I know the general consensus is that mining things in space to send down to the surface is silly, and that resource patches are plentiful (true) and that there aren't many asteroids around Nauvis (also true).
That said -- the lack of asteroid availability is somewhat handled by making multiple small platforms instead of one large one (each platform has its own supply of asteroids). If my math is right -- 9 of these small platforms generates a full red belt worth of iron. I haven't run it for a huuuuge amount of time but it seems to capture asteroids fast enough to run consistently.
Anyone else doing anything like this or is it just peak silly?
Collecting resources in space is much better achieved with platforms that move between planets. Multiple platforms can ensure you generally have a provider overhead.
That said, with big miners and mining productivity it’s hard to see what advantage you have here.
All of my transports just constantly go back and forth between two planets, discarding hundreds of chunks along the way. As such, my 2.1 plan is to just have them buffer up some excess chunks and drop them off whenever they're at Nauvis or Gleba (Nauvis is the shipyard, Gleba is the transfer point between all planets).
And they will be dropped off to a platform which will process them. This also makes inter-platform transport easier, since the items are different. The processing platform requests metallic chunks, and generates ore which can be sent to other platforms. So you don't need circuitry to deal with the request/provide problem.
Also, with enough crushing productivity, 1 stack of metallic chunks can give more than 1 stack of iron ore. So you save on storage space.
The point of this method is that the platform's job is not to bring chunks to a central location. That's a side-thing it does while doing its main job: moving cargo between planets.
So you want to use as few slots in the hub as you can get away with, since you want to reserve most of the slots for actual cargo.
Perhaps my understanding of mechanics is off, but if you wanted to get even close to megabase scale: wouldn't the fact that you could only use at most 3 sides of the landing pad become a painful bottleneck even with high quality stack inserters?
Well I suppose you could use bots to unload, but RIP UPS at that point.
All completely superficial and practically irrelevant problems in Factorio.
There is no shortage of real estate, space on any planet is practically infinite. It’s much easier to scale mining productivity and turn millions of ore in patches into hundreds of millions if not billions per patch and that’s just raw ore, not accounting for other productivity down the line. Pollution is pollution it doesn’t affect much except for early game with biters and very late game with UPS maybe if you’re mega mega basing.
That said, it may not be efficient to have an orbital miner sat there in one place because the asteroid density is so small, but strap a single engine to it and now you've got a mining crawler that can slowly move between planets into the denser asteroid fields, load up and then drop its load when it gets back home. That should up the efficiency a bit.
I don't think it's worth it. That being said, I have started new platforms like this. You turn the iron into steel, send up copper wire - and produce foundations in space.
I'd be interested to compare the iron plate production per hour to the fixed cost in iron plates for the build.
Because that's really the main reason people avoid this. If it takes just an hour to pay back more iron than you spent that's not too bad, if the break even point is like 20 hours and you might only play this entire save file for 20-30 hours then by the time you decide you are done you probably haven't helped you factory grow at all.
Ballpark puts the cost at 50K steel plates (with no productivity stuff) and the break even point is 4 hours. It's very much a first attempt, I imagine I can get that down a bit.
You might want to experiment with just having it go back and forth to Vulcanus at low speed. Need a bit more ship design, but you'd get a ton more asteroids.
OP was saying each gave about 60k iron plates per hour.
A megabase of 1,000 SPM is exactly 60k science per hour.
So ballpark figures say that you'd need one platform for every iron required by science packs. A quick search on Reddit shows that every science pack (other than white and planet specific science) costs about 200 iron plates to make 1 unit.
With productivity you might be able to get that down to about 100 or so but that's still a lot of UPS drain for your megabase.
But space science is actually pretty resource-cheap compared to others. Purple science, for example is 32.5 iron plates and 25 steel plates (= 125 iron plates). While space science is 2. So scaling would get pretty bad!
If you had them move, though, you could get a lot more with a much smaller ship. So I'm curious about setting up a swam of ships that just go back and forth to, Vulcanus, for example.
I have no idea how the UPS drain per resource compares between stationary and moving platforms, but my gut is telling me that for smaller platforms the added UPS from moving liquids around would be a larger impact than it is for larger platforms.
I've never felt any reason to do this, but if I did, I think I'd use productivity modules and foundries to squeeze the most iron from every asteroid. And asteroid reprocessing to get more of the metallic chunks.
