Travel to Aquilo is a massive difficulty spike

[LizardOfOz]

Many players enjoy coming up with their own designs, and just playing games "blind" in general.
Sure, your first designs aren't optimal (and aren't even good), but they are yours and you've managed to make them work.
This also applies to ship designs you make on your first playthrough - your ships are going to be poorly designed, and each rocket launch costs like an Apollo mission because you barely make any blue chips, but you can get things moving between planets...

Until your next destination is Aquilo.

There's several challenges that make putting together an Aquilo ship on the fly unreasonably hard.

• An Aquilo ship's ammo production needs to match the ammo consumption in real time, while an inner planet ship can safely sit idle at Nauvis, slowly building up the ammo supplies, or even just import bullets from the planet.

• A rocket turret knowledge check - you can't travel to Aquilo without some rocket turrets, and thus, without the second type of ammo you need to produce (again, at speeds faster than consumption!) and weave through your ship. It also requires carbon fiber, which you've likely skipped because the Stompers broke your supply of brain fruit and your factory fell into a spoilage death spiral.

• The cost of an Aquilo ship is intimidating - while yes, resources in Factorio are practically infinite, a relatively new player hasn't realised it yet. An Aquilo ship won't reach its destination if it's not a decently sized flying factory, while an inner planet ship can be barely holding together. When put side-by-side, just this difference alone will feel like a massive wall you need to climb, or else no further progress.

• Asteroids above Aquilo are all ice. If you didn't see that coming and haven't built asteroid reprocessing, your ship will get stranded with no ammo, no fuel, and with 20-30 minutes of playtime lost to loading the save taken before the flight to Aquilo, as the ship was too expensive to accept losing it.
  • Giving that a uniquely named auto-save is created upon your first flight to each planet, reloading after a failed maiden voyage appears to be intentional game design. Not a big fan - I feel like one could balance the ship cost in a way where rolling with the punches and building a new ship in place of a destroyed one would be reasonable.

Ultimately, these bullet points converge on having to be informed about the upcoming challenges in advance - watch videos, have a creative test world, use someone else's blueprints. In other words, on spoiling the challenge, while many would prefer to approach it blind. And you can play Factorio blind reasonably well, except for this one case.

I resorted to making a creative test world, but seeing your ship successfully arrive to its destination for the first time was undermined by already seeing that happen in the test world.

I want to re-emphasize again that I'm talking about playing Space Age (or even Factorio) for the first time - the player isn't aware yet that resources are pretty much infinite and the player wants to experience the content in real time as it unravels. This player, by definition, still hasn't "gitted gut" yet.

[kitters]

Well, imagine then how would feel making ships to reach solar system end.

I'd say reaching Aquilo is right in between dificulty.
Dificulty 1 - inner planets, 2 - Aquilo, 3 - Shuttered.
There is limitted amoun of content in the game, you want more gradual ladder with many easier steps, but writing steps is difficult, we have 3 in the game. And each step is rather big, but even. I wouldn't say step 1->2 is so much harder then 0->1 or 2->3.
It's supposed to be a big step (difficulty spike).
If you want add weights and don't restart failed attempts - your choice. Then enjoy this challenge. Strange though that you chose building ships in creative world rather then loading a save, which is essentially the same trick, don't know what morals you implement in your head about this. If you wanted a challenge than you would be a man and build 10 ships in your main world By the way if you monitor your first flight and see problems, you can stop the flight and return ship back, not destroyes entirely, just damaged - not so expensive to repair, then fix the problem (for example, when you realize you need rocket launchers).
Most of us enjoyed this part of the game for the first time just fine reloading. Enjoying every new problem we learn.

By the way, about 'problems'. Not really the topic, but feel need to comment:

An Aquilo ship's ammo production needs to match the ammo consumption in real time, while an inner planet ship can safely sit idle at Nauvis, slowly building up the ammo supplies, or even just import bullets from the planet.

I learnt about people 'recharging' their ammo only on forum, my first designs for all ships include excessive decent ammo production. And speed control as a fine-wire fuse, to limit the speed in case of low ammo and stop in case of damage. Only because I couldn't calculate needed ammo production rate. Later optimized designs don't need this, have right ratio of speed (thrusters) and production rates.
And I didn't understand you, if you stock up ammo before flight, why exactly can't you do it for Aquilo? Ammo consumption is so low when sit idle on any planet compared to any flight, so stocking ammo is not a problem.

