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Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
Just built my first warpers to get out of my iron starved starting solar system. After putting down four rows of 30 smelters I think I need to look for the copy inserters mod, because this is getting tedious.

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Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

Jarmak posted:

If your mall isn't a series of interstellar logi towers you're doing it wrong. I avoided it forever because I didn't feel the need to ship infrastructure around... but now I realized it's like having Amazon prime for DSP. Just plop down an empty tower wherever you are, set the items and max quantities to your "order" and bam, your mall comes to you. Soon as the ships arrive you can delete the tower to hoover up the contents.

I've seen some people abandon the regular logistics towers when they get to the interstellar ones, but I still find the planetary ones useful. You can pack them closer together!

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
So, fractionators! After my most recent restart when I went to set up deuterium production I decided to challenge myself and go all the way - 100 fractionators in loop with an external feed loop to convert a full mk3 belt (30/s, 1800/min) of hydrogen to deuterium.

This is a segment of what I came up with:



And it didn't work properly. It did work in that it produced way more deuterium than I actually *needed*, but the output belt had empty spots and deuterium production hovered between 1400/min and 1440/min. This is about the point I forgot this is a game about building dyson spheres and started experimenting with belts and fractionators.

I built a new design, which although visually similar was much more painful to build (literally so in the case of one of my fingers):



The difference is the belt merges are done with splitters instead of T junctions. Performance was better, but still short of ~1800/min hovering between 1700/min and 1750/min.

So my takeaways from this:

1) T junctions do not merge at speed with the fast belts.
2) I'm not sure if it is possible to achieve the theoretical 0.3/s hydrogen to deuterium conversion with fractionators. There is some serious flickering with the icons on the building. There may be some processing tick interactions that prevent the maximum conversion rate from occurring.

I guess the next test would be to run a single fractionator in a setup with out any loops, just running the contents of a giant hydrogen storage tank through without actively recycling it. I'm not sure this is a great test though as I've observed some funny signs that the output of the fluid storage is not always perfectly compressed. More experiments! What is a dyson sphere again?

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

Alkydere posted:

Congratulations you now have to do a memory check on every single hydrogen unit to see if it's been checked before. Hello memory bloat!

I understand it's not realistic but I also understand the technical reasons of why they allow you to keep rolling the dice.

It is actually quite easy to implement, just not a great idea for game design reasons. Just make a separate item for "hydrogen, isotope unknown" and "protium". Problem is you would then need to duplicate recipes as hydrogen/protium/deuterium should be interchangeable for many recipes which require hydrogen, excluding the fractionator.

It also wouldn't make for very interesting gameplay, you just wouldn't bother with the fractionator.

Smiling Demon fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Feb 22, 2021

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
I never get to them because I chronically restart the game after getting distracted, but unipolar magnets just don't seem that appealing to me? Don't get me wrong, they replace a fair chunk of infrastructure, but you need green motors for other things so it isn't as if you can skip that infrastructure. Resource wise they are worth 1 iron ore, 0.2 copper ore, 0.4 graphene each, which isn't amazing. Better than fractal silicon or kimberlite ore? definitely. Worth using? absolutely.

Organic crystals and optical grating crystals would be my top picks. Making organic crystals the long way is a particularly annoying chain and necessary for both yellow and green science. Early fire ice is great if you get it in your home system, saves on oil for sulfuric acid during the early game. For similar reasons sulfuric acid oceans are great.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

Ice Fist posted:

Just want to confirm something real quick. I did some napkin math and just want to confirm my findings. So...

True or False, Burning oil in a thermal plant is more efficient than taking the oil and eventually cracking it into hydrogen/graphite and burning those. Ofc this is taking into account the power needs of all the buildings needed to run the cracking loop. When all is said and done it's better to burn the oil directly. Right?

I read some article about infinite power loop using xray cracking because each hydrogen contains twice as much energy as each crude oil, but I think it was old and the recipe for cracking became more hydrogen expensive or something?