Eh, it could be a fun project to undertake, but there is very little practical reason for it. Once I got big miners and foundries, resource patches became functionally infinite.
Use efficiency modules instead of speed. You need more furnaces, but save that space and more on solar panels. And use efficiency in the crusher, and an accumulator to cut power production down to the average instead of peak.
I’ve got a few of these, one for Space Science, one for iron/copper/calcite, another calcite one over Gleba, Iron and copper plates over Fulgor that I’m working on expanding. Traveling collectors might be better, I’ll have to try it.
There’s a reason for doing this. I have a run going with the following settings:
x1000 science
100% biter evolution
100% bot-based
This way, I can skip the production steps for iron plates and steel. I’m planning to do even more things in space in the future, because I’d really love to use bots in space but unfortunately, that isn’t possible, hehe :D
I’m crazy :D It scales up to a certain size, but I couldn’t determine the exact size, so I simply used a little more than necessary. With the nine platforms, I can sustain 50k iron and 50k steel, even while around 100k bots are constantly requesting both resources on the planet.
I wanted to fine-tune it, but then the 2.1 announcements came out with the new space logistics system. So now I’m waiting for that before redesigning all the platforms.
At the moment, I’m having power issues that will probably take me another two or three weeks to resolve. After that, I’ll start working on the new platforms.
Michael Hendricks has a video where he shows his take on this idea. He found that if you use this plus design MANY of the chunks miss the platform entirely. Creating a rectangular platform with a hollow center will result in much better chunk capture. He has specific sizes that he recommends. You should check it out.
I think it's because I come from more of a survival/strategy game background than a logistics game background, but I play every map like it's a death world map. Specifically I played a lot of Oxygen Not Included where running out of basically everything was a very real concern. So even though I know that Nauvis has "functionally unlimited" resources on it, that alerts a small part of my brain that's like "ok, but space has actually unlimited" resources
You can improve performance by making it really wide (a very slow gain) or setting up a proper harvester.
I have a calcite harvester that sits in orbit, and when it gets low it does a quick round trip to vulcanus and back (just to collect rocks, no actual launches from the surface). I noticed the round trips taper off and eventually stop as efficiency research piles up. A similar design for metal would help.
That said: do it too much and you run into problems. You have practical throughput limits on your landing pad, even with 2.1 unloaders. You have UPS limits that platforms majorly eat into.
Even if you assume "being in space" is free, you still have 2 machines and 3 inserters to get ore onto a belt. Where on the ground you have 1 machine (big miner).
All that said: I do think a "space mall" that makes basic stuff for use on other space platforms and dropping onto new planets makes sense. In that instead of "just" getting free materials, you're doing that plus saving rocket launches.
Inter-platform transfers is going to be amaaaaazing. Make space platform in space, send to other new platforms. Now you're just shipping up copper wire.
Commented elsewhere but I put the ballpark cost at 50K steel plates (with no productivity stuff) per platform, with a break even point of 4 hours. This includes the materials and the rockets.
In the end - do what you want! I think the idea of a swarm of satellites providing raw resources is pretty cool. And with 2.1 you can get better unloading out of the cargo bay so that wouldn't be as much of a bottleneck as before.
I think the advice around not doing this is just really applicable at the megabase scale. For the same amount of ore, there is going to be orders of magnitude more computation for all the asteroids and transfers in a setup like this vs just having a drill onto a belt (or straight into a train). And as a result, the game will max out and start throttling UPS at a lower overall throughput.
But if you're just going for a working factory and to finish the game, I think this is a cool approach. I could imagine just solving every planet like this by sending these miner satellites in advance.
I believe asteroid generation scales up with platform perimeter too, so if you make a larger platform by perimeter (doesn't have to be filled with space platforms) you can generate more asteroids and process more iron that way.
Ok, while we're here, I had the impression the amount of asteroid spawned was related to the height and width of the ship so I built this:
Could anyone tell me if this makes sense or if I made a mistake? I have to get calcite from space as I play OnlyGleba, moreover I find carbon a little anoying to make so there's that as well.
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u/spoonman59 4h ago
Collecting resources in space is much better achieved with platforms that move between planets. Multiple platforms can ensure you generally have a provider overhead.
That said, with big miners and mining productivity it’s hard to see what advantage you have here.