So I have been trying to beat shattered planet, trying various things. One thing I’ve tried is throttling by cutting off engine fuel to engines based on damage taken, on the theory that the slower the platform goes, the fewer asteroids it has to deal with. I have a big, 6 ending platform that runs between a max of around 190, and can throttle down to about half that by shutting down all but two engines.
To my eye, it doesn’t seem to make any difference in asteroid density. It just takes longer, with the end effect of using more ammo to go less distance. Coming to a complete stop, of course nearly shuts off the flow.
So now I have it in my head that controlling velocity doesn’t affect asteroid speed or volume, which would suck.
I also can’t get interrupts to work properly, and nearly stranded my platform before I noticed :-/ But that’s a different post.
Anyway, is velocity affecting asteroid density, or not?
In my experience, it definitely affects it.
my first ship to aquilo, I launched, with myself and basic stuff for it, and manually toggled the switch to reduce speed. Worked fine.
Sent my ship back while I built on aquilo, destroyed within 2 minutes.
I loaded an autosave, realized I didn’t actually bring enough explosives to get back, and was losing them faster than I was making them since my explosive damage was very low. I realized my ship was probably lost for good, now, since the autosaves were too recent now.
So I made a hard save and tried a bunch of times to do various things in the hope of cheating that fate. I tried crawling at about 50, I tried rushing. I tried hopping by blasting forward and then idling, getting some actual distance, then dealing with a bunch of asteroids, and then hopping again.
I found steady and slow got me the farthest, almost halfway. Hopping produced more asteroids and was also more likely to cause damage just because of the sudden density of them. It was actually more efficient to go full speed than to hop, I think because while you’re slowing down and speeding up you’re still generating asteroids, and you never end up moving backwards, unlike hopping, where I could get that -10.
But going slow definitely was the winner, by a lot.
Now, there was a bug, where you’d generate more asteroids while you weren’t looking at the ship. Given it’s nature as a bug, I think there’s a reasonable chance that this generation isn’t dependent on speed. Do you by chance need to update? This was fixed in 2.0.43. It could explain the issue.
I think there’s also a chance that, while it does affect density, it just doesn’t affect it as much as you’d like.
Try reconfiguring and running, say, 1 rocket, or use a pump to starve that, too. If you can manage to move at like, 30, I’d expect a clear difference in asteroids, for sure. Obviously that’s too slow, but it could show you whether or not it’s affected.
Good stuff. I’ve been working on it today. First, I freed up space by removing red ammo factories that were rarely being used. Then I added more explosive generators, and made sure some was always dedicated directly to railgun ammo. But the biggest thing was setting up a bunch of logic for shutting down engines.
I have 6, and today I set up pumps and logic controlled entirely by how much ammo was in the circuit. I shut them off by 2s as the reserves drop, coming to a complete stop if belt levels start to drop. I’m still tweaking it; I had it considering damage at first, then removed that because turning around resets it, and the platform started out full speed. I need to add it back in, but just need to figure out how it should affect things. I try to keep circuit logic as simple as possible.
Anyway, I didn’t get as far, but was in better shape ammo-wise when I turned around, and had filled up my storage capacity for shards, in any case. I’m using one of those horrible belt weaves, but the only alternative I can think of is to bring a bunch of eggs and process on-ship, which I suppose is what they’re trying to force us to do. I really hate that spoilage mechanic.
I really need to figure out those interrupt mechanics! Otherwise, I still have to baby each trip.
I’ve tried a lot of the things you have, and now the logic I have eventually gets to the point where one engine is running, starved, as you say, and I’m crawling along at between 10 and 30 km/h.
Another thing I’m trying to tune is targeting. I can’t get a balance - either the missiles destroy everything before they come in gun range, and I run out of missiles and have surplus bullets; or I let too much through and I burn through bullets and have surplus missiles. On one trip, I had the railguns shooting at everything, and that was both awesome, but terrifying when I ran low on ammo. I haven’t tried programmatically changing targeting priorities based on ammo - can you even do that? Right now, I have a couple missile turrets in the middle of the ship targeting medium and higher, and all other turrets targeting only big; and two railguns targeting big and huge and the rest only huge. It’s still not right, because now bullets are my bottleneck. I’m starting to think I need to redesign the layout so I have a couple of missile turrets positioned in the center so the range is just about covering gun turrets, and have those helping the guns without burning through missiles.
Are you processing on-ship, or ferrying shards?
And the print string is at https://files.catbox.moe/ic6bq5.txt
I tried to use factorioprints to share, but it rather stupidly requires the screenshot to live at Imgur, and the screenshot is required, and Imgur is hostile to VPN users… so, it’s at catbox.
You can program the targeting.
Just shove your desired signals into a turret. You’ll get to shove all of them, but a decider combinator can output each signal set to 1, so you don’t even need a constant combinator, the same decider that determines if targeting should change can provide the signals.
I haven’t done it myself, though.
I also am not actually farming deep space yet. I’ve dipped past aquilo once but I didn’t have biter eggs set up so I came back quickly. All my ships are still solar, since quantity makes up for the reduced solar in space, even on aquilo, with a few efficiency modules.
I will say with all that production and you still worrying about resource production, and having fusion set up, foundries are much more efficient. Less steps to make steel for railgun ammo, more productivity, and the liquid steel recipe is inherently much cheaper, also.
And copper cables, too.
Plus, with efficiency modules, they’re not that far off from speed beacon furnace power consumption, anyway.
Shit. Foundries. I keep forgetting about them; it didn’t occur to me to put then on a platform! I still mostly think of them in terms of processing liquid metal, even though I’ve used them on other planets.
Damn. Thanks!
I know, right? Only reason I know to say anything is because someone told me the same thing.
I had assumed they had an atmosphere limitation like the non-electric furnaces.
With how much electricity they devour, I’d be mad if they needed oxygen too.
They wanted to give Efficiency Beacons a purpose, clearly. I mean, they’re so lonely out there, not in any builds
Friendly PSA that efficiency modules also impact nutrient consumption on biochambers!
Can be very useful for setups that chronically starve themselves.
I really appreciate that.
My gleba base thanks you.