Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
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Clever and beautiful constructions, bigger than two chunks
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popthesmart
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Re: Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
This worked amazing, thank you so much!
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inefficient
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Re: Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
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!
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popthesmart
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Re: Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
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.
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inefficient
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Re: Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
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!- 08-19-2026, 09-31-58.png (240.67 KiB) Viewed 641 times
Re: Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
I don't know when it happens, but sometimes this belt gets clogged and the ship stops due to a lack of water production.
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.
- grafik.png (647.93 KiB) Viewed 530 times
- grafik.png (771.54 KiB) Viewed 486 times
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.
- grafik.png (1.01 MiB) Viewed 486 times
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inefficient
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Re: Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
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.
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!
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.
- 08-25-2026, 06-27-18.png (478.95 KiB) Viewed 466 times
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!
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inefficient
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Re: Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
Ok, here some ships I built throughout the early bits of the game up to the early endgame when you start harvesting promethium on scale. I will also write a bit about the design principles in each ship. In general, all these ship are build with the intend of having them available as early as possible, ie. low tech, and cheap and to be self sufficient for a few hours in orbit. So lets start:
The snail class
Specs:
Tech: at least physical projectile damage and speed lvl 5
Max speed: around 50 km/s averages at 30.
Platforms needed: 259
storage: 99
This ship only needs physical projectile damage and speed lvl 5. So you can use it in achievements runs where you dont use productivity and utility science before going to another planet. It usually is my very first ship to get to a planet and start things there. Its very slow, on average around 30 km/s and the cargo capacity is not great, but enough to get the planet started, you can add more if you want though. The snail is not very sophisticated, and has problems with spikes in asteroid occurrences which leads to collisions once in a while. To combat this I used walls which have impact resistance against collisions so that the platform can take a few hits without things getting destroyed. In terms of design, I tried to move vulnerable parts such as the collectors as far to the inside as possible so that is harder to hit. A single layer of walls is not enough to prevent all damage so I have two.
The jerboa-class
Specs:
Tech: at least physical projectile damage and speed lvl 5
Max speed: 277 km/s with hyperdrive activated
Platforms needed: 729
storage: 199
The jerboa is my main workhorse, cheap, early to get by, and very quick in terms of travel. Again, lower tech needed similar to the snail, no utility or logistics. Notable is a hyperdrive that temporally increases speed by force feeding fuel into the thruster beyond what the ship otherwise could sustain. In the early mid game you wont have enough tech to keep the hyperdrive activated at all times, so you have to throttle the thrusters to a level that fuel consumption is at 90% efficiency. There is logic for that. The constant combinator with the S below the hub sets the speed of the ship by controlling fuel levels in the pipes. The combinator has a description so have a look how it works. A few upgrades early that significantly improve travel time are increasing the speed of ammo production with T3 modules, ideally legendary, and calcite fuel so that the hyperdrive can be used longer. The reason for this is that the ship has a logic that makes it wait in orbit until enough ammo and fuel is made. Early on ammo production is very slow, so speeding this up with modules significantly lowers the wait time in orbit. The jerboa will now start demonstrating a few general principles of spaceship design that I found important.
- Cigar-shapes are best for smaller ships. Make sure you have as many thrusters as the ship is wide because space-drag dominates speed-loss in small ships. Drag directly relates to the width of platforms, so narrower is better. Weight is irrelevant up to medium sized platforms (below 5-10k tons) so you can always make it longer early on without any significant drop in speed. https://wiki.factorio.com/Thruster
-The hub is one of the few entities in game that has multiple sides where you can insert and withdraw which makes the logic here very simple to handle. I use the hub as a global processing hub for most consumables on the ship. Many people dont do this, and I agree that it is annoying then to handle items in the hub inventory because of the throughput of items, but it saves a lot of space on the platform that otherwise would be needed for belts and other logistics.
- Without many upgrades ammo becomes a precious resource in most early game space ships because a lot is needed to kill asteroids. To lower ammo consumption on the ship, I deactivate turrets that are not at the front while flying. In flight this is not a problem for small early game ships because you out-speed all asteroids that are heading towards the hub from the front.
- Not all machines are constantly active, so I use accumulators to buffer spikes in energy demand on ship to build fewer solar panels
- storage tanks are kinda needed to have the hyperdrive activated when the calcite fuel crafts are not available. I make use of the hyperdrive for example when I quickly want to get agricultural science back from gleba to increase freshness or if i have an oh shit moment when something goes wrong somewhere and I quickly have to run.
