1)use /cheat all
2)build one
3) put speed x64
4)when lamp is green ship will go to vulcanus
5) you can remove condition
6)watch endless space junk scavenging !
Why :
It's a proof of concept, a space platform designed to make legendary iron ore without using quality modules in the crushers, instead it grab all the iron it can and crush it with efficency module, but then it puts it in a recycler with quality module. If the iron ore isn't legendary, it is throw back to space, if the iron is legendary, it ring the speaker and keep it preciously in the hub. This occurs twice an hour or something with the default level of research given by the command /cheat all. The yield is very low, it only keeps the iron ore that upgrade from regular quality to legendary in a single step, it would be easy to process more of the iron, through several recyclers with a bigger ship, in case of a new version of factorio where the crushers don't accept quality modules anymore.
This somewhat mimicking how you could upcycle the ore directly at the mining drill but instead from space, to illustrate that you don't have to build a whole factory on space, nor any kind of upcycling loop with intermediate products, a very simple design can do the trick.
Re: Space Platforms
Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2026 7:04 am
by coffee-factorio
My current runs platforms.
The game gave me Ryan, which I thought was awesome.
Ryan-1
First iteration, a basic satellite. Probably going to refurbish to an all normal quality one, it does work well.
Not much to say, the main difficulty is plugging in wires.
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Ryan-2
This was my first colony support ship of the run. There's a pretty low bar on that, all it has to be able to do is run crafts really and I didn't have it do all that much for Gleba. There was a suggestion on here awhile ago to simply capture what you need and use that, on a ship of this scale that works pretty well. Setting up logistics connections appears to be the main difficulty with it, if someone is working on a larger frame and wants to cut a corner they'd use... space that I don't have and rocket logistics I also don't have when this ship was made.
All asteroids are placed on a heap forward of the ship and speed is governed to 80km/s. That makes it safe enough to fly, it has a single ammo box an a short magazine of about 400... magazines
The automall functionality is still manual orders instead of an automatic listing. This combined with the short ammo storage makes an awkward situation where "I don't feel like I do a lot with this scary machine to fly." I needed more basic small supplies which I could hand craft, so I was fine shooting cargo pods onto Gleba randomly and just maintaining a healthy standoff distance from those.
This is more the kind of thing you put together when you run Rush to Space, and even then I feel like it could use 500 more foundation. Managed to get it to use 768. The 1K to 1.5K foundation experience is just better.
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Re: Space Platforms
Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2026 1:56 am
by coffee-factorio
Ryan R3
This ended up being a perfectly acceptable plain donut. Because it is not sweet, it is only acceptable, however it did everything I needed it to do and it changed very little over the course of its lifetime. It isn't spectacularly capable. But its one of those weird little workhorses that can shuffle back and forth between Nauvis and Gleba and shower a colony with plates, belts and ore.
It is clearly elliptical shaped. Not a square / 10. The accumulators would make it capable of doing Fulgora runs.
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How I feel about it is a different matter because:
Swen K.
This is Swen K. At 1600 foundation it weighs in similar. It lacks the capability to do steel burns and gears. It's ammo management policy is much more... liberal. Even for a Rush to Space run it has too many guns. I think if I cut hull protection appropriately I'd knock 8 guns off and 32 foundation off as a result. It'd at least have the same number of guns as Ryan does.
It ends up feeling hard to measure these ships because in your memory, you have this machine that worked. With some long arms you could add gears, and maybe get small steel going on the hull if you needed it. You say things like "well, I could knock off one of the crushers and just use yellow belts for that part to bring it in line for costs". Right up until I did the post operations write up, I'm asking questions about whether or not it is worth it make a build with quality parts.
Because you want a nice rectangle you can complain about, and not a plain donut which clearly has 2 more capabilities and better engineering for the available constraints you have. You'll go so far as to say its cheaper to spend 100 iron and 20 wires for the 400 extra meters of foundation. Plus cost of launches into orbit, for the idea of something someone else could reproduce. So it's an engineering product and not an art piece. It's the wildest thing. I'm proud of what Swen K. did as a line of ships, it is the father of many children and Ryan is one of them. But quality was the death of that ship even when nothing else could kill the thing.
