Molten iron/copper on Nauvis and Calcite demand

[th0]

Hey there,

Having started with SA, I really love the new molten copper/iron recipes. They are neat and give the factory a more industrial look. Also, they provide more freedom, because one can decide to build a factory using molten metals, or the coventional way. On a side note, the recipes are probably also more UPS effective than electric smelting.

But they require insane amounts of Calcite. If you want to built your Nauvis factory entirely on molten metals, you'd need to ship in insane amounts via rocket from Vulkanus. You can gather some in orbit, but it's by far not enough.

So this requirement means all these large-scale molten metal factories are basically not gonna be built because of the logistics overhead. I think that's sad and takes away a beautiful mechanic from the game.

Maybe the amount of calcite could be reduced so that the orbit farming is enough for a larger base?

What are your thoughts?

[SirSmuggler]

AFAIK you can build as many space platforms as you want, and can make them as big as you want. So if Calcite can be harvested from orbit it should just be a mater of scaling up?

[th0]

yep, I also thought of that. Some guy on reddit noticed that asteroid yield from space platforms does not increase much with size (don't have the link right now), so many Platforms is a solution. But I don't think it's a good one, more a workaround.
My point is not that it's impossible to ramp up large-scale ore melting on Nauvis, just that it has rather high indirect costs compared to the classical way, which makes it somewhat uninteresting. Which is sad.
I'd love to have *some* extra complexity (your supply chain gets easier with molten metals after all), but not to the point to render it impractical to do at all.

[DeadMG]

This obviously depends on what you consider a "large" base, but you can supply 1kspm on Nauvis with like 500 calcite/minute which is fairly easily farmed in orbit once you have done Gleba and Vulcanus, and Calcite rockets carry huge amounts of the stuff that Vulcanus has enormous excesses of that is very practical to ship. I don't really understand how you can have a base big enough to need a huge amount of Calcite, and yet too small to handle shipping or orbital farming.

[th0]

Yes of course, I can also do a fairly large base with 0 calcite per minute if I just use smelting. My point is not that it is impossible or even too challenging. I'm just saying that the added complexity discourages this base layout (because you can perfectly produce plates and steel without melting), and there is no real reason for it to be that complicated. It doesn't add substantially to the gameplay, it just makes people use smelters instead of foundries on Nauvis.

[BlueTemplar]

Consider using them for only some products ?

Related :
Space Age - Low Density Structure Casting vastly inferior to Assembler Recipe

[CyberCider]

It's not like calcite spoils or something. Shipping it from Vulcanus is really easy and simple. It's more complex to get the calcite from the landing pad to your smelters, than it is to get it off Vulcanus. And rocket parts on Vulcanus are dirt cheap, especially for someone with a "large-scale" base that has all sorts of productivity boosts.

[mako00]

I'd love to have *some* extra complexity (your supply chain gets easier with molten metals after all), but not to the point to render it impractical to do at all.

I really don't see how this is impractical, or where the sweet spot in terms of complexity would be for you? If an extra ingredient is too much, what would be the right amount of complexity?

One calcite gives you 112.5 plates (150%^2) without any productivity modules), so a full rocket of calcite is enough for 56k of plates. And you already need a Vulcanus shuttle for the science packs.

If you manage to launch and ship one rocket per minute (which isn't hard at all), that is enough for 20 (!) blue belts of plates (and a lot more with modules), which is already well into megabase territory.