Factorio Forums

Spec'ing out an end-game ship. Final huge promethium asteroid density is 714/m. What does that mean?

My guess is 714 huge promethium asteroids / minute, but the width of a ship should play a part right? So a wider ship should encounter more asteroids. That 714/minute must assume a specific width of the ship. It also assumes a specific speed... so does that mean it'll actually encounter fewer asteroids by traveling faster? That's counter-intuitive.

Another option: 714 huge promethium asteroids / meter. Since I'm traveling at 150 km/s, that puts me at 107 million asteroids per second. That can't be right. And it doesn't consider the width of the ship.

Perhaps it's saying the density in that orbit from the star is 714/meter. That means in a giving 1m-wide ring around the star, there will be 714 huge promethium asteroids. The total area of that ring would be A=(pi*r*r - pi*(r-1)*(r-1)), and we could calculate how many of those 714 asteroids we will encounter by estimating the width of the ring we will pass through. But since we don't know our distance to the star (r), we can't calculate it.

I think it's per minute and the bigger ship doesn't actually encounter any more astroids. The fact ruined my Nauvis calcite generator. It's so wide yet that doesn't seem to matter at all.

I was wondering about this too... per minute over the whole map, so a small ship might miss many of them but at some point size doesn't matter?

It would make more sense to be a rate per certain cross section (width) for sure. Otherwise I'd like to know the curve of encounter rate versus width...

Faster ships encounter more asteroids per minute, so it can't just be a flat 'per minute' value, can it? I've also tried to figure out what these numbers are, but haven't come up with anything that makes sense.

in my rough estimations, the asteroids i encountered were about triple the number that the route shows. at the time i just guessed it's ship width - my ship was roughly 3 "space platform hub" wide, so in my head it made sense to take that number, and add it another time for every roughly 10 tiles width.

I wasn't aware that speed affects the number of asteroids - i kinda assumed going slower just makes them move slower, so it's easier to shoot them down before they hit your ship, but i guess it would make sense to encounter more...

anyway, the numbers i had were extremely rough as it's hard to keep track when the amount changes constantly, i wish someone did go through the effort to get ACTUAL numbers i can do the math with, because trial and error on a massive platform wasn't that interesting for me after a few times.

I haven't really gone deep into the space platforms, so it's pure speculation. But I'm thinking that the asteroid spawns will be distributed to active chucks, which would explain why just making a really wide platform doesn't increase resource generation as you expand.
As for speed affecting spawns, I'm assuming it has to do with entering new sections of the route will force spawn new asteroids, thus increasing the frequency above the section spawn rate.