Space Platform 101 Discussion

[mmmPI]

You totally can (and should!) produce Ammo onboard the Platform; it just happens that the example Ship Design I shared is from a Save where I was trying to produce/use as many Bullets-per-minute as possible to consume extra Uranium; versus the more conventional Science-per-Minute benchmark. The core Semaphore mechanism can exist on any planet within the schedule; it works best if there are no other Conditions for that Stop. I also use the Planetary Distance Adjustment mod to make Platform travel slightly more of a challenge.

Yeah sorry for the phrasing, i didn't mean your ship in particular, "uranium ammo" is confusing because it illustrate 2 different thing in my mind, either the "cargo" or the "necessary ammo". In the case of the semaphore, wether the "cargo" or the "necessary ammo ( or fuel)" is missing, the platform will not depart, causing a possible bus-munching. It's good and safe if the platform are prevented to leave without the minimum fuel & ammo buffer. Better have them all stuck in one planet than destroying themselves into space, as it's the risk with platform that have "time passed condition", if for whatever reason you're not supplying the "necesseray ammo" the platform is schedule to depart anyway. There are in a way less risk of bus-munching, because the lack of cargo won't interrupt anything, but the platform then need to be "safe" or "selfsustained" for ammo

[mrvn]

How do I schedule one ship (platform) to leave when another leaves from a different planet? With trains we can limit the number able to travel to a station but planets don't have this functionality.

I'm trying to make platform 1 load/unload at Nauvis while 2 is loading at Vulcanus etc. Without some form of cross-platform scheduling they always bunch up at whichever planet has the slowest loading.

While it is true that you cannot send a Signal between Surfaces or Platforms to coordinate their departure, you can send Items to create a 1-bit Semaphore - On or Off. This is a similar concept to old-fashioned Railway Tokens which ensured only 1 Train was present on a Track greatly reducing the chances of a deadly collision by two trains meeting head-on.

A rocket is a very expensive way to handle tokens. A cheaper way would be to have the space platform produce a token and have the landing pad request the token as a signal. This also has the advantage that you don't need to fill a whole rocket with tokens for it to automatically lift of.

For this to work the platform would produce exactly one item of something cheap but not stored on the platform or shipped around. A yellow magazine works for me. When speed > 0 place exactly one yellow magazine in the hub and set the schedule to wait for "item <yellow magazine> = 0". This then makes the space ship pause at it's destination. The ground can then request 1 yellow magazine to signal the space ship to leave.

You can use multiple such signal items. For example use 2 items A and B. Put A into the hub when speed > 0. Item A is always requested at each planet. When item A arrives on planet item B is requested on planet. The space ship puts item B into the hub 20s after item A has left and then waits for item B to be gone before it leaves. That way each space ship leaves when the next space ship arrives. This is great for Gleba where spoilage time is more important than waiting for requests to complete.

[mmmPI]

A rocket is a very expensive way to handle tokens. A cheaper way would be to have the space platform produce a token and have the landing pad request the token as a signal. This also has the advantage that you don't need to fill a whole rocket with tokens for it to automatically lift of.

There appears to be couple misconception, you never have to fill a whole rocket with tokens; you just need to send 1 item, there's an option on the platform request called "minimum custom payload" for this. You can also limit the inserter stack size to 1 so you don't insert more than 1 "thing" in the silo, which will automatically depart if a platform is requesting a single item with a minimum custom payload of 1. ( which you can read from the silo ).

Then a rocket isn't necessarily expensive, you have to consider the broader context, if your spaceship carry (only) 100 piece of refined concrete ( 1 rocket capacity), it would double the cost. if you need 500 rocket launch to fill- in your ship, adding 1 for the token it's down to about 0.2% of the price, if you need 5000 then it's 0.02% ... It's not very expensive then, it's only a marginal fraction of the the cost of shipping the items.

For the rest i'm not sure i can follow, Do you have a working version of what you describe ? I 'm lost when you say " the groud can then request 1 yellow magazine to signal the space ship to leave ", it appears problematic to me because i wouldn't know from the ground when and which platform is ready to leave, How would you know when to request that item ?

Say i have 5 platforms, they all have their unique item in ther hub, platform 2 is ready to leave but not the others. I don't see what kind of mechanism allows to know which unique item to start requesting from my hub, whereas if the platform is the one that request the token i can read that on the silo which allows me to identify which platform are present in orbit. I mean think i can follow what eugenekay described, but here i'm at a loss.