The opposite, you get much more net power from cracking. 2 crude oil is 8MJ, refined that becomes 9.MJ (16.8MJ before refinery costs). Xray cracking the products of refining 2 crude yields 25.08MJ (36.6MJ before refinery costs).

*Did not account for the 80% thermal plant efficiency, doing that 2 crude oil is 6.4MJ, refined that becomes 9.6MJ (13.44MJ before refinery costs). Xray cracking will yield 17.76MJ (29.28MJ before refinery costs)

Edit: At the stage of the game were I care about thermal power generation, refined oil is a valuable commodity that gets used elsewhere. Hydrogen may be burnt off, but refined oil is neither cracked or burnt as I need a stupid 5 refined oil per organic crystal.

Smiling Demon fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Feb 26, 2021

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
Do you have the ratio of cracking refineries to plasma refineries backwards? You should have 2 xray cracking refineries for every plasma refining refinery.

If we assume 1.68MW gets us 3 crude a second, by default that is 7.92MW net power burning the crude.
[3 crude/s * 4MJ *.8 efficiency - 1.68MW energy cost]

Refining that crude gets us 1.5 hydrogen and 3 refined oil a second using 6 plasma refineries. This is 12.72 MW power.
[ ( 1.5*8MJ + 3*4.4MJ ) *.8 efficiency - 1.68 MW - 6*.96MW]

Cracking that result gets us 4.5 hydrogen and 3 graphite a second using 18 refineries total. This is 24.96 MW power.
[ ( 4.5*8MJ + 3*6.3MJ ) *.8 efficiency - 1.68 MW - 18*.96MW]


*Edited to show math. Sorter power usage not included.

Smiling Demon fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Feb 26, 2021

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

Gully Foyle posted:

Edit: All of this is math is kind of pointless. Burning oil products in thermal generators is only really useful to get rid of products you don't want to store. Oil in the early game is far more useful to make things out of it, whether it's red science, organic crystals, plastic, or sulphuric acid, and then deuterium out of the hydrogen. Just burn the oodles of coal you have sitting around instead. In the late game you have better power options and are probably largely ignoring the oil stuff since you have access to things like gas giant mining, fire ice, and mining organic crystals.

This is what should be emphasized as the takeaway. Burn unwanted/excess oil products just to prevent things from backing up and stalling your lines. I don't burn coal much and instead line my planet with rings of wind turbines, but that is down to personal preference.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
I feel the peak usefulness of xray cracking is right as you get it. I don't need it for graphite, coal is abundant. Hydrogen is easier to get from gas giants once you are a little more established.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
I'd be fine with a setting on the thermal plant to always run at full capacity.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

zoux posted:

If I put swarm guns on both poles, what's the ideal orientation of my orbit?

I think perpendicular to the rotation of the planet around the sun? The way the game calculates this is kinda weird, the guns don't aim for the orbit in general but a specific moving point on the orbit.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
One of my rituals, efficiency be damned, is to line the rings of a planet with solar or wind to mark the lines where the grid shifts and there is an abrupt change in the density of squares. Building across these lines leads to sadness so I do this primarily for the visual indicator with an added bonus of power generation.

The equator is different though as the number of squares doesn't actually change. It is an inflection point, the size of individual squares stops increasing and starts decreasing as you cross it, but this doesn't actually cause the building problems the other latitudinal break lines do. To me the equator is where larger factories go.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
I was a big proponent of fractionators, but they do consume one very important resource that the colliders don't. CPU. I abandoned a galaxy after I stupidly tried making the deuterium component of my 30 science/s build with fractionators (150/s deuterium, 500 fractionators). Do not do this.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

Ice Fist posted:

My least favorite activity in the game is setting up miners. I see there's a mod for one with increased range, but man, there's nothing worse than having to run around setting up miners on stuff. They should add like a drone mining hub or something that will send out drones to hoover up all the resources within a imo, pretty generous radius. Make it use some upgraded version of the logistic drone but give it a mining laser. The current mining mechanics are just big and clunky and there's no thinking that goes into it, just put miners in a big circle around a group of veins, connect them with a belt, send to tower, repeat 15 times.

