Ships that can get to the shattered planet

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dragon_gawain
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Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by dragon_gawain »

This will (hopefully) become in the future a place to share and discuss about ships that have the capability to go all the way to shattered planet, so feel free to share your shattered planet ships here!
But that's just my excuse for the semi-generic title, and I really just want to gush about my own ship a bit :D

So, without further ado, allow me to present to you my ship that has made it all the way to the shattered planet. This was done completely without editor mode, and I would love to say I used no mods as well, but after I got to the solar system edge, I installed 3 mods: bottleneck, copy-paste modules, and helmod. (so QOL stuff and a calculator, nothing game changing, so it's basically still vanilla, right?).
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The ship cruised at a constant speed of 61.95 km/s (was going a bit faster at the start, and there were some speed fluctuations to find a good balance, but this was my constant speed for most of it). The trip took a total of about 18 hours real time (UPS dropped a few times, and my timing method is imperfect cause I just looked at the clock, so, yeah..).
Screenshot 2024-11-20 134629.png
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Here's the production statistics:
Screenshot 2024-11-20 134814.png
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And the kill stats:
Screenshot 2024-11-20 142303.png
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Now, this is a big ship, and there's a lot of systems going on, so I wanna highlight a few of them.
Screenshot 2024-11-20 135810.png
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We begin with my own personal creation, code name: "the brain". I already shared and spoke about this creation of mine in another post ( viewtopic.php?f=193&t=121434 ), but in short, it changes the recipe of the three crushers based on what's needed. Check out the other post if you want to know the details, cause there's a lot of details about it.

That system then ties into the next: the garbage chute
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Even with metallic processing only ever doing advanced processing, there's too much iron ore being created, so I'm voiding some of it. There's also logic that makes it so that if carbon or ice (or the chunks!) get too plentiful, they get thrown out. I don't want promethium in my hub, so that's also always thrown out. (chunks were including cause at first I had forgotten to hook up the collectors properly, so they just kept collecting and that clogged my system..). For the collectors, it's a simple arithmetic 'read from hub and input belt, each * -1 output each' -> output linked to constant with the number of each chunk I want -> hooked into collectors on set filter.

Let's take a look at ammo production next:
Screenshot 2024-11-20 135517.png
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Before I get to ammo production, I'll give a minor shoutout to the blue zone, which is fuel creation. It's pretty standard/simple (IMO), so it doesn't get a highlight of it's own.

All machines are legendary, and pumped up with legendary speed beacons and legendary T3 mods. To maintain my speed, legendary helped a lot.
The red section, rudely cutting into the promethium storage (I'll get to that later) was an addition that was put into place at around 1.7 million km into the journey to shift from normal rockets to explosive ones. This was a very good idea, it cut down my red ammo usage from 2.2k/minute to 1.7k per minute (you can see the sharp orange spike and blue drop off in the consumption graph at that point). I'm not going to go into details of ammo per minute cause well, I shared the production graph for that...

Moving on!

The ammo display and alarm system.
Screenshot 2024-11-20 135216.png
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This is a long journey, and I wasn't about to watch it the whole time, so I wanted some quick feedback to see how it's going. So, I built an item counter (shoutouts to the Digital Display, Yay! thread for the design: viewtopic.php?f=193&t=19825&start=100 ). The display panel shows the type of ammo, and if you mouse over it, it'll tell you safe values for the ammo amounts railgun: 8100, red ammo: 8700, rockets: 7900). For all the ammo types, the buffers (i.e. belts) can hold at least 100 more. There's also an alarm next to each ammo counter that goes off it the ammo falls below 6k to let you know that something has gone wrong. TO get the numbers, I'm just reading all the whole belt (belt reader -> hold (all belts)) and doing each *1 output each. This makes it compatible with multiple quality types, not that I'm using quality ammo here (I wanted the belt density).

