A Lemmy community for the game Factorio made by Wube Software.
Part of our adventures making minimum viable transport ships. This thing barely works, moves slowly, can't fire at many asteroids, only sorta supplies enough energy. It gets where it needs to eventually though and includes the most important space ship feature: Blinky lights
Here I was theorising you could make a functional spaceship with just 1 crafter and a chemical plant, but you actually did it. Great job!
What's the refill time on the fuel tanks there?
3.5 years
If you keep the thrust lower it becomes more fuel efficient! Less time to refill
Thank you, it was a lot of fun to build! No idea on refill speed I just use them for reading which I'm lower on. It can travel at an inconsistent speed of about 40-50 between Nauvis and Gleba. It was actually spending almost all of its time floating around trying to make ammo, fuel was fine. I made a 2.0 version that has ammo delivered to it that I'll post later
I love seeing what people come up with and which design choices they make.
This one for example is completely contrary to mine which is: BIGGER, FASTER, MORE, MOOOREEE, ADD MORE ROCKETS!!
HARDER
BETTER
FASTER
shitshitshitshit slow down slow down
...STRONGER
shitshitshitshit slow down slow down
I do not like it, but yes. This is literally me every time I venture beyond Aquilo. Learning is for nerds anyway.
I just finished a 2.0 version that has ammo delivered to it and made the design small enough to be powered by a single solar panel
The rocket ship must grow
How quickly are you switching between recipes on the chemical plant?
Is it long enough for fuel/oxidizer imbalance in the thruster and how does that impact thrust efficiency?
It makes whichever one is lowest in the tanks which means it usually switches each time the recipe completes, and periodically for water
It seems to have an internal bias for more fuel than oxidizer but the engines run near constantly and the imbalance can't cause a backup so I'm not worried about it. I don't know anything about thrust efficiency
It goes around 40-50km/s between Nauvis and Gleba
Well sorry for sending you down this rabbit hole, but thrusters get more efficient the less fluid is in their internal reserves ;)
There's a table on the wiki page detailing how internal fluid reserve impacts thrust and efficiency.
I've omitted the fuel tanks in my newer designs. Tweaking the chemical plant output with modules is an easy way to hit the desired efficiency point. Although it's probably not that easy when you have only one single shared chemical plant.
Are the fuel and oxidizer tanks necessary? Doesn't the thruster's internal buffer suffice?
Its so I can read which one I'm low on and make that, since I can't read from the engine directly
That makes sense. You can't read pipes either, right?
You could count crafts and make an equal count of each which should do the same thing. Don't know if you need the buffer to prevent stalling though...
you can count crafting, but how do you count usage?
Two combinators is the same footprint of a storage container, so the logic has to be really simple. < 4 units otherwise storage makes sense
There are 2 storage tanks, so we have 8 tiles to work with (maybe a little more if pipes end up being shorter but that doesn't matter). Off the top of my head, I could do it in 5 tiles. First, a decider combinator as a basic memory cell to count the crafts, resetting at 2x. Then another to pick the recipe earlier in the ui if the count is less than x. Finally, a constant combinator with the later recipe as the fallback option when the other turns off. Switching for a second decider would make the system more robust against any changes with priority when there are multiple recipe signals, but that is still 6 tiles, which is an improvement.