- you can use collectors as temporary storage for asteroids. There is a very simple logic that sets the filters of the collectors such that it will collect only x of a certain type and then you use a inserter to only take x of a certain quantity out. This means, that when there is no demand, the collector can accumulate and entire inventory full of asteroids and then save it until you request something. This is very useful, because asteroids have a stack size of 1 and need a lot of space, so storing them in the hub is very expensive.
- collector placement is also important. In flight most asteroids are encountered at the front as debris. In orbit though, is almost equal around the entire ship with a bias towards the rear because the asteroids are attracted to the hub. So in ships with a low demand of resources, such as inner planet ships, I only have collectors at the front and keep some resources stocked in the hub. On bigger ships that go to aquilo where asteroids types becomes skewed, you have to collect on the sides to make recycling viable when you are in orbit. In flight front collection is enough, but as soon as you are stationary above aquilo you quickly deplete non oxide asteroids and what is collected at the front is not enough to sustain the entire ship.
- hub placement is also something that can be optimized. I always have the hub at the rear and directly in the middle of the ship, because that way asteroids have a very steep impact angle with the ship because they are attracted to the hub and it allows me to out run some asteroids. If the hub is in the front, the impact angle gets shallower and some asteroids may start hitting the rear of bigger ships. Also, placing the hub in the middle causes asteroid pressure to be uniformly distributed throughout the front. I have seen ships with the hub being not centered, this biases asteroid encounter rates at the front and skews ammo drainage on belts if not balanced well but also assymmetric pressure on defenses.
The vulture class
Tech: at least physical projectile damage and speed, laser dmg and speed, and explosive dmg all lvl 6
Max speed: 265 km/s with hyperdrive activated
Platforms needed: 990
storage: 169
The vulture is my first ship for aquilo. Just to get there and bring a decent amount of things with me. The weakest point of the ship is the limited storage space but it enough to get a small base started to make science. I later on use it to distribute aquilo resources across the system. The time it can stay in aquilo orbit is at least 2-3 hours, but I havent tested this for much longer, so there may be a point where it runs out of carbon to make rockets, but I never reached this. On top of previously introduced principles we have some more now:
- it is very effective to store steam in storage tanks for later use on the ship. The reason for this is that the high power usage assemblers like the furnace and lasers are not on all the time. But require a high peak production to not crash the ship into a blackout. Normally, the reactor on this ship with 2 heat exchangers could only sustain around 3 turbines. But with the stored steam, it can sustain more. This saves me the space for additional heat exchangers and makes sure that the heat exchangers are there work at 100% capacity most of the time. The buffered steam is then used to help satisfy peak demands. It also allows me to use a lot of laser turrets on a small ship which takes away pressure from ammo production by limiting gun turrets targets to medium asteroids and have the lasers clear the small ones.
- with aquilo you will start encountering more types of asteroids. When you check their tool tips you will find they have different type of resistances. I make use of this here. A problem you have at high speeds is proper targeting. If you are very fast, the turrets cant track all asteroids and eventually they may collide with the ship. On top, some turrets will deal low damage to a certain type of asteroid and would be better off shooting at other types were they are more effective. In general, laser turrets are best for small asteroids, gun turrets for medium asteroids, rocket towers for medium and big asteroids and rail guns are effective against all of them.One also has to consider that laser turrets and gun turrets have very high attack speeds so they can clear the bulk asteroids, which are small and medium, very quickly, where as rail guns are very slow and every hit should better be used on a suitable target to make it worth the energy and ammo spend. Because of these considerations I have laser turrets limited to small asteroids, gun turrets to medium, rocket towers to big asteroids and rail guns for the huge ones.
- tower positioning and activity is a big thing for ammo management. At the moment it is not possible to alter the detection range of turrets on the ship. That means many towers will shoot on asteroids that dont pose a danger for the ship. This is substantial ammo loss on small and narrow ships. To mitigate some of this loss, placement of towers and activity is critical. On the vulture I put all rocket turrets into a single line directly into the middle of the ship. They consume the most expensive ammo made on the ship and at the middle of the ship they are the furthest away from all asteroids on the side and are most likely to target asteroids at the front. The line also has the advantage, that they share the same target pool. Which means that the turret at the front will be the on most active and the ones behind will activate once something escaped the turret ahead, making sure that they only shoot when it is absolutely necessary. I put the gun turrets in the second line to limit their access to medium asteroids that approach the ship and save ammo. The laser towers have a very quick shooting speed, so medium asteroids can get fairly close to the ship without getting dangerous.