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Re: Space Platforms
Posted: Fri May 29, 2026 11:13 pm
by coffee-factorio
Ryan R4 and Upgrades
Full Sized Hull Final Fitting
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This is a sweet ship. I made a slight cross shape to catch asteroids and did lightening cuts so it wasn't a perfect square silhouette. It's 5400 foundation and rather capable. The full size ship uses the automall well and it built a lot of its own express belts for its final upgrades off it.
Platform Hub w/automall
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Theres a subtle "beak" on the front of the ship where the collectors grab asteroids due to the effectiveness of the rare guns and range of the asteroid collectors. By the way... that level of firepower is overkill even for this level. The spinal layout is based off an experience I had with a ship where a similar layout being insanely survivable when the chips where down, combined with the desire to have a relatively clear input/output scenario around the platform hub. It went from the edge of the solar system to Nauvis after its front gun section was destroyed and it expended all railgun ammo due to an improperly configured thruster - never use timers, velocity varies in a gravity well. So on the one hand, it satisfies having a sense of security. On the other hand, more often than not you jump over the middle 4 section unnecessarily.
Front Detail
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It started life off using small forges. Quality fixes the amount of energy it takes to forge a piece of steel when it's epic to legendary, at rare I couldn't get enough beacons on a work space to make a ship that was a sane expenditure of time and material for a single person to construct with my campaign structure (Gleba, Vulc, Fulgora). It isn't a shame though imo, because the ship was always able to drop materials for rocket parts onto a surface so a whole bunch of part shortages went away when I got advanced asteroid processing.
Gleba Forge Set
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A ship in the 5-8K format like this works pretty well though, because once you get foundries you've got the capability to do rocket parts on the ship itself if you want to or all the materials you'd otherwise desire. I lucked out on Vulcanus because the game just handed me five rare foundries like it knew me.
Vulcanus Rare Forge Set
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There's a missed opportunity or two on the hull, due to time and technology constraints: there's space on the ship for more thrusters but ultimately it moved fast enough. So they were never added. There was space to do coal liquifaction off nuclear but that requires redesigning that area of the ship so it didn't make it.
The nuclear reactors are something I started putting on colony support ships prior to foundries and winning the game. Because they save... so much space on solar panels. It has just enough cargo space to make the 16000 foundation for its next level.
Re: Space Platforms
Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2026 9:08 am
by xkorpion
2.1 Experimental Play.
My obnoxiously wide and overpowered starter "blockade runner"
It hold 5 minutes of fuel for 5 thrusters. I have never seen my speed on any of my platforms go over 200kps so I'm not sure what sorcery people have going on in the thruster/fuel efficiency thread. I can't make sense of how they are accomplishing the speeds over 200kps nor the efficiencies, but I did adapt some learning to this platform so the fuel pump is controlled by the speed of the platform. HUGE savings to fuel so I don't have to carry nearly as much as I am now or produce as much at the nauvis (novice?) orbital.
And so with 2.1 we can finally have refueling depots, now if WUBE wants to make our lives easier and allow thruster fuel to go into barrels, that would be yummy.
This design gives me 1 space science / s. AND collects and stores over 5k iron ore & 5k carbon and 1k ice blocks. It's excesssive and a WIP naturally. But it's all automated and now with plat -> plat xfers certain dreams are now reality.