This was my night tonight and I'm a little salty about it.

Edit: I think someone mentioned a while ago that maybe adding a building like the oil extractor but for mines so I can just plop down one building on top of a set of veins. That'd be fine too and a huge upgrade over the current process.

Edit 2: Has anyone tried this? https://dsp.thunderstore.io/package/crecheng/PlanetMiner/

It seems to take my complaint to the absurd conclusion and I don't want to do *that* far, but man after tonight it's sorta tempting.

I'll second this. I just want some kind of "mining logistics station" that I can put over the veins directly. I wouldn't care if it mined slower and was costly to make like the gas giant collector, I just don't want to position the miners anymore at this stage of the game.

I saw that mod, but haven't tried it yet. There was another that seemed less extreme but the translation for it was really rough.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
I kind of made it a mission to make a 30/s hydrogen to deuterium setup as I found the game chokes under many common methods. The perfect expected numbers for 100 fractionators are ~1800/min if they are all individually fed, somewhere around ~1159/min if you chain them sequentially. In practice you lose another ~100/min chaining them together as the game doesn't handle any setup which directly links two different fractionators without some stuttering. The only way to achieve 0.3/s deuterium from a fractionator as far as I know is to have an individual loop for each fractionator.

All of this is academic of course. You save on power by doing this at the expense of a little bit of space. I've set up enough of these now that I don't find it too much of a burden. Later on if you need to scale up deuterium production I recommend either collecting it directly from gas giants or using particle colliders as fractionators just have a far larger cpu footprint.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

SkyeAuroline posted:

Doing my best not to check external resources as much as possible until I'm satisfied with my mostly blind run. Just verifying a few things real quick.

  • Despite having 12 potential belt channels, vanilla planetary logistics stations are capped at 3 items and only one direction for each, correct? Having not yet built an interstellar logistics station, are they additionally capped to only local or remote for a given item?
  • Did I miss any non-manual controls for interplanetary flight?

Finally got yellow bricks manufacturing slowly, just have to manually run the supply of titanium a little longer until I get the higher tier logistics stations installed and can shuttle it automatically. Committing a lot of design sins while figuring out DSP's quirks.

The "one direction" only applies to the logistics drones and vessels, not the belts. You can belt in/out of a station that deals in an item regardless of its setting (supply, demand, or storage).

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

Peachfart posted:

So why do people keep talking about making separate mining and smelting planets? I just smelt on site, it saves time, materials, and energy.

Edit: And oil is the eternal nightmare, you will probably spend more time getting oil unclogged than any other thing in the game.

It most certainly does not save time. If you smelt on site, every time you need a new mine you have to setup both a new mining facility and a new smelting facility. If you have a central smelting facility you set that up once, only needing to touch it if you need more capacity.

Setting up mines is already one of the most annoying aspects of late game play. Compounding that with on site smelting sounds painful.

You do save some resources and energy, but if you do the math it isn't very much.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

SkyeAuroline posted:

Still no update, but the idea got lodged in my head so I went ahead and wrote up comparisons of the various transportable power methods. Might help someone out.

I remember I ran the numbers a month or so ago and got very different results than you. I assumed no gravitational lenses were used mind you, which is a big point of divergence. The accumulators did consume less ongoing resources than the antimatter fuel rods. The increase in warper consumption does not match the rod portion of the antimatter fuel rods.

Thing is, a fraction of a small number is still a small number. The resources saved simply weren't worth the hastle given the not exactly ideal behaviour of discharging accumulators.

(Edit, my bad, haven't played in a while and mixed up MJ and GJ values wrt accumulators, ignore this)
>I'm not sure how your costs are calculated though. 1GW for 10 minutes is less than 1% of a warper in 10 minutes. You don't need 4240.25 iron to make a small fraction of a single warper. The ongoing costs for accumulators seem several orders of magnitude off.

Corrected for my idiocy, it is still only 6.66 warpers (double for returning the empties) in 10 minutes to deliver 1 GW with accumulators. This is still far less resources than you account for in the ongoing costs of accumulators. Is the difference purely down to use of gravitational lenses?