- ammo can also be saved on belts and stack insertion onto belts is an effective way of doing that, thats why all ammo is put on belts via stack inserters. This increases up time of ammo production assemblers.
- In general modules can be used to lower power demand, its pretty useful on small ships that dont have fusion plants where you are using laser towers because they demand a lot of energy. Efficiency modules in furnaces, especially beacon boosted furnaces, are a game changer on ships.
- I also start using interrupts here. Interrupts are very powerful because it a click and go mechanic that can be automatized. On this ship I have 3 interrupts, one is my standard farm ammo interrupt, which I use to make rockets and rail gun ammo after some firearm magazines have been made after I just build the ship. This interrupt essentially sends the ship on a cycle between vulcanus and nauvis to farm the expensive ammo types for a first trip towards outer destinations. The second interrupt sends the ship back to nauvis to restock nuclear fuel when nuclear fuel drops below a threshold. The third interrupt is a click and go park interrupt. Its not automatized and needs to be clicked. This just sends the ship back to nauvis to wait. This is useful because you dont have to delete the schedule that you have running on the ship. You just click it and it will go without having to set anything.
- you may have noticed but towards aquilo asteroid rations become skewed towards oxide type and this makes collection of asteroids at the side mandatory for orbiting but also recycling of asteroids. So I added a logic for this that takes care of this. Help for this can be found here viewtopic.php?t=124776&hilit=cookbook but the most important combinator probably is this one viewtopic.php?t=132822 I found this a couple of times already from different people so I dont know who found it first but it essentially does clamping and recipe selection from a library with two combinators only, which is extraordinary powerful.
The albatross-class
Tech: at least physical projectile damage and speed, laser dmg and speed, and explosive dmg all lvl 6
Max speed: 265 km/s with hyperdrive activated
Platforms needed: 937
storage: 239
Was build on top of the vulture chassis, so nothing new here, other than that I use the free space from the more compact fusion reactor to increase storage capacity to use it for large construction operations.
The snail class
- 09-02-2026, 21-04-25.png (832.47 KiB) Viewed 251 times
Specs:
Tech: at least physical projectile damage and speed lvl 5
Max speed: around 50 km/s averages at 30.
Platforms needed: 259
storage: 99
This ship only needs physical projectile damage and speed lvl 5. So you can use it in achievements runs where you dont use productivity and utility science before going to another planet. It usually is my very first ship to get to a planet and start things there. Its very slow, on average around 30 km/s and the cargo capacity is not great, but enough to get the planet started, you can add more if you want though. The snail is not very sophisticated, and has problems with spikes in asteroid occurrences which leads to collisions once in a while. To combat this I used walls which have impact resistance against collisions so that the platform can take a few hits without things getting destroyed. In terms of design, I tried to move vulnerable parts such as the collectors as far to the inside as possible so that is harder to hit. A single layer of walls is not enough to prevent all damage so I have two.
The jerboa-class
- 09-02-2026, 21-30-53.png (309.41 KiB) Viewed 251 times
Specs:
Tech: at least physical projectile damage and speed lvl 5
Max speed: 277 km/s with hyperdrive activated
Platforms needed: 729
storage: 199
The jerboa is my main workhorse, cheap, early to get by, and very quick in terms of travel. Again, lower tech needed similar to the snail, no utility or logistics. Notable is a hyperdrive that temporally increases speed by force feeding fuel into the thruster beyond what the ship otherwise could sustain. In the early mid game you wont have enough tech to keep the hyperdrive activated at all times, so you have to throttle the thrusters to a level that fuel consumption is at 90% efficiency. There is logic for that. The constant combinator with the S below the hub sets the speed of the ship by controlling fuel levels in the pipes. The combinator has a description so have a look how it works. A few upgrades early that significantly improve travel time are increasing the speed of ammo production with T3 modules, ideally legendary, and calcite fuel so that the hyperdrive can be used longer. The reason for this is that the ship has a logic that makes it wait in orbit until enough ammo and fuel is made. Early on ammo production is very slow, so speeding this up with modules significantly lowers the wait time in orbit. The jerboa will now start demonstrating a few general principles of spaceship design that I found important.