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It makes water barrels to send over to the aforementioned blockade runner as well as the ore and carbon necessary to produce fuel. It makes yellow ammo at a rate of 1.5/s, and sends over 2k worth to the blockade runner keeping it stocked between expeditions. I'm not at the point in my game, obviously, to have developed a singular platform that can just hang out anywhere and defend itself as well as provide science and what have you. I may do that, but I like the idea of these factory-ships that can be designs to fulfill certain roles and its not always a mega-ship. I recall in the SA design process (FFF?) it was mentioned by devs that the platform would be like a train but for the stars
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It's funny how sometimes, you get something and it just sticks with you for hundred hours. This was, that ship. The design that just worked. Its original implementation ran on a Rush to Space run because that's my chosen golf handicap. The ship was made from mixed quality parts drawn off science and its own foundation. The original pattern was really heavily tested and ended up working like a charm. The 2x6 gun cluster directly to the front of the ship kills everything. Normal collectors were used because... that's really all you need for the inner systems. The ship had space reserved for calcite processing. Ammo is fed through a magazine in the middle of the ship. Thrusters are uncommon to change the power/weight ratio and free up calcite once that's relevant. It did just over 100 km/s once the damage upgrades matured, but had its speed governed to 80 km/s so it could run on chemical science upgrades without issue.
It has an automall and did general construction of engines to make sure those could simply be dropped to Gleba at the start of the run. It's main drawback was poor cargo capacity. But the tradeoff for speed and effective general construction was worth it, time and again. The only thing it couldn't do well was foundation prior to a foundry and... I'll be honest, that won't happen unless you make a very large ship. In 2.0.x you couldn't just make a large space station with the blast furnaces to do that.
Fulgora model after a design upgrade
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Later iterations had foundries and accumulators over Fulgora, to dampen power spikes that overwhelmed the uncommon solar panels. Foundries gave ships the capacity to do several hundred foundation per hour and eventually upgrade, in the same space that the uncommon electric furnaces took up. These ships and their autocrafters where present for 150 hours, for two reasons.
The first reason was that no great autocrafter for less foundation was needed. So if I put on legendary parts well... I'd shrink work stations down to a foundry but I wouldn't effect the design tradeoffs of the ship.
The second reason was the concept reached maturity at 100 hours. A general purpose ship could largely be replaced between 100 and 150 hours with a ship specialized for shipping, or a modular brick of large size, and while another general purpose design was made and I found it to be rewarding, it wasn't so satisfying and would immediately be upgraded for a larger, more capable ship in another role. Plus, there's almost always a capital ship in my games like Ryan that can just get more stuff done. It will be interesting to see how this changes in 2.1.x
Re: Space Platforms
Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2026 1:51 am
by coffee-factorio
And then, to create a better iteration of a general purpose design. I had to go through not one but two iterations.
The first one is this 2nd pattern of tlcoffee.
tlcoffee 2nd pattern.
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It's 6K foundation and does a better job milling parts. It does LDS and Proc. Units on its deck. But... great, once you add more raw materials you really need to improve cargo space and that didn't really happen. It got upgraded vertically. But the ship itself never felt satisfying and only one of this class was ever made. It was nice aesthetically though.
Dustician. Only Pattern.
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The next pattern was Dustician. It did some interesting things but was undergunned as an Aquilo special. And it's wide frame for its 8K size meant it was relatively slow in operations.
Unused asteroids find a home in the recycler.
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It had a bulk recycling line that only really worked out towards the end of 2.0.x as I got a lot of upgrades for it. But this strategy needs to be deployed further out if it is to work at all, and with high asteroid productivity upgrades. This was acceptable, in theory I replace that part with a different mission module. In practice it just got left there while I did legendary stack inserters.
The real high value line.
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And then we have the normal-recycle cliff explosive line. How this works is: any normal cliff explosives really work, stack those on a belt. Any high quality ones you give to Vulcanus so they can be turned into interesting metallic fluids and used. The uncommon+ stones just got fed into a stone furnace line as fast as possible. The fluids went to make legendary speed 3 modules. The kiss of death though was it's poor firepower and speed. It did end up lasting for nearly a hundred hours but mainly because I started pretending it didn't exist.
Plus, I needed to source better parts. A decision was made to make legendary parts as fast as possible. This worked out as a proc. units build (in 2.0 no less) because I had legendary EM Plants and Foundries first. And those meant that I could just steamroll science on Nauvis to my goal and then put the extra proc. units I was making into an upcycle/downcycle line. And then I got a severe case of burnout doing that and science at the same time. And had to take a break for awhile.
