Friday Facts #432 - Aquilo

[Gouada]

2 comments:

Solar panels are more efficient when cold. They don’t need heat pipes to work as long as the layer of snow on them isn’t too thick.

Ammonia fumes are toxic


1 question:

Since the ground doesn’t melt, what happens if you don’t put concrete down?

From my interpretation:
Solar panels will not require heat pipes to produce their 1% power. We will not be able to place buildings on ground which does not have concrete.

[Goodman599]

Why the railguns are shooting backwards in space? The asteroids are not usually catching up with the platforms from behind.

I reckon this is more of an exhibition rather than actual in-game use cases. We know space platforms perform better when all the space is used, and the design in the picture has a lot of empty space, doesn’t have asteroid collectors where guns are, no machines, no nothing. So I think it’s more likely for the guns going backwards to be just a demo of the sprites or something.

[Sphinx]

On the freezing induction furnaces. Would there even be a reason to build them? There are no raw materials (for the furnace) on the planet and everything would have to be imported. The more limited space and all the logistics make me think of a compact, specialized base rather than a megafactory. Even if there were some strange reason to fly raw materials to the planet for processing.

[jakeit1111]

On the freezing induction furnaces. Would there even be a reason to build them? There are no raw materials (for the furnace) on the planet and everything would have to be imported. The more limited space and all the logistics make me think of a compact, specialized base rather than a megafactory. Even if there were some strange reason to fly raw materials to the planet for processing.

I'm curious if there is no way to produce rockets locally on the planet. If there are no sources of iron, copper and stone, that means that in addition to needing to import essentially every building (and likely many intermediate resources used in the construction of buildings that do use local resources) that you want to place, you also need to import tremendous amounts of concrete for covering your platform.

On top of that, every rocket you launch would need each of it's resources to be imported, this effectively means you'd need to launch rocket's from other planets containing the resources needed to launch rockets on Aquilo, which starts exponentially growing the number of rockets you need to launch (due to the rocket equation like nature of this kind of resource dependency).

The alternative that comes to mind is potentially having a space platform orbiting above the planet responsible for harvesting these resources from asteroids. Iron is simple enough, and possible coal could be derived from carbon asteroids, but not sure how you would get the copper and more importantly the monstrous amounts of stone needed for all the concrete with this method. Perhaps there's a new asteroid that's not been disclosed yet?

Curious if anyone else has thoughts on this? It's possible I'm overthinking it and you just import everything and it's not a big deal, but I remember the devs mentioned something like 500 rockets should be enough to finish the game (although many more would be reasonable depending on the scale you want), but this doesn't seem achievable if all iron/copper/stone derivatives must be imported.

[bobucles]

1% solar power isn't going to stop people from doing full solar bases.

[GregoriusT]

1% solar power isn't going to stop people from doing full solar bases.

it indeed is not but the amount of land you have sure is LOL

[enterisys]

"In practice this just means that most entities can't be placed directly on to ice, we don't actually turn the ice tiles into ocean... anymore. That used to be a mechanic, but it was too annoying to deal with when you try to build in an already heated area. "

Can we have melting ice as a map gen option, disabled by default. Or something like that.

[Ohz]

Awesomeeee

[gnutrino]

On the freezing induction furnaces. Would there even be a reason to build them? There are no raw materials (for the furnace) on the planet and everything would have to be imported. The more limited space and all the logistics make me think of a compact, specialized base rather than a megafactory. Even if there were some strange reason to fly raw materials to the planet for processing.

If you look at this video from the FFF, the rightmost cyro plant is taking holmium plate (I think) and two unidentified liquids and outputting some sort of grey ore (you have to pause the video and step through it to see it being moved by the inserter) which is being smelted into some sort of grey circle that is then being combined with blue chips, superconducting wire (I think) and tungsten carbide (again, I think) to produce what is presumably the quantum processors with probably some sort of coolant loop going on with the leftmost cryo plant. So yes, it looks like you will need smelters on Aquilo.

EDIT: Thinking about it, it's kind of weird that a process requiring coolant would also need heat supplied to stop it freezing over. You would have thought from the name that cryogenic plants would be an exception to everything on Aquilo needing heat to function...