- Cigar-shapes are best for smaller ships. Make sure you have as many thrusters as the ship is wide because space-drag dominates speed-loss in small ships. Drag directly relates to the width of platforms, so narrower is better. Weight is irrelevant up to medium sized platforms (below 5-10k tons) so you can always make it longer early on without any significant drop in speed. https://wiki.factorio.com/Thruster
-The hub is one of the few entities in game that has multiple sides where you can insert and withdraw which makes the logic here very simple to handle. I use the hub as a global processing hub for most consumables on the ship. Many people dont do this, and I agree that it is annoying then to handle items in the hub inventory because of the throughput of items, but it saves a lot of space on the platform that otherwise would be needed for belts and other logistics.
- Without many upgrades ammo becomes a precious resource in most early game space ships because a lot is needed to kill asteroids. To lower ammo consumption on the ship, I deactivate turrets that are not at the front while flying. In flight this is not a problem for small early game ships because you out-speed all asteroids that are heading towards the hub from the front.
- Not all machines are constantly active, so I use accumulators to buffer spikes in energy demand on ship to build fewer solar panels
- storage tanks are kinda needed to have the hyperdrive activated when the calcite fuel crafts are not available. I make use of the hyperdrive for example when I quickly want to get agricultural science back from gleba to increase freshness or if i have an oh shit moment when something goes wrong somewhere and I quickly have to run.
- you can use collectors as temporary storage for asteroids. There is a very simple logic that sets the filters of the collectors such that it will collect only x of a certain type and then you use a inserter to only take x of a certain quantity out. This means, that when there is no demand, the collector can accumulate and entire inventory full of asteroids and then save it until you request something. This is very useful, because asteroids have a stack size of 1 and need a lot of space, so storing them in the hub is very expensive.
- collector placement is also important. In flight most asteroids are encountered at the front as debris. In orbit though, is almost equal around the entire ship with a bias towards the rear because the asteroids are attracted to the hub. So in ships with a low demand of resources, such as inner planet ships, I only have collectors at the front and keep some resources stocked in the hub. On bigger ships that go to aquilo where asteroids types becomes skewed, you have to collect on the sides to make recycling viable when you are in orbit. In flight front collection is enough, but as soon as you are stationary above aquilo you quickly deplete non oxide asteroids and what is collected at the front is not enough to sustain the entire ship.
- hub placement is also something that can be optimized. I always have the hub at the rear and directly in the middle of the ship, because that way asteroids have a very steep impact angle with the ship because they are attracted to the hub and it allows me to out run some asteroids. If the hub is in the front, the impact angle gets shallower and some asteroids may start hitting the rear of bigger ships. Also, placing the hub in the middle causes asteroid pressure to be uniformly distributed throughout the front. I have seen ships with the hub being not centered, this biases asteroid encounter rates at the front and skews ammo drainage on belts if not balanced well but also assymmetric pressure on defenses.
The vulture class
- 09-03-2026, 06-08-56.png (367.35 KiB) Viewed 203 times
Tech: at least physical projectile damage and speed, laser dmg and speed, and explosive dmg all lvl 6
Max speed: 265 km/s with hyperdrive activated
Platforms needed: 990
storage: 169
The vulture is my first ship for aquilo. Just to get there and bring a decent amount of things with me. The weakest point of the ship is the limited storage space but it enough to get a small base started to make science. I later on use it to distribute aquilo resources across the system. The time it can stay in aquilo orbit is at least 2-3 hours, but I havent tested this for much longer, so there may be a point where it runs out of carbon to make rockets, but I never reached this. On top of previously introduced principles we have some more now:
- it is very effective to store steam in storage tanks for later use on the ship. The reason for this is that the high power usage assemblers like the furnace and lasers are not on all the time. But require a high peak production to not crash the ship into a blackout. Normally, the reactor on this ship with 2 heat exchangers could only sustain around 3 turbines. But with the stored steam, it can sustain more. This saves me the space for additional heat exchangers and makes sure that the heat exchangers are there work at 100% capacity most of the time. The buffered steam is then used to help satisfy peak demands. It also allows me to use a lot of laser turrets on a small ship which takes away pressure from ammo production by limiting gun turrets targets to medium asteroids and have the lasers clear the small ones.
