Space plateform gameplay is excellent BUT a "briefing" (tip) would have helped getting into it

[FasterJump]

Space plateform mechanic is great, but I hit an invisible wall a few time intil I succeded.

When I built my first space plateform, I greatly underestimated the amount of iron plates and ammo needed to defend against asteroids (and we're just talkkng about "medium" sized ones, not the big and huge ones). So I had to redesign it multiple times after dying and savescumming.

To complete a trip to Fulgora, it turns out that I needed 8+ furnaces (10+ if normal quality) and at least a dozen turrets.

The problem is that the space plateform sreenshots and main menu scenes make it look like we don't need so much ammo for the plateform to be viable, especially when travelling at low speed (about 50km per hour).

I think that a "briefing" tip (like we had for other planets) would have helped to get a grasp of the amount of plates/min needed to survive.

It's important to keep in mind that the space platform gameplay differs from the planet gameplay: on the planet, you can start small, and when you jave learned the planet mechanic you can build big. In the space platform, you can't do that: you've gotta build big from scratch without any clue what's ahead.

What's your experience, did you feel the same? Did you also start building a space platform without looking online for youtube videos / blueprints?

[MeduSalem]

Space plateform mechanic is great, but I hit an invisible wall a few time intil I succeded.

When I built my first space plateform, I greatly underestimated the amount of iron plates and ammo needed to defend against asteroids (and we're just talkkng about "medium" sized ones, not the big and huge ones). So I had to redesign it multiple times after dying and savescumming.

Yea, a little "heads up" would have been nice.

But I kinda expected it to be "rough" so I totally overengineered my space platform from the get go. Also took test-flights a few times and then reloaded the save. ^^

To complete a trip to Fulgora, it turns out that I needed 8+ furnaces (10+ if normal quality) and at least a dozen turrets.

I only have 6 Q2/3 furnaces. 4 Q3 ammo assemblers and 14 Q2/3 Gun Turrets. Doing just fine. I guess it is the damage upgrades however that make the difference. ^^

One also should not underestimate the amount of solar panels & accumulators you need. Nothing worse than running out of juice to craft more ammo 3/4th of the flight. xD In that regard I placed 8 Q3 panels and like 10 Q2 accumulators on it.

Also don't forget modules. Makes it even better. Don't mind my setup too much tho, I just put in there what I had available when I first built it and was too impatient to wait for more modules and haven't had the time to switch yet and didn't find it worthwhile to load a rocket just for a handful modules.

Here is a screenie of it:

screenshot

Screenshot 2024-10-28 014229.png (1.36 MiB) Viewed 2325 times

As of now I am running 2 (near identical except for quali) platforms. The one from the screenie is on auto-mode transporting EM SPs from Fulgora to Nauvis.

The other I am currently preparing to take to Vulcanus. ^^

Not one asteroid hit the trade platform as of yet. And the trade-platform did like 15 trips back & forth between Nauvis & Fulgora so far (it is also the one I used to land there in the first place, the second one I built remotely in Nauvis orbit from Fulgora)

What's your experience, did you feel the same? Did you also start building a space platform without looking online for youtube videos / blueprints?

Yea, I started doing it on my own. Then hit a small wall because I did not entirely understand how we are supposed to do the chunk refining, looked at a few official screens from the dev diaries.

Took some inspirations from it, but developed it a little further. I didn't place as many thrusters because I think one of the biggest issues also is the speed you are going at. If it is too fast then you will crash into asteroids because the turrets cannot take care of all in time.


There are some things I might do differently if once I find the time to invest some more in better space platforms.

What I would definitely try to change is the ammo assemblers. currently it is very imbalanced with the outer most assemblers having to feed 5 turrets each, while the inner ones only have to do 2 turrets.

What I would also like to do better is "cross-feeding" from left to right/right to left. Water especially. Didn't think of it. Because sometimes the load is very one sided depending on where asteroids spawn. Usually it does not make much of a difference though and it sorts itself out all the time.

Also what I want to change is, is to better integrate the hub. Maybe as temporary storage for ammo or other stuff. Currently there is only belt/machine buffer.

[mmmPI]

What's your experience, did you feel the same? Did you also start building a space platform without looking online for youtube videos / blueprints?

I think maybe it could be made more obvious that the speed and the amount of asteroid you face are related, the faster you go, the more frequent are the encounter. Althought it could be argued that a player has to find this out by itself with observation

I think the "pause thruster" is very useful if you play multiplayer and you can't save and reload the game.

I think the "physical" and/or "explosive" damage research level are important factor in the efficiency of the ship/ number of ammo-turret/ speed at which it can cruise safely.

I started building space platform without looking online for youtube videos because there was none at the time, but i was at the LAN party and i saw the ships other people made there while attempting to make one myself. I felt like it required more careful planning for me to be satisfied than how you can play in a team where everything goes fast and things can be messy as long as they work roughly.

