Aquilo: add an upgraded roboport that won't freeze

[ikarikeiji]

If you want to make a self-expanding construction network you ultimately need nothing more than electric poles and roboports outside your "mall" area.

Back on Vulcanus when I wanted to add a long rail line remotely, I already had a full mall setup with roboports and construction bots, so I just laid out my rail line, then added big power poles and roboports at intervals along the line until the whole thing got built.

I recently found out that rails and trains don't freeze on Aquilo, so they don't need heating. Electric poles also don't freeze. But roboports do... so the same technique will not work here. I would have to either have a really long heat pipe, or heating towers with local fuel production or logistic bot-based fuel delivery*, but only to protect the roboports, not for the railway itself.

Can there be a researchable "better roboport" which can be assembled on Aquilo, which has a higher constant electricity consumption in order to heat itself so that it's immune from freezing? I feel like once you get to Aquilo there are way too few technologies left to research so this'd be a sensible use for cryogenic science, also a sensible use for lithium or one of the other basic Aquilo exclusives (not the quantum processor though, that would be going too far).

Obviously this could be easily done with a mod but I am (currently) playing vanilla and it seems like a basic QoL thing that is just missing.

*I personally don't like using logistic bots, in my current game I resorted to using them on Gleba because that planet is a nightmare IMO and I felt I had to pull out all the stops, but I haven't used them anywhere else, so I don't really like the idea of having to use them on Aquilo merely for fuel delivery.

[Muche]

Would having a train (instead of robots) deliver the fuel for that local heating tower work for your design requirements?

[erkki772]

What if you put burner next to port with fuel request? With burner inserter.

[ikarikeiji]

Would having a train (instead of robots) deliver the fuel for that local heating tower work for your design requirements?

That... is a neat idea, which I hadn't thought of, and it would definitely work, but given that roboports have to be placed every 50 tiles, it really sounds like overkill to have to have a train stop every 50 tiles just to do that. If it only had to be done every 500 tiles or something, it'd be much more reasonable.

What if you put burner next to port with fuel request? With burner inserter.

That's precisely "logistic bot-based fuel delivery" which I want to be able to avoid.

[Loup&Snoop]

I just don’t agree. Given how everything else on Aquilo freezes, the freeze-proof status seems to be very intentionally reserved for a few things that really need it. Of all the things that could be freeze-proof, roboports don’t really feel that critical.

If you want a self-expanding base, you can just have heating towers, heat pipes, burner inserters, and requesters with fuel to make it work. And this feels like what makes sense and intended for aquilo.

[sarge945]

I'm against this idea. Aquilo is supposed to shake up the gameplay. You can't just use the same pre-made bot strategy everywhere. Bots are already way too overpowered already.

[Oktokolo]

Include heating infrastructure in the self-expanding construction network.

[computeraddict]

Spidertrons are mobile roboports that don't freeze, yeah? For a one-time construction surely they're the answer?