Should Gleba and Vulcanus have been swapped?

[JackTheSpades]

Vulcanus is the planet closest to the sun, thus providing the best solar panels of any planet.
Except, a single Chemical Plant making steam from calcite and acid is outperforming them all.
Solar panels feel completely wasted on Vulcanus given how trivial it is to make power from steam turbines.

Meanwhile Gleba is even further away then Nauvis and has less effective solar panels all the while being heavily reliant on the incredibly energy hungry tesla turrets for the late game as they are clearly the best defense against stompers.
The main way to produce power on Gleba is to burn waste (and maybe rocket fuel).

Personally, I've just set up a nuclear reactor on Gleba with a space ship occasionally delivering some fuel cells. For me, the amount of spoilage I produce just cannot possible provide a full perimeter with testla turrets and while I could substitute it with rocket fuel or try and ramp up production I just don't see the point when a nuclear reactor takes care of all of that.

I guess maybe the idea is that you'd have fusion reactors by the time big stompers become a problem but even so, I feel it would have been nicer to have the good panels on Gleba instead.

(On a side note, it would also have been interesting to have some varying day vs. night lengths much like real life. Heck, you could even have the planet closest to the sun tidally locked in perma-day.)

[Premu]

Vulcanus is generally seen as best first planet to land on - and here the high solar efficiency means you don't need to bring a lot of solar panels to power your initial base. Sure, you can replace them later, but you will have to start with solar first.

Also, the actual production on gleba doesn't need that much power. And starting a large scale production of rocket fuel is a good idea anyway as you need it to fuel the outgoing rockets. So using it for power production should be fine.

[Tertius]

The main way to produce power on Gleba is to burn waste (and maybe rocket fuel).

Personally, I've just set up a nuclear reactor on Gleba

Rocket fuel, fruit intermediates and spoilage is the way to Gleba energy. As far as I see, you don't need nuclear power. Burning leftover fruit intermediates, spoilage, and after that rocket fuel as fallback is more than enough. Burn surplus Yumako mash and jelly, don't wait for spoiling. The heating tower is very efficient (250%) with converting stuff to heat. Its just slightly more complex than on Vulcanus, where you directly create steam and just feed steam turbines.

The advantage of both is that you don't need any extra fuel infrastructure. You can of course use nuclear reactors on Gleba, but if it fails importing fuel for some reason, all your stuff will spoil and you need to power up your whole factory again, which could be tedious. By using fruit products for power instead, you have a continuous and infinite supply from nothing.

I use solar power just for bootstrapping. On Vulcanus it's one pumpjack for acid and 1 machine for acid neutralization, manually feeding calcite. As far as I remember, 1 steam production cycle with manually feeding the first calcite is enough to keep it going forever, as long as you make sure you don't consume all steam for steam condensing.

On Gleba, I also used solar power just for bootstrapping, and additionally a few imported rocket fuel to initially heat the first 500°C. The very first facility created Yumako mash and directly burnt it, which was enough to power this first facility. Built the first biochambers, then extended to jellynut processing, then bioflux etc. The continuously produced mash and jelly was more than enough for power production. In spirit, the heating tower is the same as a nuclear reactor, just without neighbor bonus.

So in the end, solar power only matters for space platforms. Space platforms up to Fulgora can be powered by solar panels. Only if you go to Aquilo and beyond, it's advisable to change to other means: nuclear or fusion.

[eugenekay]

Vulcanus is the planet closest to the sun, thus providing the best solar panels of any planet.
Except, a single Chemical Plant making steam from calcite and acid is outperforming them all.
Solar panels feel completely wasted on Vulcanus given how trivial it is to make power from steam turbines.

A slightly different angle to this point: Vulcanus teaches you that it is possible to take shortcuts to enable massive Production (Lava makes Iron/Copper essentially free; Electricity is almost free once you have a chem plant going; Productivity researches for steel etc become available)…. But at the same time this still is not enough to take down a Demolisher reliably for most people: it takes Tactics, not just Production or a ton of Laz0rz. Making Solar power produce less ruins the feeling of “power is cheap, use lots of it”.

That is the lesson that I got, anyway. There are many ways to play the game! If you don’t like Gleba’s challenges, well, there is a queue.