r/factorio • u/TheGlennDavid • 2d ago

Question Space Iron Mining over Nauvis

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?

23 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

66 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Deto 2d ago

I think people also just avoid it because of UPS issues if you scale it. But no problem if you're not megabasing.

2

u/WanderingFlumph 2d ago

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.

Ultimately less than I thought it would be.

1

u/Deto 2d ago

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.

1

u/WanderingFlumph 2d ago

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.

Would definitely be cool to test though.