Factorio Forums

Hello! I'm making my way through the expansion, just got agricultural science up and now I'm looking towards making some new ships and heading to the other two starting planets. Now that I've unlocked the tech to get copper from asteroids, I kinda want to make a huge shipyard platform in space so that I don't have to launch everything from the ground for each new ship. However I can't quite figure out how to send items between space platforms, I have two in orbit of Nauvis but the logistics of one don't seem to be supplied by the other? Is there something I'm missing or is delivery between platforms not a thing yet?

You can initiate "make new platform" action from any Silo.
You need to have a fully built rocket in a silo AND a space platform starter pack on a planet over which you're ordering new platform though.

You can't launch rockets from space platforms (and cargo can arrive to space platforms on rockets only).
It includes launching rockets from platforms to platforms.

You can make a dedicated space trucking platform with big cargo and sustainable thrusters to haul stuff between planets.
You'll still need to send hauled cargo to the planet surface to re-send it to another space platform anyway.

Space is pain.

Dang, that's really limiting. So much for my plans of an orbital shipyard. Hopefully this will go the way of logistics requests for spidertrons in 1.0 and the devs will fix it before too long.

Karbon14 wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 29, 2024 8:42 pm

Dang, that's really limiting. So much for my plans of an orbital shipyard. Hopefully this will go the way of logistics requests for spidertrons in 1.0 and the devs will fix it before too long.

I agree it's a strange oversight. It stops you from doing even obvious things like making a factory on one space platform that then delivers the goods to other space platforms. (This would save on rocket launches because a lot would be made in space!) I also thought this was kinda the whole point of the space platforms. But nope, they're meant to be treated like interstellar trains and not much more. Pretty disappointing, and not really much point using high-quality stuff on the platforms then.

True, and those asteroids are a pain for me to, can't make a succesfull trip to other planets, asteroids continuesly break down everything.

I am really missing the delivery cannons which are part of the space exploration mod

I am sure there will be a mod for it eventually. ^^

Maybe the devs can be argued with and they add platform-to-platform transport at a later date as QoL improvement. But I wouldn't get my hopes up too far for that.


In the meantime just avoid producing stuff in space that you want to transport to another platform.


It does NOT make production in space completely useless however. Because some of the planets are starved for a certain resource:

Nauvis/Gleba have no Calcite. If you want to use Foundries you gonna need Calcite, so it makes sense to process all chunks to make calcite in orbit.

Fulgora on the other hand has little water and you might be starved for it in certain production chains; the ice blocks from space would help.

So you can totally make sense to build a stationary platform there to farm chunks & asteroids, process them and send drop-pod the stuff down to the planet to aid production.