Now, let's talk about that mysterious constant combinator with a U signal, hmm?
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Behold my thrust limiter (and extra image to show off my thruster design)! It's very simple in design, just the main tanks hooked into a pump which outputs into a tank directly connected to the thrusters. The DC reads in the hub (which outputs moving from/to) on the green line, and reads the tank connected to the thrusters on the red line. I'm using the everything signal to make this generic between the fuel and oxidizer combinators. So, there's some stuff that lets it move faster when going to other planets, but when going to the solar system edge and beyond, it goes based on the speed (so it doesn't fill up when stopped), and this U signal. The U signal is set on a logistic group and is shared between both pumps. It's purpose is to let me change the amount of liquid in the lower tank (and therefore change the speed of the ship) for both fuel and oxidizer simultaneously. There's another CC next to the ammo display with the same U signal because often I need to change the speed after looking at the ammo counts, so I wanted easy access to it.

Let's talk a bit about defenses now. I've showed that my ship took 0 damage, and it wasn't black magic that caused that to be the case!

Edit: I did have a picture of a zoom in of my front line here, but I ended up removing it so I could include the kill stats.


Leading the pack is an army of railgun turrets of varying qualities. Some are only shooting huge chunks, some are shooting both huge and big (it's about a 50/50 split). That's to balance out railgun consumption and rocket consumption a bit.
Next up, we have the two lines of gun turrets (all legendary). The front row targets medium then small, the back row small then medium. The back row only fired when I disabled the front row (that G CC to the right) as a test to see ammo conservation stuff. In the end, I left the front ones active cause I didn't like how close stuff was getting when they were off.
Last up, we have the rocket turrets. The space to the left and right are deliberately left empty - I don't want to shoot stuff too far off to the sides! Most of the rocket turrets are epic, with the two on the edges being rare and the two in the middle being legendary. This is purely for range conservation purposes. They aim only at big chunks, but the splash damage from explosive rockets helps a ton with the red ammo as mentioned before.

All the turrets are set to ignore targets not in their priority list. Also, the target priorities rotate around (metallic -> carbonic -> oxide -> promethium) so that I don't end up with all the turrets focusing on one type of asteroid and letting another type through.

The side defenses are more or less the same, but sparser (as seen in the overview picture).

Two things left on the list!
Next up: built in science production:
... which I can't seem to be able to add another picture for, but you can see it pretty clearly in the overview pic anyway, so... make do with that I guess..
It's pretty simple anyway. Space for a beacon on the left, promethium flows directly to it, other ingredients flow to it, and the science gets sent back to the hub.

Last on the list: promethium storage.
This is by far the weakest point of this ship. I did not build it with large storage in mind. In that sense, this ship can be considered a failure. If you want to use this design with more storage, move the front line up and add more storage. I will say though that the belt weaving design is my own original design. If it happens to be the same as someone else's, then that's pure coincidence. I made it myself, so I'm taking credit for it.
In fact, except for the display, the entire ship is my own design!

Final thoughts: always bring more fusion fuel cells. The belt storage is the only reason I have enough power to get back. The hub is empty. I realized this would happen at around the half way mark, so I started taking out prod mods and putting in efficiency mods where I could.

I finish this post off with the ship blueprint. Feel free to use it, and/or give me suggestions!

(blueprint is too long to be included in a forum post here, so here's a factorioBin link to it instead: https://factoriobin.com/post/7fjy5m )
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by Stefit1 »

That's a nice ship, I also like designing my own so I try not to look at or take from other peoples ship designs too much, but the idea of having slightly different target priority rotations is something I will definitely add to my ship designs from now on, maybe it will be effective, curious to test it. I recently installed a mod (the only one I use atm) that fixes railgun turret speed to make it scale with the infinite aquillo research like it's supposed to, but is capped at 0.86 due to turret animation viewtopic.php?t=116987. This really improved the performance of my ship and made me realize the railgun turret is the meta for fast ships in deep space. The fix would also change the optimizations of your ship.

You asked a suggestion for your ship so here's one, maybe it's not relevant if your ship doesn't use its full speed, but I utilize all of the width of my ship for engines, whilst your design seems like it has enough space for 4 more engines. And correct me where I'm wrong, but wouldn't a more compact engine design where the engines are glued to eachother in an upside V shape be a better design as it would let you fit in more engines in the same space?

