Sorry for the massive delay in replying. I had some RL issues that needed to be taken care of.
First, don't get me wrong. I absolutely love this mod to death. It's made the game MUCH more interesting and challenging for me and probably countless other people as well. Only thing I'm trying to say is that alien science packs are relatively trivial to produce compared to other science packs when taking the respective technology levels into account. I simply assume that higher tier tech should be more complex to produce than lower tier stuff. In other words, I'm attempting to provide constructive criticism. I hope I don't come across as hostile in any way. Feel free to tell me to bugger off if you want, I'd completely understand
Timeslice wrote:I... don't think hoho understands that we were talking about Bob's Mods.
Actually, I've always played with Bob's mods.
When I said I considered alien research packs (sacrificial QL Bio-processors) to be too cheap compared to blue ones (sacrificial atomic manipulator), I meant when playing with this mod + Bobs stuff the production chain complexity for alien pack was trivial compared to blue one. I ignored the cost of resources to make the packs. Though, even material cost is rather low for the alien pack considering on what tier it is.
To make alien packs one only needed two components, one of each:
1) QL bio processor
2) neural overclocker
#1 takes 1 alien artefact and 40x of iron and copper each while producing
30 items as a result
#2 takes some water and 2 iron and copper each while producing 4 items as a result.
So, essentially ignoring melting the plates, to make an alien science pack one needs just three assemblers:
one for each component + one to combine them to the science pack.
In my last game I had just one assembler producing #1 and about 10 producing #2. Getting 30 components for a single "craft" seems like way too high to me. I'd prefer to have less input materials and more processing time so that the amount of assemblers needed for both components would be roughly comparable. Alternatively, having the #1 take more complex source materials would also be fine. Asymmetry isn't inherently bad. I consider it bad in the current case as #1 uses essentially raw resources as input that are pumped out in masses anyway.
Total material cost per alien pack comes down to 2 copper, 2 iron, 1/30'th alien artefact and 1 water. I think in vanilla game (haven't played without mods since around 0.7 so it might be different now) one alien artifact produced 10 science packs so in terms of artifacts, this mod makes it even easier to get the packs than vanilla game. Sure, this mod adds a bit of water, copper and iron to the cost but it's insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Now, blue pack is put together from two components:
1) femto laser array
2) atomic sensor array
Femto laser array takes four components:
1) femto laser emitter
2) femto laser foci
3) chemical laser flash fuel
4) water
Femto laser emitter takes three components:
1) battery
2) basic electronic board
3) plastic bar
4) sulfuric acid
Not going to go deeper here, surely people know what it takes to produce those components
Femto laser foci takes three components:
1) steel
2) copper
3) sulfuric acid
Chemical laser flash fuel is again three components:
1) steel plate
2) heavy oil
3) light oil
It should be quite clear that it takes dozens of assemblers with different recipes and tons of piping in order to produce the blue science packs. I'd rather not try to calculate how much materials each pack costs (probably not *that* much) but the processing chain itself is insanely more complex compared to the alien science pack. Hell, I'd say the alien science pack production line is roughly comparable to the red science pack and red pack is even harder to make than alien one when using DyTech (DyTech adds stone gears for red science packs).
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Obviously big part of the complexity for blue science packs comes from Bob's mods and how it drastically changes how electronic stuff is produced (and I'm perfectly happy with that). What I'd like to see is that this mod would make producing alien science packs more complex than it already is. I fully understand that coming up with processing chains isn't exactly simple. I also know this mod is yours and I have no right to tell you how you should do it. I'll be using the mod as-is, I'm just describing what sort of changes would make it even more interesting for me than it already is. Other people might disagree here, of course.
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I obviously have no idea on what sort of picture you had in your mind when designing the current alien science pack processing chain so I wouldn't be surprised if what I'm about to offer here goes completely against your original ideas. Take this just as some ideas I thought up during typing this reply. I haven't put much thought in it but if you wish, I can try to brainstorm it in more depth.
I like the general idea of it being some sort of mix of quantum physics and bio-processors.
I'd probably add a few steps to process the alien artifacts to make them usable in one or both of the component parts of the final science pack. Perhaps use some sort of fluids to produce different kind of products from the artifacts (e.g sulfuric acid in vanilla and sulfuric-nitric acid mixture with Bobs mods. Something completely new is also always a possibility). Those products might be combined further with different types of electronics and/or chemicals and perhaps even production modules before reaching the final two components for the science pack. E.g speed and efficiency modules might make sense. Perhaps the alien artifact products might be in fluid form as well. I know many people don't really like messing with piping but I consider it as extra challenge when designing the layouts of my base.