- with aquilo you will start encountering more types of asteroids. When you check their tool tips you will find they have different type of resistances. I make use of this here. A problem you have at high speeds is proper targeting. If you are very fast, the turrets cant track all asteroids and eventually they may collide with the ship. On top, some turrets will deal low damage to a certain type of asteroid and would be better off shooting at other types were they are more effective. In general, laser turrets are best for small asteroids, gun turrets for medium asteroids, rocket towers for medium and big asteroids and rail guns are effective against all of them.One also has to consider that laser turrets and gun turrets have very high attack speeds so they can clear the bulk asteroids, which are small and medium, very quickly, where as rail guns are very slow and every hit should better be used on a suitable target to make it worth the energy and ammo spend. Because of these considerations I have laser turrets limited to small asteroids, gun turrets to medium, rocket towers to big asteroids and rail guns for the huge ones.
- tower positioning and activity is a big thing for ammo management. At the moment it is not possible to alter the detection range of turrets on the ship. That means many towers will shoot on asteroids that dont pose a danger for the ship. This is substantial ammo loss on small and narrow ships. To mitigate some of this loss, placement of towers and activity is critical. On the vulture I put all rocket turrets into a single line directly into the middle of the ship. They consume the most expensive ammo made on the ship and at the middle of the ship they are the furthest away from all asteroids on the side and are most likely to target asteroids at the front. The line also has the advantage, that they share the same target pool. Which means that the turret at the front will be the on most active and the ones behind will activate once something escaped the turret ahead, making sure that they only shoot when it is absolutely necessary. I put the gun turrets in the second line to limit their access to medium asteroids that approach the ship and save ammo. The laser towers have a very quick shooting speed, so medium asteroids can get fairly close to the ship without getting dangerous.
- ammo can also be saved on belts and stack insertion onto belts is an effective way of doing that, thats why all ammo is put on belts via stack inserters. This increases up time of ammo production assemblers.
- In general modules can be used to lower power demand, its pretty useful on small ships that dont have fusion plants where you are using laser towers because they demand a lot of energy. Efficiency modules in furnaces, especially beacon boosted furnaces, are a game changer on ships.
- I also start using interrupts here. Interrupts are very powerful because it a click and go mechanic that can be automatized. On this ship I have 3 interrupts, one is my standard farm ammo interrupt, which I use to make rockets and rail gun ammo after some firearm magazines have been made after I just build the ship. This interrupt essentially sends the ship on a cycle between vulcanus and nauvis to farm the expensive ammo types for a first trip towards outer destinations. The second interrupt sends the ship back to nauvis to restock nuclear fuel when nuclear fuel drops below a threshold. The third interrupt is a click and go park interrupt. Its not automatized and needs to be clicked. This just sends the ship back to nauvis to wait. This is useful because you dont have to delete the schedule that you have running on the ship. You just click it and it will go without having to set anything.
- you may have noticed but towards aquilo asteroid rations become skewed towards oxide type and this makes collection of asteroids at the side mandatory for orbiting but also recycling of asteroids. So I added a logic for this that takes care of this. Help for this can be found here viewtopic.php?t=124776&hilit=cookbook but the most important combinator probably is this one viewtopic.php?t=132822 I found this a couple of times already from different people so I dont know who found it first but it essentially does clamping and recipe selection from a library with two combinators only, which is extraordinary powerful.
The albatross-class
- 09-03-2026, 08-07-12.png (421.78 KiB) Viewed 188 times
Tech: at least physical projectile damage and speed, laser dmg and speed, and explosive dmg all lvl 6
Max speed: 265 km/s with hyperdrive activated
Platforms needed: 937
storage: 239
Was build on top of the vulture chassis, so nothing new here, other than that I use the free space from the more compact fusion reactor to increase storage capacity to use it for large construction operations.
-
inefficient
- Long Handed Inserter
- Posts: 57
- Joined: Fri Jul 11, 2025 2:49 pm
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Re: Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
The cachalot-class
Tech: at least steel plate productivity and asteroid processivity lvl 6, laser weapon and physical projectile damage and stronger explosives lvl 10 and rail gun damage and shooting speed lvl 4
Max speed: 282 km/s with hyperdrive activated
Platforms needed: around 5000
storage: 119 hub and 10.000 promethium chunks
promethium science output: around 15.600 per hour
required items to run: repair packs (when tech is not above required)
Ok, my master piece, state of the art developed. Again, I tried to keep tech requirements to a minimum. The minute you got your aquilo science up and started making fusion reactors, you should have all the science necessary to run this ship. Its reasonably cheap, all these techs need only 8k for the final lvl. I found it exceedingly hard to make a ship that goes with less and has a reasonable collection rate. But please prove me wrong that it is possible to built a low budget promethium science ship that needs as little tech as this one. To start it use the usual tricks with solar panels and removing the cryoplant to add some fluoroketone and then have in orbit a bit until enough firearm magazines are made. Once the front towers are all loaded, run the ammo farm interrupt a couple of times to get enough rockets and rail gun ammo into the storage. Once you have this, run the "run this only once after all ammo is there" interrupt to send the ship to aquilo and get some quantum processors. Congrats! Now you can run the ship. Use the promethium farm interrupt for this, if you want to got completely auto, make this schedule a non-interrupt one. Anyhow, it has a lot going on to enable this. It builds on most principles mentioned earlier and but introduces new ones or takes a different spin on them.
