Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships

[popthesmart]

This worked amazing, thank you so much!

[inefficient]

Cool, thanks for letting me know! If you run it in 2.1. and have high rail gun speed research, it may not work because it burns through the ammo quicker than its made and then eventually crashes. I havent investigated that yet but will be done within the next 2 weeks or so!

[popthesmart]

I found upgrading to legendary asteroid collectors makes a massive difference lol. So much so that the asteroid belts can get clogged so I added an overflow that dumps them overboard.

[inefficient]

happens! But keep in mind that most things are balanced on the ship, so things may start to break at higher quality! But yeah the increased collecting rates should make the promethium collection much much quicker and you probably will finish way ahead of the schedule for the non quality ship! Resetting the schedule is also easy, just go into an editor map and adjust the constant combinator with new speeds and the decider with new distances and have a look how it goes!

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[Ah0]

I don't know when it happens, but sometimes this belt gets clogged and the ship stops due to a lack of water production.

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It might not be the best solution, but I have connected a divider and an underground belt with an inserter to the edge of the ship. It's activated when there are more than 100 pieces of ice on the belt.

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[inefficient]

So I was testing it a bit and have to admit that I dont see the clogging. My guess was that you guys have much higher asteroid productivity? I tested this with asteroid productivity 13 and the recommended research levels in the original post (laser weapon dmg lvl 14, physical projectile dmg lvl 14, stronger explosives lvl 14, asteroid productivity lvl 13, railgun dmg lvl 8, steel plate productivity lvl 13 and railgun shooting speed lvl 8) and then with lvl 30 for asteroid productivity just to see what would happen, but it still worked fine. If asteroids have higher yields naturally it would make the consumption slower and they would accumulate. But this shouldnt be an issue to begin with, because there is a circuit that limits the asteroids that are in the system to what can fit on the belts. The combinator which controls that can be found on the bridge between the turrets and the main body of the ship at the top (see below). I admit though the belt gets quite full at times and maybe this is just a question of statistical fluctuations, so yeah, try lowering the thresholds a bit.

Also, if you use legendary collectors, it will definitely clog. The problem is that I dont limit the loading of asteroids onto the belt, that means everything that is collected will be put on belts immediately and than can overshoot the limit. A work around for this is that you control the unloading from the actual collector by setting filters for the inserter that unloads. An example of this in Tertius's ship or in the blue print below. In the BP you will find that I use am Integer overflow sign change to limit the input in the hub. The overflow is set such that when a certain quantity is reached in the hub (specified in the combinator right to the inserter), it will output negative numbers which cannot be used as filters. In this case it set it to 2147483642, which is 6 asteroids below the overflow value of 2147483648. When what is in the hub and in the combinator adds up to more than 2147483648, it becomes negative because factorio is made in 32bit and the greatest allowed number in a 32bit system is 2147483648. The other combinator limits, in a similar way, what the collectors pick up. In this case I set it such that collects 12 of each. This is a nice way of storing asteroids on the ship for later use without putting them into the hub. But all this was not my idea, I saw other people doing it but I dont know whom to give credit to for this. Anyhow, this is an alternative way of dealing with this. I designed the ship before I was aware of this trick so this would have been a bit better probably. But the decider combinator should do the trick as well.

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Copy blueprint

You can lower the asteroids the ship collects in this combinator and get rid of the overflow. Maybe try 20% less to begin with.

Hope this helps!