Smiling Demon fucked around with this message at 09:46 on May 12, 2021

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
Solar sails absorbed is based on the number of nodes in the structure. Design a sphere with more nodes in it to increase sail uptake rate.

This does make the sphere overall more expensive as that means more rockets.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
Eh, I only tend to spray things that have the "more products" bonus or fuel. There are some exceptions (see thread title), but I don't really care too much about the machine speed upgrade or hydrogen bound for the fractionator.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

Finagle posted:

What am I supposed to do with all this hydrogen? It's gotten to the point my deuterium is stuck because the extractors turn off when full of hydrogen and I don't have space for it to be unloaded.

The gas giant extractors don't do this, even if hydrogen is full they'll keep on extracting deuterium. The problem is that they don't extract much deuterium, not enough to keep up with serious demand even with 40 collectors on a gas giant. (edit: I think farther out gas giants produce enough deuterium, but not the one you start in orbit of)

(Annoyingly the gas giant collectors do burn fuel to power themselves, and don't preferentially burn hydrogen before deuterium, so some deuterium will be burnt chemically. Nothing you can do about this though.)


Hydrogen byproduct is produced in three places:

1- Oil Refining
2- Fire Ice > Graphene processing
3- White cube production

From the sound of it you aren't dealing with either of the second two cases. For oil processing you can use the reform refining recipe and turn coal + hydrogen into more refined oil. Use a splitter to prioritize the reformed oil over the original refined oil.

Eventually down the road the only thing that strictly requires refined oil is plastic to produce particle broadband, but it takes some work and interstellar warping to get there. Acid and organic crystals can be extracted directly and doing so greatly reduces the footprint of things requiring them.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

WithoutTheFezOn posted:

I’ve seen a bit of video with that mega bus and all I can think is, if you have the ability to source all the materials at one end, then you have logistics towers. If you have logistics towers, why do you need a bus?

Edit: or rather, why do you want only one bus?

Last I remember of Nilaus before this is that he made some pattern that he stuck on the poles of new planets to import buildings that he called a "temple of efficiency" or something like that. Hugely Ironic as it represented a massive surplus of expensive objects for only minor gains in response time. Me, I just stick an unpowered tower down and request what I need, then remove the tower after importing what I wanted. I view that bus much the same way - namely it looks pretty, takes up way too much space and is far more practical to implement with logistics depots and towers.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013

Gadzuko posted:

I don't think it's possible to calculate any kind of optimal mine:ils ratio because it's dependent on where your smelters are and how much research you've put into ship cargo/speed. A mining planet half the galaxy away will have a lot more travel time.

I don't use PLS at all, they are strictly worse than ILS so I don't bother manufacturing them except as an intermediate.

They aren't important or necessary to use, but PLS do have a use that makes them not strictly worse than ILS: they have a smaller exclusion radius so you can pack them closer together. I tend to use them to help with space constraints.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
The only time I've considered stone to silicon longer term was in a starting system which had total system silicon reserves of only ~200,000. I didn't even know that was possible before I got hit with it. I didn't end up playing through that seed though.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
I'm kinda ambivalent on adding more turrets. While I appreciate more content, there are existing turrets that don't really serve any purpose. The cannon turret seems to occupy such a minor niche that I couldn't justify using it.

Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
I spray all ingredients prior to adding them to the logistic bot box network.

I don't care about intermediate buildings not being sprayed as you can't get the extra products bonus, only the speed bonus, on those recipes. If you want that you'll probably have to move spray around with the logistics bots and do an intermediate spray complete with conveyor belt.

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Smiling Demon
Jun 16, 2013
So I decided to try and build a dyson sphere around a blue giant as they allow for the largest and most powerful spheres. I just went with my standard minimize structure/maximize cell points approach.

Turns out I should have done some math. With the number of nodes I have it would take in excess of 1100 hours at maximum sail uptake to complete. I'll write this one off as a learning expense, sadly the dark fog was not the obstacle.

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