Cool belt-storage design, with the overlapping underground belts for extra space. Depends on the purpose of your ship, whether you want fast-short dives to the first 100km of prometheum space or slow-long dives, you could repurpose some of that belt storage to recyclers and make them upscale the prometheum to higher quality, depending on how long your trip will last, since you will likely end up finding more prometheum than even your belts can store.
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by dragon_gawain »

Designing ships yourself with as minimal influence from others is perfectly understandable! I do the same :D To me, the design phase is a big part of why I enjoy Factorio so much!

The rotating priorities is something that I had thought of, but didn't really test to see if it helped with anything. At the end of the journey, it almost certainly doesn't due to asteroid density.. The idea behind it made sense to me though, and it was easy enough to put into place, and it hasn't given me any issues so far, so I'm counting it as an 'it works'! If you do test it to see if it has a significant impact, please let me (and the rest of the community) know!

Railguns being the way to go for end game ships makes sense. I stuffed as many as I could at the front because they are so good! Installing that mod to uncap the railgun speed limit is interesting. It would change the balance of the ship as you point out. Might download it to test it out..

Adding extra engines isn't really useful to this ship.. The only reason I can think of for doing that would be to get to the solar system edge sooner and therefore with fresher biter eggs. However, I'm thinking of making it a ship that recycles overgrowth soil to safely store the biter eggs instead of transferring promethium back to Nauvis (that's part of why the promethium storage is so skimpy compared to other deep shattered planet ships).

The upside V design (or the 'wing design' as I call it) in terms of space platforms needed, my design is about as efficient as that. (In the wing design, you need pipes going on top of every engine, then going up 1 to connect with the next pipe. That's a total of 5 pipes. In my design, every additional engine also requires an extra 5 pipes for the bridging bit in between each engine).
I prefer my design for a few reasons:
1: I find it more aesthetically pleasing (though I can totally understand if others like the look of the wing design more).
2: It makes it more easily defendable when stationary (gun turrets can easily reach beyond the edge of the last engine, and it fits in very nicely with the ammo belt)
3 (?): The 4 wide gap that my design leaves is kinda awkward, so the effective usable space with the wing design might be technically slightly better and in the end save some weight, but with very minor tweaking, all the extra space platforms can be cut out, making my design just as good (long hand inserters can bridge a gap of 1 tile is how I would do that). Also I've used that space in some of my past ships.
But also I use it cause I came up with the engine design so it's a bit of a point of pride.
If you were trying to squeeze in as many engines as possible, then my design is indeed inferior cause the pipes between take up engine space - for every 5 engines, you lose the space for a 6th.

tldr of that engine design talk: yes, theoretically the wing design is better, but the gained optimization from switching designs is so minimal that it doesn't really matter, so I use the engine design I came up with cause I like the way it looks.

Belt weaving blocks are currently the meta for storing promethium to bring back to Nauvis as far as I know. I'm certainly not the first to come up with the idea! So, I'll take that statement of yours as a compliment to my specific design, in which case, thanks! I fiddled around with it a bit before settling on this design. I do think that it's not the best. With a bit more finagling, I feel like you can squeeze in at least 1 more short underground red in there.. I hadn't spent too too long on it cause I was eager to just let it fly!

I already spoke about my final plans in terms of how to use the super deep dive, so I won't repeat it. My true goal is fully automated promethium science, which means that I need a ship that can make it all the way to the end so that it can automatically come back. The biggest problem with that is the travel time. In order to make good use of the travel time, you need to either craft a lot of promethium as you go, or store a lot of promethium to bring back. I don't think you will ever be able to have enough storage to make going all the way there and back worth it, so I want to try the other method.

Going for quality promethium is an interesting thought though.. I might look into that and see if my base can do that.. (the problem will most likely be carbon fibers, which is currently a tacked-on setup that doesn't lend itself to quality well.. I am considering making only legendary gleba science though, and if I do that then legendary carbon fiber should be pretty easy. More experimentation and thought is needed).

Anyway, this reply has gone on FAR too long (I uhh, tend to ramble a bit..), so lastly, thanks for the reply and your thoughts!
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by eradicator »

Let me join the bragging thread - before they fix railguns and make it all way easier!

