Friday Facts #442 - Flip, Flow, and Fresh Paint

[Hurkyl]

Yeah you have no idea what you're talking about. The legendary : common ratio on throwing chunks into the recycler straight is ~1/3000, maybe?

2727.

And huh, a single common quality recycler processes 16 asteroids per second. I guess you probably need to recycle around 3636 times (2727 times 1 + 1/4 + 1/16 + ...) (it's probably not actually that simple but I imagine this is in the right ballpark) to get through that, so if you have unlimited asteroids that recycler can make 0.264 legendary asteroids per minute.

Times 43 for crushing with 50% productivity (0.7 asteroids make 30 ore), and another 1.5 for smelting in electric furnace, and that turns into 17 legendary iron plates per minute.

(that would be times 400 if crushing with 300% productivity)

[jackthesmack]

I'm registering an account specifically to say that I don't agree with the removal of space casinos.
They are the only way to make quality modules that isn't horribly tedious. Without space casinos I'm just going to not play with quality anymore (since you're making that an option now)

How is throwing quality modules in an assembler tedious? It's way less tedious than building a giant upcycling spaceship that then must be reprocessed on Vulcanus.

[coffee-factorio]

I mean, think critically about what I'm saying. This fundamentally doesn't work at small scales. You either have to have as part of a "voluntary required cleanup program" on all platforms that would normally be discarding material when you're making, I don't know whatever you get 150 hours in. Or you need to have it on a ship dedicated to it. I wouldn't venture to say you can do it simultaneously with promethium until you have an operation of truly ridiculous scale. Which a megabaser might take as "Tuesday."

If I had to bet five dollars, I would bet that a required function call to the boiler plate code in front of quality, then probably another function call to a PRNG, would hit the CPU worse than incrementing a counter on a particle and then deciding whether or not to draw it, because often people aren't looking at things they're throwing away on a space platform. It would be kind of like something you did to pad your supply of building materials because you had enough but a little more couldn't hurt.

It's a weird thing. Because optimization is a black box and context sensitive. So there's stuff that would have better rates of return but wouldn't be practical because it's like... 1800 random number generator calls on copper wires or ores. Abucmcnasty is going to have a long, long career. God bless him.

[Hurkyl]

I'm registering an account specifically to say that I don't agree with the removal of space casinos.
They are the only way to make quality modules that isn't horribly tedious. Without space casinos I'm just going to not play with quality anymore (since you're making that an option now)

How is throwing quality modules in an assembler tedious? It's way less tedious than building a giant upcycling spaceship that then must be reprocessed on Vulcanus.

I really think it's a misattribution. I think it's very likely that most of them don't actually find reprocessing loops any less 'tedious' than craft-recycle (or other) loops at all, and what they are experiencing is that they just have to do less of it because they can have one loop to rule them all and the large expansion factor when unpacking from asteroids to ores.

But people in general are really bad at rationalizing why they feel a certain way, and there's a meme for them to latch onto that short-circuits the process.