Going for the speed achievements. I had the great idea that fewer asteroids meant I could race to planets and Solar System Edge with lighter ships.
…turns out it also applies to asteroid chunks. My ships needed a full hour to refuel, and space science took several hours to get the research for getting to Vulcanus.
RESTART
This is an amazing tip, I’m going to use this for all my platform builds now.
Most likely just for the build/startup phase which happens in orbit. I’m sure it will reduce the time from build to launch massively
For building my platforms, I moved my whole industry to volcanus.
I have a blueprint called ship embryo that has a single turret, a couple of solar panels, and one building of the production chain from metallic asteroid to ammo. Wiring prevents overflow.
This ship blueprint has requests for all the materials I need to build the next blueprint, called ship skeleton. By skeleton, I mean it rearranges the ammo production, and places the conveyers for all the turrets my final ship needs. Everything in the skeleton blueprint matches my actual ship blueprint, so theres no rebuilding or force-building needed.
So I send up a platform, paste the embryo blueprint, and do other things whle it gathers materials from rockets. Then I check back in and paste the skeleton blueprint, and my new ship arms itself. Because the embryo ship requested everything needed, this happens pretty instantly. As soon as the skeleton ship exists, I paste the final ship, and I know that parts won’t get battered by asteroids as requests are fulfilled, because all the needed turrets and relevant conveyers were built last step.
So with three blueprints (that I put in a book, for simplicity), I can reduce shipbuilding to 2 overseen steps. First the launch, where I paste the embryo blueprint, then when I paste the skeleton blueprint immediately followed by the final ship.
Actually, I could program the route just after pasting the last step, if I configure an interrupt stop to wait long enough that all the construction is delivered. Then the interrupt will fall off and the ship can be on its way without even needing that step.
I have overengineered this for someone with 1 transport ship per planet at the moment.