Here's the generic description from the picture thread.
eradicator wrote: Mon Dec 02, 2024 10:21 pm Legendary Multipurpose Prototype
  • Cargo: 5109 slots (optionally holds ammunition reserves)
  • Maximum Speed 215km/s
  • Weight: 2967t
  • 6000k promethum storage facility.
  • Destination-based automatic speed control.
  • High-precision triple-fuel injection system allows fine grained control in 1% steps.
  • No-waste dyanamic asteroid reprocessing in the drive gondolas.
  • Independant fuel production per drive.
  • Centralized circuit bus allows easy expansion of control systems.
  • Inspired generations of future explorers to go to yet unseen places!
Warning Endgame Spoiler
Originally I just wanted a larger cargo ship because the Aquilo delivery of stones kept overflowing. So I set 100 cargo bays as a "good enough" random goal and began construction. Re-used some sysstems like asteroid processing from previous ships, but most things are newly designed for this beauty. Took special care to avoid straight lines to make her look more interesting. Could go at 140km/s for the first 500k kilometers or so, but as the design assumed resource scarcity it used normal rockets, so I had to in-flight add explosive rocket production and increase explosives production with whatever spare buildings and modules I still had in cargo. Managed to reach a working solution at 42km/s, bottlenecked by insufficient explosives. All built in full vanilla. Only one legendary railgun because I didn't want to wait any longer with the maiden voyage. Got destroyed countless times until I found the equillibrium between production speed and movement speed. And then got killed several times due to circuits randomly failing on the water, iron and copper production. One time I narrowly escaped from death by manually shuffling railgun ammo from the back to the front cannons before production could kick in again. Approximately 22h flight time according to the production graph. Quite a good adventure for me!

Also really impressed by the performance of this particle hell.
Endgame Content Spoiler

Also comparing kill stats with @OP seems to confirm my feeling that asteroids span time based, not speed based. And thus flying faster means you actually have to kill fewer asteroids.
Statistics
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Mod support languages: 日本語, Deutsch, English
My code in the post above is dedicated to the public domain under CC0.
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by dragon_gawain »

A beautiful looking ship, and a hard fought adventure! A hearty congratulations to a fellow explorer of the deep depths of space!

When you say 6000k promethium storage, do you mean 6000, or 6000000? My ship can store around 23000 (technically only 22700 safely), and it looks like I have more belt storage than you, so that confuses me a bit..

I really need to make a better fuel injection system.. Mine is prone to errors (in part because you move at different speeds with the same amount of thrust depending on where you are going, or something like that.. on my way back, I used less thrust, and was moving faster. Something is wonky with that at least..). Anyway, I need to make a speed based fuel optimizer at some point..

Those ship specs look real nice! Certainly a ship to be proud of!

Interesting observation about the time vs speed asteroid density thing. I've noticed that less speed means fewer asteroids that spawn immediately (leading to a potential cheese where you start an stop thrust for like, 150+ hours to go at a speed of like, 5 km/s and get very few asteroids), but them being overall time based is interesting. It does makes sense though, cause the graphs are in asteroids per minute.. In any event, I'd say that this is pretty conclusive evidence giving the span of time that it takes, and the differentials between our two ships.

My way back took about 15 hours btw, running at around 74 km/s. (time is approximate since the ship got back to the edge while I was asleep. I judged based on when the last promethium asteroid was shot down). I can't really tell the differences in the kill counts of going there to going back though.. I went back a while ago, so I can only look back on the trips in the 250h graph at this point.

As any good factorio engineer, now my thought is: how can we abuse this? For harvester platforms, this means that we'd want them to go pretty slow so that the density is as high as possible, and you use fewer resources on fuel.. I guess that means that for harvester, you want the minimum number of engines running at peak efficiency (~40% filled) such that you still produce enough thrust to move, but are also moving slowly so that you get the most asteroids per trip.. Also need a good way to process the chunks to keep up, especially if you're converting them to legendary chunks.. This is getting off topic from the thread though, so I'll end that line of thought there. Some food for thought there though!