So when i could put time in a solo game I was over prepared because i don't care about achievement i had purple and yellow science already, and even some quality things. I had a "strong" Nauvis before leaving it and my first ship looked like this :

exploratorator

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This is because i was not merely trying to reach Fulgora, but bring enough stuff with me to get started fast.

I think for future run i could do with smaller first ship, as i did later on, to make them easy to copy paste, such as this one which nows is automated Nauvis=> Fulgora

small shuttle

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I have made many ships by now and that has to be one of my favourite part of the new gameplay. I have a collection of ship blueprint that i know i can use to skip this part entirely in future game if i want to focus on other things but i dont think i'll end up reusing them much, because with quality there's many different combo possible and i want to explore them.

I also wanted to mention that not every platform is a "ship", i posted a picture of the first ship i made which i use manually for special delivery or taxi, and another one which i use as shuttle for science, but in the platform gameplay i had fun designing static platform with no thrusters that aim at harnessing the space ressources.

Here is a screenie of it:

Pretty cool ! I think that's the first on the forum =) I think it could open up a subforum in the show your creation topic with "platform" , i can't wait to see the future ones

[Daid]

What's your experience, did you feel the same? Did you also start building a space platform without looking online for youtube videos / blueprints?

I think maybe it could be made more obvious that the speed and the amount of asteroid you face are related, the faster you go, the more frequent are the encounter. Althought it could be argued that a player has to find this out by itself with observation

This is true and not true at the same time. If you run low on fuel and are generating it mid-flight at a slower pace then consuming, you go really slow but also encounter a ton of asteroids. Not realizing I should really stock fuel I burned trough 5k magazines for just a flight to another planet.

I agree with the general topic of this thread, I totally expected a "briefing" on entering space, and felt really lost and suddenly needed to experiment a lot. While the early game had a lot more really nice handholding though the early steps, it feels "out of place"/"unfinished". (Still tons of fun, enjoying every minute of it)

[MeduSalem]

I think what people might really massively under-value is putting some fluid tanks on the space platform and be patient enough to stockpile fuel and setting some circuit network conditions before letting them move. ^^

That is why in the design I showed above I have put 2 tanks of each fuel/oxidizer on the platform.

I have put some circuit network on them and hooked it to the hub and set the conditions such so that the transport platform only departs for the automated trip if the tanks are full at 25k fuel/oxidizer.

After each trip about 10k fuel is left in each tank (it varies depending on how many and type of asteroids it encountered). So it burns roughly 30k fuel from the tanks on each trip with 5 thrusters and an about ~200 ton platform.

1 tank for each fluid might suffice as well in my design, considering some fuel is also stored in the thrusters, but I wanted to make sure there is enough in any case and that the platform will not slow/strand mid-flight. (as said above, in fear I totally over-engineered my first platform).


Anway my platform refills the fuel most of the time while parking in orbit of either Nauvis or Fulgora. Which is not too bad because mostly when it arrives there are not quite enough EM science packs ready to ship yet anyway. So it is no problem letting refill. There is enough time between each haul and the return trip that it can do that in each orbit.

[jamiechi1]

It would be nice to have better or more tips on this. But I have been relying on Youtube for this more and more over the years.
I have not launched my first rocket yet in 2.0, but have already watched several good videos about it.

Been spending most of my time updating a couple of my personal mods from 1.1 to 2.0.
And a few more to go.

[SirSmuggler]

Did my first trip to an other planet (Fulgora) this weekend. I did try to stay away from spoliers so I had not seen any videos of others makeing the trip. Using what I remebered from the FFF though I cobeled together a platform with only 2 furnaces and a single ammo constructor. I think I had 5 turrets in total.
It worked fine. Not fast, but fine with minimal damage and nothing destroyed.

I think what saved me was that I remebered (and it makes sense realy) that you encounter more asteroids the faster you go. So I did the only resonable thing for a first trip and put circuit controled pumps between the thrsuter and the fuel. So the fuel cut of if acumulator charge or ammo in turrets started to run low. So when the asteroid preassure started to go to high the platform automaticaly slowed down.

[MechBFP]

A good engineering principal is that if you don’t have enough information to make a design is to over engineer the solution based on an anticipated worst case scenario given known information.

In my case I added lots of turrets and made sure there was the ability to create more ammo on the fly, and made sure the belts+turrets were all full of ammo as well before leaving.

I survived the first flight with some minor damage and learned a number of key lessons for further missions:
1) Make and store extra ammo in the hub while in orbit that can then be dispensed when needed during the flight.
2) Redo my ore sushi belt so that when it is loaded with enough ore then it stops getting loaded with more so that ore can back up on the collectors
3) Bring repair packs.
4) Extended turret coverage to have some on the sides of the platform, not just the front.
4) Keep speed modules on hand to allow for quick adjusting on the fly.
5) Add accumulators to help buffer power spikes during flight.