- So lets start in the back, again, pretty standard fuel control as for the other ships, directly controlling pipe levels now instead of pump throughput. Saves combinators and less clutter.
- cryogenic plant gets fed from two sides with promethium, one taps into the promethium storage, while the other one uses what is collected in flight. The reason for this is, that the promethium storage is only 10k, which is almost used up before you reach the edge of the solar system, the problem that you then have is that it takes a lot of time for the chunks to go through the storage, so I start feeding the plant directly with chunks by having a small circuit that shunts the promethium away from the storage straight to the plant. This increases uptime of the plant and also increases the amount of promethium science that can be made on the ship.
- towards the shattered planet you have to protect the entirety of the ship with rocket launchers, lasers and gun turrets so I observed where they collide into the ship and put turrets there. This is necessary, because the ship is too big to outrun all the asteroids that are made at the front. Again, turret activity is controlled to lower ammo consumption. I turn them off in regions of the trip where I dont need them, e.g. many rocket towers are not needed close to aquilo because the asteroid density becomes too low there.
- speaking of ammo, the ship has close to 100% uptime of ammo assemblers and I have a huge pool of ammo stored to sustain the consumption at the front. There are times where the ship consumes 20% more ammo than it can make for 20 minutes so this is necessary. This will significantly change with higher explosive damage upgrades because clear will get so much better and eventually, you can delete some of the rocket assemblers and add more promethium storage if you want. Rail gun ammo is very tricky now that the shooting speed is no longer capped at higher rail gun speed upgrades. Eventually, if you see them running out of ammo, you can remove them and replace them with collectors but you have to see. This can be solved by using quality modules to speed up crafting. If you do non-quality runs you have keep and eye of it. The ammo storage is big enough so that the ship can sustain it for a couple of trips but eventually you may have to farm more rail gun ammo when your shooting speed is not high enough to delete turrets. I also tried making ammo logistics as expansive as possible to increase the storage thats why I do have the output at the rear. I also trying a logic at the minute that lowers the activity of the rail guns by having them active for a specific amount of time so that higher attack speeds are practically downgraded, that works very well.
- hub placement at the back to increase asteroid impact angle as mentioned in the previous post, makes ship more robust.
- generally, because there is so much production on the ship, everything is almost perfectly balanced, to be indefinitely sustainable. I use mixtures of modules to achieve this. All the free module slots are then filled with efficiency modules to lower energy consumption of the ship to make the fusion reactor as small as possible. Again, all production is optimized to be 100% active at all times except in orbit where you cant sustain this. But this will change with higher tech because things become cheaper.
- To increase promethium collection rates, I set the collector filters at the front to promethium only as soon as the ship leaves the solar system because here are enough asteroids on the side to sustain the ship. Non-quality collectors are really really really shit. The through put is soooooo low. This is probably the hardest bit to optimize on non-quality ships. At low tech, it becomes very difficult to balance defense at the front with collection. After testing I found that 3 collectors should be flanked by one rail gun each. Also the rail guns are protruding way ahead of the collectors to make sure that occasional asteroid impacts with the ship do not hit the collectors. Collectors are very squishy and break very easy. Rail guns dont. Also asteroid crashes have aoe damage, so if the collectors front is too close to the rail gun front, both get damage, so you want to retract the collectors.
- I also tried to put rocket towers in the center of the ship to optimally use their range and defend the sides. One tower in the middle is as good as one on each side, but uses a fraction of the ammo.