Lastly, those ammo graph comparisons are also very interesting. Looking at them, I think lasers save a lot of red ammo. I might look into incorporating some lasers onto my ship.. Mayhaps replacing my front line of gun turrets with lasers would be a good move.
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by yckmciaiy »

Just to share my abomination after 50h lazy run with the ship of only 405 tons weight (could've gotten there faster, but lazy to do upgrades mid flight)
12-18-2024, 07-08-34.png
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I dare the madlad trying to use and modify this one :lol:

This was moving mostly at 60km/s at start, but after over 1500000 the asteroid spam became unbearable (friendly fire became a huge factor) with low amount of turrets and had to slow down to 20-40 with some periods of 5-10km/s to restore ammo supply.

The curious thing is in graph, that if there is enough power cells supply you can probably reach anywhere with less developed ships and less research, moving very-very slowly, as most of asteroids spawn at the top of the screen and mostly have horizontal velocity, getting closer to the ship more by ship moving faster.
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The ship is generally my generic design with minor adjustments for this run, epic turrets are only for convenience as they got 0 kills.
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by mmmPI »

yckmciaiy wrote: Wed Dec 18, 2024 5:21 am Just to share
Very nice !
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by dragon_gawain »

yckmciaiy wrote: Wed Dec 18, 2024 5:21 am ...
Well.. that certainly is a spaghetti abomination.. :shock:
It took me quite the analyzing just to comprehend how the belts worked, and a lot of it is still a mystery to me!

If I were in charge of naming that ship, I'd call it "the flying spaghetti monster" (or something along those lines)

Congrats on making the long (extra long for you!) journey all the way out to the SP! Thanks for sharing your ship and stats!
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by momumi »

I made a ship that can fly over 500km/s to the shattered planet.

I use all legendary turrets, with two rows of rockets behind the railguns. I used lvl 20 asteroid productivity and lvl 15 explosive and laser damage. At peak production it uses about 10,000 explosive rockets per a minute. I way overbuilt the rail gun ammo production, probably only use about 30% of what's there.
production1.png
production1.png (16.36 MiB) Viewed 11686 times
promethium_plower.png
promethium_plower.png (2.28 MiB) Viewed 11686 times

Here's a video of it flying back:
shattered_planet_570km_per_second.mp4
(28.5 MiB) Downloaded 200 times

Blueprint is here: https://gist.github.com/momumi/a883f18b ... 6c5b8bd800

I tried strapping some more rockets onto it and got it flying over 1000km/s, but it started taking damage at about 1.5M km to the shattered planet.

Might try making it narrower and adding more rocket turrets to see how that goes.
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by laja »

This is my light & fast ship at <320t. It's essentially my promethium science ship, designed to get in and out of the solar system safely at 350-450km/s, with everything running through the hub.
Screenshot 2025-01-11 at 3.37.43 PM.png
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I resisted removing the science setup at first because I wanted it be the same ship, but around 1M km the average speed was dropping down below 40km/s. So I replaced the science with an additional explosive rocket assembler, beacon, and slightly larger power plant to maintain ~55km/s. I also downgraded most turrets to avoid wasting resources shooting asteroids off to the side, and squeezed a little more throughput into the input belt. Unfortunately the higher energy use meant I no longer had enough fuel cells to bring the ship home :cry:

Blueprint: https://pastebin.com/Gfqu8qHV
The circuit network is a bit of a mess, but green generally deals with what's on the belt, and red with what's in the hub.
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by waterBear »

Kind of late to the party, but just made it with our first ship. The glorious Marathon 2 (which for most of its life was named "Brick" because it's a giant, uncreative square).

Image

Quick statistics:
  • Maintained 170 km/s + for the entire trip
  • 30 legendary railguns front-facing
  • ~110 legendary rocket turrets front facing
  • Fully beaconed production. Can produce an insane amount of rockets (explosive or not), rail gun ammo, and gun turret ammo. At one point it was equipped to produce 6 stacked turbo belts of gun ammo until we rebuilt it with explosive rockets and gun turrets became almost irrelevant.
  • 4 fusion reactor setup (mostly uncommon, some epic mixed in) capable of >1.1 GW. Steady-state usage was only ~500 MW.
The basic idea was to make a simple design with plenty of room that's easy to modify so we could change it as we learn. And the design did change several times, each time going deeper. At this point, we pretty much get it and could no doubt make a more compact design to do the same job.