A rocket turret knowledge check

You can find all this knowledge in in-game 'wiki'. About asteroids on routes, about their resistance. And the fact that Aquilo is unlocked right after unlocking rocket turrets should also give a hint.

Asteroids above Aquilo are all ice. If you didn't see that coming and haven't built asteroid reprocessing, your ship will get stranded with no ammo

Lies. Asteroids are very excessive. I literally don't have reprocessing on transport ships.
First time I needed to reprocess on prometey ship is when I upgraded it to legendary and speed to 300, so hadn't enough carbon asteroids for rockets.

[eugenekay]

• An Aquilo ship's ammo production needs to match the ammo consumption in real time, while an inner planet ship can safely sit idle at Nauvis, slowly building up the ammo supplies, or even just import bullets from the planet.
• A rocket turret knowledge check - you can't travel to Aquilo without some rocket turrets, and thus, without the second type of ammo you need to produce (again, at speeds faster than consumption!) and weave through your ship. It also requires carbon fiber, which you've likely skipped because the Stompers broke your supply of brain fruit and your factory fell into a spoilage death spiral.
• The cost of an Aquilo ship is intimidating - while yes, resources in Factorio are practically infinite, a relatively new player hasn't realised it yet. An Aquilo ship won't reach its destination if it's not a decently sized flying factory, while an inner planet ship can be barely holding together. When put side-by-side, just this difference alone will feel like a massive wall you need to climb, or else no further progress.

The first time I played the Space Age expansion I had no particular problem creating a one-way-trip Aquilo-capable ship after getting a basic Gleba Research operation working. The platform was slow, did not craft its own rockets, and I forgot Nuclear fuel cells to kickstart the Heat plant.... I thought it was a great experience, despite being stranded on an ice planet. You learn something each time that you make the attempt, which I think is a great "puzzle mechanic".

Travelling to the final planet should be hard, it gives you a since of accomplishment once a running factory has been dredged out of the ice slurry.

[Hurkyl]

Ultimately, these bullet points converge on having to be informed about the upcoming challenges in advance - watch videos, have a creative test world, use someone else's blueprints. In other words, on spoiling the challenge, while many would prefer to approach it blind. And you can play Factorio blind reasonably well, except for this one case.

You missed a trick: "unspoiled" does not mean "blind".

In my first time through Space Age, I scouted the space routes. Make a platform fly it into new territory, reverse if it looks like there's any chance of being overwhelmed, and try again. Then make a platform (usually by upgrading the scout ship) I think can make round trips, and do a test flight to verify... again pulling it back if it looks like it will be overwhelmed.

And only when I've empirically verified a platform can make the trip do I load it up with supplies and an engineer and send it off to colonize the new planet.

I guess technically the first scout ship is sent blind, but the point is that most of the design work is done unspoiled but not blind, because I do have the information I've obtained in-game about how well things work.

[juliawtapp]

The factoriopedia also exists and has ample information to help the player with this challenge and previous space challenges - it lists asteroid armor values per damage type, space routes with graphs of what asteroids you'll find and how many along the way, and the page for "thruster" even shows that its efficiency goes up with lower fueling (which may lead an observant player to slow their ship down, thus needing less production capacity to survive the trip).

It is a big step up in terms of difficulty, but the game gives you all the information needed to make it work.

[mmmPI]

I want to re-emphasize again that I'm talking about playing Space Age (or even Factorio) for the first time - the player isn't aware yet that resources are pretty much infinite and the player wants to experience the content in real time as it unravels. This player, by definition, still hasn't "gitted gut" yet.

Do you suggest something be changed ? if so how ?

I feel the most difficult was the first ship for me, to understand how thruster works, how many is a reasonnable number, scaling up the nauvis base for space platform tiles . But by the time i had reached Aquilo, i felt like the game had forced me into making reliable platforms for the inner planet so it felt difficult ,but not as overwhelming as the first ship. I had learned how to pause my ship for when seeing a big asteroid and wasn't afraid of reloading the game if the ship crashed on its way to Aquilo. ( i tried sending an existing inner planet ship as a scout, it crashed on the first big asteroid , several times, so i made a better one with rocket )