[Blaster]

Nice


...though I was hoping the railgun would make more of a thunderous lightning-powered bang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Uv1-CCY80

I expect someone will make that a mod

[Akontio]

Another week, another FFF introducing "new" things I've already experienced in mod overhauls (albeit with a different coat of paint). This time it's mechanics from seablock and IR3's steam era (i.e. routing pipes to everything). How Wube gets away with selling a repackaged mash-up from free overhauls will forever remain a mystery to me, ig the game is just that addictive that the playerbase will eat up anything that's put in front of them. Very disappointed in what this "expansion" has to offer, the actually original ideas can probably be counted on one hand.

So, ignoring a lot of your weird ragebait and spite

You still HAVE to admit a lot of those mods get so many things wrong. What is the problem with the literal devs of the game doing that same concept right? Those mods you mentioned were created 5-7 years ago by random individuals, you act like all those mods just have some amazing update around the corner. And whoops the dlc stomped on it all!
(I'm pretty sure every single mod dev is honored their mods are getting integrated after way too long)

To have such issues about 'already experienced' it- You are 1% of a 1% my friend. You keep mentioning pirating it too, so pirate all you want, you obviously like the game. It's literally a polished version of all your favorite mods. Though assuming you going to actually rip a copy for yourself I can assume you might not have any friends to play it with, and in a sad poetic way, maybe that doesn't even bother you! tragic ..

[StannyB]

"One continuous ocean covers the entire planet and it's at least 200km deep."

There's gotta be some space Kraken down there..
On the second hand Wube clearly said there are no enemies on Aquillo..

[Dixi]

I know this might be a bit nitpicky and I also know that it is just a game, but... am I the only one that gets thrown off that the railgun has a cratridge that gets ejected? I mean the basic principle of a Railgun is to take basically a metal spear and yeet it forward using magnets (I will let myself happily correct by others), So why is there a cartridge that would typically hold the propellant?

I'm also disappointed by questionable Railgun look. Yes, it supposed to shoot nails, metal rolling, and ammo cartridge clearly do not fit. Some art of charging capacitors on a gun basement would look much better.
Since Factorio tech have some steampunk view, but mostly looks reasonable, from technical side of view, this gun graphics really does not fit. Americans build a railgun for real, can borrow general look from their tech

[EustaceCS]

There's gotta be some space Kraken down there..
On the second hand Wube clearly said there are no enemies on Aquillo..

Consider this.
"No enemies" doesn't mean "no creatures".

Lil' Tentacle might lend a hand from the deep.

<- outrageous speculation - but who knows...

[Molay]

Has there been a rework in how heat pipes work, similar to the fluid rework? Or does it still work as in 1.1?

[Rebmes]

Cool, a rail gun.

And a bunch of stuff to figure out xD

10 days to go, can't wait!

[escfoe2]

Can I give a suggestion? I absolutely adore the snowy graphics. I can see why rails don't freeze over as it would be annoying to run a heatpipe along the whole length of a rail line.
But imagine how cool it would look to have the rails freeze over visually even though they aren't affected mechanically. And then trains running over snowy rail could clear them for a short time, leaving a small trail of unfrozen rail as they pass, which then quickly gets snowy again.

I know it's pretty late in the dev cycle but I really hope you consider this as it would elevate the aesthetics of Aquillo even further.

I second this

[foxiest_engineer]

Amazing.

I'm getting chills, and it isn't from the ice.

[Sneak555]

Oh please make level 4 belts out of this mechanic. Because of the high speed, the belts would generate a lot of heat. On aquilo this would be a benefit since the belt would generate its own heat, but on any other planet they would require active cooling. Faster belts on nauvis for example would need to be connected with a heat pipe to a cooling station or they jam.

Sounds really tedious and boring, if you ask me.

I think as long as the conveyors can share fluid with eachother, it'd be completely fine.

that said, I think they need to merge together so that they don't contribute too much to ups problems. maybe make them only exist in the 'underground' varient---you'd probably only want these for high-priority, high-throughput cases anyhow.

that being said, I think throughput at least is 'solved' with the whole item-stacking mechanic. so this really is only worth it for the rather rare edge case where you need speed--not just throughput.

[Violet_Scarelli]

My immediate thought is "will we get ways to delay/pause spoilage"? Because it'd be really useful if so...