I can post more detailed pictures if anyone is interested.

Edit: Uploaded a better screenshot. :)
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by athenor »

So because I was getting a little tired of building my ship, I decided to hunt around for something that could get me the last few achievements and push to the endgame.. and I came across this thread. :)

With regards to the very first ship -- Dragon_Gawain, you mentioned that you felt the prometheum storage was a bit of a failure. That said, I don't think it would be that hard to increase it and keep your goals?

Have you tried adding a dedicated bulk loader to each of your asteroid grabbers, with a whitelist filter of prometheum, and then adding a blacklist to the other inserters so they won't ever pick up the chunks? By doing this, you would get 4x as much storage on your belt, without interfering with the standard functions of the rest of your setup. For the grabbers at the top, you'd need to make tunnels for your ammo to bring the asteroid belt closer to the grabbers, but I don't think that would impact things much.

So yeah. All standard asteroid chunks go on the belt 1x, while prometheum shards just sit in the stack inserter until full and ready to load onto the belt. Due to how you are using the splitter, the prometheum will never go into the hub, and you still have your capacity control based on the constant set on the left side.
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by dragon_gawain »

Prometheum (as well as all the asteroid chunks) have a stack size of 1. This means that even a stack/bulk inserted can only hold 1 chunk at a time.

To increase my prometheum storage, I’d have to make the ship longer to fit in more belts.
However, storing prometheum inside the asteroid collector is currently untapped real estate for me. With some circuitry, I could store some extra chunks in the collectors themselves.

Thanks for the thought though!
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by itsme38269 »

How do I actually start the ship in the first post? I've got it up and running and all the ammo is on the belts and over the relevant thresholds. The checkmark signal is reading a 1, but needs to be reading a 2 in order to move to the next travel step. Even if I try to force move it, it doesn't move, as the pumps controlling the fuel are disabled by control behavior. There are so many circuits that I don't know what they all mean (and don't know circuits very well either). I've compared my build to the photo of the build on here, and it doesn't look like there are any random missing pieces. Any items that I substituted, I substituted them for higher quality ones (e.g. legendary bulk inserter instead of epic or whatever). I added a couple solar panels and laser turrets in blank space. Power is running, belts are full, turrets are full of ammo, tanks have the correct liquids. What do I need to do to start this thing?
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by dragon_gawain »

First off, thanks for trying out my ship! Means a lot to me that others are using my designs! (though I'd still encourage you to try to figure out a working design on your own, as that's what I enjoy in the game! Play the way you have fun though! That's most important!)

Anyway, yes, there certainly are a lot of circuits and stuff on board! And it's complicated enough for even me, it's creator, to forget how exactly it all works in the ~7 months since I last designed it. (Doesn't help that I haven't been playing Factorio recently so I haven't been doing routine looks at the ship..)
So, to answer your question @itsme38269, the short answer is I don't know (again, lots of circuits on boar so I don't know what exactly isn't going). I probably changed the ship since I posted - loading up my file to take a look at it, it's currently set to autopilot running short missions to collect promethium, so the circuitry has almost certainly changed. However, there are a few things that I can think of that might be causing issues:

0. Quality doesn't matter.
The item substitutions you did shouldn't matter at all. The only items that need to be of a minimum quality are those feeding the crushers. Otherwise, as long as you did a replace instead of deleting the old inserter and placing the new one, it should be fine. And even then, that only matter for the inserters with circuit conditions, so only a few around the hub iirc.

1. The hub conditions
You mentioned that the tick signal is at 1 - I'm guessing that means you found the constant combinator with the L (L for launch) just to the right of the yellow ammo production? It's nestled in a little nook in the belts between yellow ammo and iron plate foundries. That CC has to be flicked to ON in order for the check mark signal to be sent out.
The hub should only need the tick to be set to 1 (not sure if I changed this since the original post?)
The tick is based on 5 conditions:
The manual launch signal (which I just mentioned)
3 signals - one for each of the ammo types
1 signal that checks major fuel and oxidizer levels.

