Ammonia in Rocket Fuel

[GrumpyJoe]

How you guys doing this?

Im designing a 10k SPM base at the moment (mostly with Creative on a different save to test builds) and so far its going great
Until.... i come to the bottom of the rocket fuel chain... again...
Every time i hit this point, its pure frustration.

Even with Bob´s Modules (240% productivity, in rocket fuel only, none of the other gases can be prod modded) its 1,6M Ammonia! a minute.
Every other gas in that chain is kinda 1:1 to the next, with some exceptions.

But:
100 Hydrazine (+100 Hydrogen Chlorine) needs 250 Ammonia and 50 Monochloramine
50 Monochloramine needs 300 Ammonia and 5 Sodium Hypochloride (like, WTF?)
200 Methylamine (+50 Pure Water) needs 250 Ammonia and 50 Methanol
and im sure im missing something, or one of them is used again in Dimethylhydrazine.

The red catalysts to make Ammonia alone are ~16k/min (5x mk5 belt lanes) and if you were to barrel the Ammonia (i have tried to pump it to the various plants in another save, which failed horribly) its about 30k Barrels/min!
For all the other intermediate gases its about 20 Chemplant Mk4 per gas, not moduled (heavly speedmoduled the rocket fuel capsule)
Without any modules that would be 160 Plants for Ammonia.

Even with some modules which brings me down to ~40 plants for Ammonia, that rocket fuel factorio is bigger than:
the heat shields, LDS, RCUs and sattelites (which includes Mk1->Mk3 solar panels that I have not moduled because of belt constraints, so its 180 assemblers) COMBINED. Oh, yeah, im even including the 10 Rocket Silos there.
If i were to barrel the whole thing, i´d need even more space for barrel washing (mod), but thats totally my choice ofc.

Im ok with the heavily(?) complicated reciepes, even tho i dont like to deal with chemicals at all, but i gotta ask Angel here, was it really necessary to make that high amount of one gas only? Imho, even if you give in to the petrochem hell (i usually just make plastic out of synthesis Methanol&Propane, only using Coal), this is not fun. And i even started to like it, before i hit that wall of Ammonia again.

Every time i hit this point before, i gave up the save in frustration. Not because its not doable, but because its so stupid i dont wanna build it.
This time im tempted to just screw around with the mod files until it doesn´t eat this stupid amount of one gas.

Any ideas?
But please don´t mention it´s (possible?) realismn, or i have to point you at 50/50% Oxygen/Nitrogen out of thin air.
Or the fact that you mix gases and without adding any metal plates (or something like that), you get out fuel and oxydizer capsules

[Light]

Congratulations on breaking the game by going on such a massive scale.

I tried looking into other avenues of making ammonia gas such as bio processing. Yet it demanded 1.3GW for the 1.6M ammonia gas per minute from over 1,000+ buildings maxed with Mk8 speed modules. The number of buildings were reduced to 500 when including Mk3 beacons into the fold.

If I recall correctly, there was a mod to enable productivity modules for Angel's recipes. As someone who never uses them, I'm unsure if they'd have a great impact on producing on such a scale. If so, then that's the mod you'll want to find or create to accomplish your goal.

The recipe itself seems fine to me, given such extremes aren't commonplace for 99% of us. Still, I'd love to see your production per hour sheet and map overlay just to marvel at its absurd size.

[GrumpyJoe]

Congratulations on breaking the game by going on such a massive scale.

......

Its not the scale of the whole base that bothers me, with Bob´s prod modules Mk8 its like 6 or 8 heat shield assembler, with 8 beacons spreading speed.
Its not even close to break, the whole build will not be that big, with the "godlike" modules (not the god modules)
Last night i tested the lab build, and MK8 speed was waaaaaay to fast, its 10x10 labs and Mk2 speed in the Mk3 beacons (1 lab surrounded by beacons, 1 requester chest per sci pack, so 800. needs about 120-150 Mk4 bots)

Even at 1000SPM, pumping Ammonia to 3 different builds is hell. At least with the current fluid mechanics. Hope Angel´s mods are 0.17 ready.
The alternative is building it 3 times, scaled for the 3 different hydrazine builds, so pumping & spreading it out "evenly" is not that much of a problem.
Or just barrel+bot it. Ive never used bots before when i could avoid it.

The recipe itself seems fine to me

I think you are right there, most wont run into that problem where a 6.5:1 ratio between in and output will be that much of a problem. But even if you build it for 1rocket/5min, some probably will think while calculating: "U WANT WAT MATE?"


Ive tried to change the reciepe with a mod of my own. It its loading without errors, but since it lacks "update" and "final-fixes" its not changing the reciepe, and i lack the understanding of looking up mod dependencies
Guess i´ll just change it in the original file, something i wanted to avoid.
Cos its not the footprint of the build that bothers me. I would be fine with 10 times the size
Its really about the reciepes and the ratios.

[Termak]

It feels to me that the ammonia usage should be atleast halved or cut to one third when looking the formulas, not sure what are the basis of the math behind them. Even a basic setup without beacons caps out the ammonia pipe so you would need to split it into multiple smaller chains. I dont even want to think about factories of your scales.

[GrumpyJoe]

It feels to me that the ammonia usage should be atleast halved or cut to one third when looking the formulas, not sure what are the basis of the math behind them. Even a basic setup without beacons caps out the ammonia pipe so you would need to split it into multiple smaller chains. I dont even want to think about factories of your scales.

As i said, scale not really a problem with bobs modules. Its all planned with 240% prod and where it can empty fast enough (mostly belts) also speed modules.
Its alot smaller than you´d think, not even close to vanilla mega bases. Yet

And yeah, splitting up the builds is the only solution. Would be fine for the Ammonia itself, but then you´d have like 20 Ammonia plants feeding chains of 2 plants in a row. Its like 4-5(?) steps from Methanol+Ammonia to rocket fuel. Like 2x A, into 2x B, into 2x C...., all fed by 20x Ammonia and that 10x.
MEH!

[eformo]

I always used barrels and bots for such volumes of fluids. The 500 barrels/sec you mentioned isn't too bad, at late game that only takes about 35 bots times flight time, then doubled to move empties. Less than 1k fusion bots, which I have in small factories easily. With that kind of science you can bring it down further with bot speed and capacity research.

Speed of the pumps filling/emptying is the larger issue. But don't be discouraged by the size of this, rather be amazed at how small those other builds you mentioned are.

[tbelaire]

I enjoyed my 3/s rocket fuel build, but I admit I did go WAT when I saw how much ammonia was needed. Then I went and designed a few blueprints for it, and slapped them down at opposite ends to supply the oxidizer and the propellant.

This was when I only had MK0 or MK1 speed modules, and I've been scaling it up to MK2 now.

[Arch666Angel]

I decreased ammonia usage by 1/5 in the rocket fuel chain. I'm a bit in a fear that this will introduce a bigger build up of hydrogen as there already is.

[GrumpyJoe]

I decreased ammonia usage by 1/5 in the rocket fuel chain. I'm a bit in a fear that this will introduce a bigger build up of hydrogen as there already is.

i already forgot about this, altho i wanted to add something
I researched abit after posting this, and according to the german wikipedia it seems that the usual process of making ammonia, is responsible for 2% of the worlds energy usage, combined!
Not so unrealistic after all.

hydrogen can be vented