Rocket weight capacity

[Niizuki]

The weight limit feels strange. I understand the intent, but it just doesn't feel right, some things are too light, some are too heavy.

[DragoonGXG]

It would be cool to have upgrades to the rocket. Or along the lines that you are suggesting, efficiencies in the items themselves perhaps?

[dragon_gawain]

I've been struggling to see much value in the quality system as a whole, but maybe quality rockets could be a thing?
Would give a reason to use quality stuff/use quality modules in a rocket silo. Quality rockets would be able to hold more, and maybe also send faster (talking about the lag between launching something up and the time it arrives on the space platform).
Quality silos already exist, so we can tie that in: a quality rocket could only be built out of a quality silo (though a quality silo should also be able to produce lower quality rockets), and that would let you ship up more stuff with a single rocket?

On the other hand though, rockets are very cheap. 75 yellow science packs (with no prod mods considered) is pretty much more expensive than a single rocket now, so... rockets are cheap..

Some of the item weights (ammo in particular) feels very intentional. The devs don't want you to ship that stuff up, or make it expensive to ship (looking at green belts here..).

[levas_007]

True. Weight should not be based on the stack size.

[qwr]

They don't have rocket carrying upgrades? Not even as a researchable tech?

[mouzy]

They don't have rocket carrying upgrades? Not even as a researchable tech?

No, but there are many upgrades that make rockets cheaper and faster to build, which is effectively the same thing (except that it plays nicer with how logistic requests work).

The rocket part research from Aquilo makes them up to 4x cheaper, and combined with the research on blue chip/LDS/fuel productivity from other planets they can get up to 16x cheaper, even more if you consider costs further down the line like plastic or steel.

[Theragus]

Looking through the posts here in the forum and also reading the responses to SA from a couple of days ago over on a post I made on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... out_for_a/) quite a few people are not satisfied with the way the arbitrary rocket limit weights currently work.

To chime in on this discussion and give a little feedback, I personally think Space Exploration handled this much better than SA.
For those not familiar with SE, a cargo rocket in SE has a fixed 500 Slot inventory, and all of the other planets' ingredients (Beryl, Iridite, Naq etc...) were balanced around stack sizes.
This feels IMO much better since you don't need to keep track of another per-item stat apart from stack size but it also makes feeling space logistics much more natural, since you now can calculate a full rocket load in your head by simply multiplying the stack size x 500.
Also rockets in SE allowed multiple different items but that is going too far beyond this post.

What i found is surprising that in SA some items DO had their stack sizes adjusted (like LDS) to tackle this problem but was not pulled through to the end.

Right now I have to agree that some of the weight limits feel very out-of-place, my personal best example is that you can only fit 50 rail signals on a single rocket, which makes absolutely no sense.

One of the reasons the devs did want a custom value from what I've read in the past is that some items would be way too expensive to transport (for instance iron or copper plate).
To be fair, who would actually ship in iron plates or copper plates from other planets?
the whole point of the other planets is that their basic resources are so dirt cheap that bringing them in via Space Platform just doesn't make any sense, which is also very much the same in SE, or at least mitigated by the fact you have multi-item rockets.

Therefore guiding the player to mostly move "expensive resources" is the correct choice, which makes the weight limits kinda pointless anyway.

[TechyBen]

I guess my suspension of belief is that some light items just need a LOT of packing to survive the g forces.

[P.E.T.A.R.]

It's weird tho, canon shells and gun ammo both having a rocket capacity of 25, the suspension of belief is going to very high levels here.

[AllIWantIsAPepsi]

Maybe quality could decrease weight, legendary halving weight seems appropriate and not overkill.

[dragon_gawain]

Maybe quality could decrease weight, legendary halving weight seems appropriate and not overkill.

Quality items by their very nature are denser. What I mean by this is, for example, a single legendary crusher (unbeaconed/unmoduled) performs the duty of 2.5 common crushers since it has a crafting speed that is 2.5 times that of a common crusher. The same applies for all machines (including stuff like inserters) and science whose science value increases.
This even applies to intermediates as the things you make with those intermediates will be denser, effectively meaning you need less to achieve the same result.

So to me the suggestion that you can put more legendary items into a single rocket doesn't make sense. If anything, it should be the other way around - legendary items could be heavier, assigning a value to that density. But I don't like that either. The increased value you get by shipping quality items is that you can effectively get more in a single rocket since the value of the items themselves is higher. 50 legendary assemblers can perform the duty of 250 common assemblers. And since this speed boost is base value and speed modules work in percentages, speed modules have a greater impact on the higher quality machines, making them even more dense.

A legendary silo being able to send more weight would make sense to me though. As it is, legendary rockets don't really exist. A quality silo only increases crafting speed, but since the rocket animation takes some time, you can very easily hit the speed cap of a silo with common silos, making quality silos pretty worthless IMO (I forget if they also consume less power, but if they do, that would be a reason to use quality silos).

To me, ammo being very heavy does not make sense from an immersion perspective, but makes a lot of sense from a game design perspective. Being able to send up ammo bypasses one of the main logistical problems of space platforms. I'm OK with ammo being heavy.

[Tinyboss]

It's weird tho, canon shells and gun ammo both having a rocket capacity of 25, the suspension of belief is going to very high levels here.

I mean, there's also the fact that an artillery shell takes up as much room in inventory as ten of the turrets that fire it, which also is the same size as ten seeds. You just gotta accept that it's all for game balance, nothing else.