(THIS IS LIKELY YOUR PROBLEM)
2. The fuel/oxidizer pumps
This depends on where you're launching from. Right next to both of the pumps is a decider combinator that has a bunch of conditions based on which planet you're at. We really only care about the first condition though. It states that the velocity must over twenty and the amount of fuel/oxidizer in the tank below a certain threshold. The minimum threshold prevents the tanks from filling up when at a planet. This is a known flaw with fuel system - it needs to be primed. If there's no fuel/oxy in the thrusters, it can't launch. This is probably the problem. It's pretty simply to fix - change the "V > 20" to "V = 0" and the pumps will start filling the thrusters while the ship is stopped.
Also of note is that since the post, I added another condition to that first block "V < 120" which caps the ships speed to 120. The other conditions in the DC let the ship go faster when going to a planet (as opposed to going to the SP, in which case it goes slow and steady).

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask if you need any more info, I'm glad to help!
itsme38269
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by itsme38269 »

The V change seems to have worked to get it moving. I'm still only getting one check signal from the combinator that looks at ammo, L and green square.

I could just change it to ignore that circuit condition, or to accept check at 1 or something. But still curious where the other check is supposed to come from

edit: Hmm, moving around a little more, v = 0 seemed to be limiting the velocity a lot. So I set it to >= 0, and now its on the move, though the "everything" signal keeps flashing on and off and the checkmark output keeps flashing too. I suppose this is your speed limiter? (i looked around and found it on the constant combinator near the thrusters)
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dragon_gawain
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Re: Ships that can get to the shattered planet

Post by dragon_gawain »

Ahh, I see. Thanks for showing the hub conditions - that was probably from an older design. The hub should be looking for the check to equal 1 AFAIK. (Might have been different in the posted design, but when I looked at the ship earlier today, the hub was looking for the check to be 1).
I might've had another CC at some point that was outputting another check? Though that should be what the L CC is doing as a manual override.. Not sure where another check would be coming from since everything is funneled into that one DC.. It might've also been me manually setting the hub conditions to 2 as extra layer of force stopping? Though again, I could've just turned off the L CC.. Anyway, I'm not sure what's going on there, but as far as I know, the hub should be looking for a condition of "check = 1"
tldr, I dunno why it's checking for check = 2, but it's prolly a legacy thing. Should be safe to change that.

The U signal is the amount of fuel/oxidizer that the direct feed tank holds. So, if not moving, the lower tank would end up having that much liquid (should be at 100 I think?). Making U bigger will cause the ship to move faster (but only up to a certain degree and it's somewhat finicky. To set better speed limits, it would be better to just set V limits. So having like "V > 20" and "V < U", and then U would be the upper speed limit of the ship. Though since acceleration is a thing there might some oscillations, yada yada yada it would be good enough :lol: )

Also yes, if it's set to "V = 0" while in flight, that will cause a lot of speed limitations. The V signal is pulled straight from the hub and is the current ship velocity. If you only allow fuel/oxidizer to go into the thrusters when V = 0, it means that the ship would have to come to a full stop before it would get any more fuel/oxi. The condition for "V > 20" was to prevent overfueling when the ship was stopped. 20 is a semi-arbitrary number so that it wouldn't overfuel when coming into a stop or just at departure time.

To change the U setting, there should be a CC somewhere, I think near the oxidizer pump at the bottom right? The U is on a logistic group so changing it in one place will affect both fuel and oxidizer simultaneously. In case you didn't know (cause you said you don't know much about circuits), a logistic group lets multiple combinators share values such that if you change a value in one spot, it'll change that value in all the combinators (globally) in that logistic group. You can think of it as a global wireless value that can be shared.

Also also, make sure you bring enough fusion cells! iirc it takes around 200 to get to the SP? (my original consumption pic confirms that), so to be safe I'd recommend having at least 500 in total to make sure you can get all the way to the SP and back.

Once more, feel free to ask if you have any thoughts, comments, or questions! Hope my ship serves you well! :space-age:
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