- ok this is a big one. Turrets at the front. Placement, rail guns at the front, then gun turrets and then laser towers. Rocket towers in between. Rocket tower void zone at the edge of the ship to suppress friendly fire from the aoe rockets. After lots of testing I noticed that the game has something built that I call overkill-targeting suppression. This essentially is a feature that calculates how much hp an entity has left before projectile impact and if the sum of projectiles exceeds the hp of the entity, it blocks targeting by turrets. This is well intended to stop turrets wasting ammo on entities that are dead already. The problem with this is though, initially I started using mixed targeting, eg. have rocket turrets also attack medium promethium and oxide asteroids, the two most abundant asteroid types beyond the edge, but I noticed that this causes occasional damage to the ship. The reason for this is that medium asteroids are a product of big asteroids and these have to be shot down first before medium asteroids can be targeted. That means on average, medium asteroids are closer to the ship. The problem now is that if you target asteroids close to the ship with rockets you run in to two problems. One is that you are in danger of friendly fire due to the rocket aoe and the second is that rockets have a travel time, which in combination with the overkill targeting suppression causes the medium asteroids to get even closer to the ship than they otherwise would be. Why? Because when they are targeted by a rocket that would kill them, the gun turrets stop shooting at them. As a result this extends travel time of the asteroids to the ship until the rocket hits. This time window is sometimes enough for the asteroid to hit the ship and cause damage. So I highly recommend to not have mixed targeting because of this. I only use it at the very front for rail guns to shoot down medium promethium asteroids as well.
- i also noticed that big asteroids become only dangerous after aquilo when huge asteroids appear. The reason for this is that when spawned from the vacuum, big asteroids dont have random directions, which means they never accelerate towards the ship and only experience gravitational pull from the hub. When they spawn from huge asteroids though, the get an initial random directions, that means they can accelerate directly towards the ship from any position the huge asteroid was at. That means, rocket towers on the side can be turned off before aquilo because the big asteroids never become dangerous on the side. After aquilo there are huge asteroids though, which means random acceleration , so you have to protect the side with rocket towers again.
Ok, thats almost it, one more ship but this has been shown earlier in the thread, this is just for completion
- 09-06-2026, 16-42-26.png (558.67 KiB) Viewed 54 times
Max speed: 282 km/s with hyperdrive activated
Platforms needed: around 5000
storage: 119 hub and 10.000 promethium chunks
promethium science output: around 15.600 per hour
required items to run: repair packs (when tech is not above required)
Ok, my master piece, state of the art developed. Again, I tried to keep tech requirements to a minimum. The minute you got your aquilo science up and started making fusion reactors, you should have all the science necessary to run this ship. Its reasonably cheap, all these techs need only 8k for the final lvl. I found it exceedingly hard to make a ship that goes with less and has a reasonable collection rate. But please prove me wrong that it is possible to built a low budget promethium science ship that needs as little tech as this one. To start it use the usual tricks with solar panels and removing the cryoplant to add some fluoroketone and then have in orbit a bit until enough firearm magazines are made. Once the front towers are all loaded, run the ammo farm interrupt a couple of times to get enough rockets and rail gun ammo into the storage. Once you have this, run the "run this only once after all ammo is there" interrupt to send the ship to aquilo and get some quantum processors. Congrats! Now you can run the ship. Use the promethium farm interrupt for this, if you want to got completely auto, make this schedule a non-interrupt one. Anyhow, it has a lot going on to enable this. It builds on most principles mentioned earlier and but introduces new ones or takes a different spin on them.
- So lets start in the back, again, pretty standard fuel control as for the other ships, directly controlling pipe levels now instead of pump throughput. Saves combinators and less clutter.
- cryogenic plant gets fed from two sides with promethium, one taps into the promethium storage, while the other one uses what is collected in flight. The reason for this is, that the promethium storage is only 10k, which is almost used up before you reach the edge of the solar system, the problem that you then have is that it takes a lot of time for the chunks to go through the storage, so I start feeding the plant directly with chunks by having a small circuit that shunts the promethium away from the storage straight to the plant. This increases uptime of the plant and also increases the amount of promethium science that can be made on the ship.
- towards the shattered planet you have to protect the entirety of the ship with rocket launchers, lasers and gun turrets so I observed where they collide into the ship and put turrets there. This is necessary, because the ship is too big to outrun all the asteroids that are made at the front. Again, turret activity is controlled to lower ammo consumption. I turn them off in regions of the trip where I dont need them, e.g. many rocket towers are not needed close to aquilo because the asteroid density becomes too low there.
