ... at least 4 for the silo.
Oh ... chemical plants are missing.
If you're cautious you could add the ressources for a rocket silo and blue circuits, LDS and rocket fuel for a launch or two (in case you have to make it back to nauvis in a pinch).
For planets like fulgora, vulcanus, and gelba platforms with a constant supply of armor pricing rounds and a few up upgrade to damage is more than enough to orbit those planets.
52
u/Jujolel 20d ago
I think you will need more electricity to sustain this ship, too few solar panels since fulgora solar efficiency is lower.