Aquilo: add an upgraded roboport that won't freeze
Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2025 6:34 pm
If you want to make a self-expanding construction network you ultimately need nothing more than electric poles and roboports outside your "mall" area.
Back on Vulcanus when I wanted to add a long rail line remotely, I already had a full mall setup with roboports and construction bots, so I just laid out my rail line, then added big power poles and roboports at intervals along the line until the whole thing got built.
I recently found out that rails and trains don't freeze on Aquilo, so they don't need heating. Electric poles also don't freeze. But roboports do... so the same technique will not work here. I would have to either have a really long heat pipe, or heating towers with local fuel production or logistic bot-based fuel delivery*, but only to protect the roboports, not for the railway itself.
Can there be a researchable "better roboport" which can be assembled on Aquilo, which has a higher constant electricity consumption in order to heat itself so that it's immune from freezing? I feel like once you get to Aquilo there are way too few technologies left to research so this'd be a sensible use for cryogenic science, also a sensible use for lithium or one of the other basic Aquilo exclusives (not the quantum processor though, that would be going too far).
Obviously this could be easily done with a mod but I am (currently) playing vanilla and it seems like a basic QoL thing that is just missing.
*I personally don't like using logistic bots, in my current game I resorted to using them on Gleba because that planet is a nightmare IMO and I felt I had to pull out all the stops, but I haven't used them anywhere else, so I don't really like the idea of having to use them on Aquilo merely for fuel delivery.
Back on Vulcanus when I wanted to add a long rail line remotely, I already had a full mall setup with roboports and construction bots, so I just laid out my rail line, then added big power poles and roboports at intervals along the line until the whole thing got built.
I recently found out that rails and trains don't freeze on Aquilo, so they don't need heating. Electric poles also don't freeze. But roboports do... so the same technique will not work here. I would have to either have a really long heat pipe, or heating towers with local fuel production or logistic bot-based fuel delivery*, but only to protect the roboports, not for the railway itself.
Can there be a researchable "better roboport" which can be assembled on Aquilo, which has a higher constant electricity consumption in order to heat itself so that it's immune from freezing? I feel like once you get to Aquilo there are way too few technologies left to research so this'd be a sensible use for cryogenic science, also a sensible use for lithium or one of the other basic Aquilo exclusives (not the quantum processor though, that would be going too far).
Obviously this could be easily done with a mod but I am (currently) playing vanilla and it seems like a basic QoL thing that is just missing.
*I personally don't like using logistic bots, in my current game I resorted to using them on Gleba because that planet is a nightmare IMO and I felt I had to pull out all the stops, but I haven't used them anywhere else, so I don't really like the idea of having to use them on Aquilo merely for fuel delivery.