- speaking of ammo, the ship has close to 100% uptime of ammo assemblers and I have a huge pool of ammo stored to sustain the consumption at the front. There are times where the ship consumes 20% more ammo than it can make for 20 minutes so this is necessary. This will significantly change with higher explosive damage upgrades because clear will get so much better and eventually, you can delete some of the rocket assemblers and add more promethium storage if you want. Rail gun ammo is very tricky now that the shooting speed is no longer capped at higher rail gun speed upgrades. Eventually, if you see them running out of ammo, you can remove them and replace them with collectors but you have to see. This can be solved by using quality modules to speed up crafting. If you do non-quality runs you have keep and eye of it. The ammo storage is big enough so that the ship can sustain it for a couple of trips but eventually you may have to farm more rail gun ammo when your shooting speed is not high enough to delete turrets. I also tried making ammo logistics as expansive as possible to increase the storage thats why I do have the output at the rear. I also trying a logic at the minute that lowers the activity of the rail guns by having them active for a specific amount of time so that higher attack speeds are practically downgraded, that works very well.
- hub placement at the back to increase asteroid impact angle as mentioned in the previous post, makes ship more robust.
- generally, because there is so much production on the ship, everything is almost perfectly balanced, to be indefinitely sustainable. I use mixtures of modules to achieve this. All the free module slots are then filled with efficiency modules to lower energy consumption of the ship to make the fusion reactor as small as possible. Again, all production is optimized to be 100% active at all times except in orbit where you cant sustain this. But this will change with higher tech because things become cheaper.
- To increase promethium collection rates, I set the collector filters at the front to promethium only as soon as the ship leaves the solar system because here are enough asteroids on the side to sustain the ship. Non-quality collectors are really really really shit. The through put is soooooo low. This is probably the hardest bit to optimize on non-quality ships. At low tech, it becomes very difficult to balance defense at the front with collection. After testing I found that 3 collectors should be flanked by one rail gun each. Also the rail guns are protruding way ahead of the collectors to make sure that occasional asteroid impacts with the ship do not hit the collectors. Collectors are very squishy and break very easy. Rail guns dont. Also asteroid crashes have aoe damage, so if the collectors front is too close to the rail gun front, both get damage, so you want to retract the collectors.
- I also tried to put rocket towers in the center of the ship to optimally use their range and defend the sides. One tower in the middle is as good as one on each side, but uses a fraction of the ammo.
- ok this is a big one. Turrets at the front. Placement, rail guns at the front, then gun turrets and then laser towers. Rocket towers in between. Rocket tower void zone at the edge of the ship to suppress friendly fire from the aoe rockets. After lots of testing I noticed that the game has something built that I call overkill-targeting suppression. This essentially is a feature that calculates how much hp an entity has left before projectile impact and if the sum of projectiles exceeds the hp of the entity, it blocks targeting by turrets. This is well intended to stop turrets wasting ammo on entities that are dead already. The problem with this is though, initially I started using mixed targeting, eg. have rocket turrets also attack medium promethium and oxide asteroids, the two most abundant asteroid types beyond the edge, but I noticed that this causes occasional damage to the ship. The reason for this is that medium asteroids are a product of big asteroids and these have to be shot down first before medium asteroids can be targeted. That means on average, medium asteroids are closer to the ship. The problem now is that if you target asteroids close to the ship with rockets you run in to two problems. One is that you are in danger of friendly fire due to the rocket aoe and the second is that rockets have a travel time, which in combination with the overkill targeting suppression causes the medium asteroids to get even closer to the ship than they otherwise would be. Why? Because when they are targeted by a rocket that would kill them, the gun turrets stop shooting at them. As a result this extends travel time of the asteroids to the ship until the rocket hits. This time window is sometimes enough for the asteroid to hit the ship and cause damage. So I highly recommend to not have mixed targeting because of this. I only use it at the very front for rail guns to shoot down medium promethium asteroids as well.
- i also noticed that big asteroids become only dangerous after aquilo when huge asteroids appear. The reason for this is that when spawned from the vacuum, big asteroids dont have random directions, which means they never accelerate towards the ship and only experience gravitational pull from the hub. When they spawn from huge asteroids though, the get an initial random directions, that means they can accelerate directly towards the ship from any position the huge asteroid was at. That means, rocket towers on the side can be turned off before aquilo because the big asteroids never become dangerous on the side. After aquilo there are huge asteroids though, which means random acceleration , so you have to protect the side with rocket towers again.
Ok, thats almost it, one more ship but this has been shown earlier in the thread, this is just for completion
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- cachalot_class.txt
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