Uranium and ammo shipping too expensive

[Cwythevere]

I know the devs want to force us to produce ammo on the space platforms, and I know they've made interesting, different power systems for the different planets so they don't want us to just take nuclear power wherever we go, but I think there are better ways to accomplish this than making it artificially expensive to ship ammunition or anything related to uranium off the planet.

First, uranium. Every planet seems to have some resource or resources that are exclusive to that planet (Vulcanus=Tungsten, Fulgora=Holmium, etc.) Uranium is Nauvis's exclusive resource. Instead of punishing us for taking Uranium off the planet I think it should be required as part of some late game recipes on other planets. That would match the mechanics for the other planets better.

If we're not supposed to use nuclear power plants on the new planets maybe there's some reason they don't work anywhere besides Nauvis and space? Or maybe shipping the reactors should be more difficult? Honestly, the only other planet I'd even consider using nuclear power on anyway is gleba.

And the whole thing with nuclear bombs is just silly. You can ship an ENTIRE nuclear reactor but a single bomb is too heavy? And it's pointless anyway. It didn't stop me from sending the materials to make a couple on Vulcanus to kill my first demolisher, just forced me to wait a few extra minutes and launch a few more rockets. If that's not supposed to be a viable option, lock nuclear bombs behind Vulcanus science or something like that.

A far as ammunition goes, Yellow bullets are easy to produce in space, so I wouldn't ship them up anyway, and red bullets are unnecessary. But before you get the railgun, arming a platform that travels back and forth from Aquilo takes ages because you can't make rockets very quickly with the resources your asteroid catchers bring in. I have to either ship extra coal and sulfur up from Nauvis, or just ship rockets up 25 at a time, which is a pain but I'll do it if the other option is to wait hours to send my next shipment to Aquilo. Maybe this is a skill issue on my part and there's some better way to break up large asteroids than using rockets, but to me it looks like all the other high end ammo costs even more explosives so I'm not sure what else to do there.

Fulgora and Vulcanus don't require a steady stream of ammunition. The only places that do are Gleba and space. So making ammunition hard to move around only makes the most challenging places more frustrating than they already are.

It also feels a bit clumsy to say "carrying bullets and rockets to other places would be broken, so we're just going to pretend they're SUPER HEAVY."

Maybe instead we could start with rockets that can only hold 1/2 or 1/4th of the current weight, making it impossible at first to ship heavier things, but then have science that unlocks heavier rocket capacity. That way it would still limit the amount of bullets you can take at first, but eventually increase to a full stack or more.

[wobbycarly]

*snip*
But before you get the railgun, arming a platform that travels back and forth from Aquilo takes ages because you can't make rockets very quickly with the resources your asteroid catchers bring in.
*snip*

The logic of your post is sound to me, but on this particular point, one possible workaround is to have the ship fly around the inner solar system a bit first, instead of just hovering over Nauvis. This will increase the frequency and variety of asteroids and potentially allow you to build a buffer of rockets before heading for Aquilo.

And as an extra bonus, if you set the target priority of the rockets to ignore small asteroids, you won't waste them as you let the gun turrets take care of them.

[pioruns]

Indeed, as previous poster says, rocket turrets should be set to destroy medium and big asteroids only, ignore small ones, that way you will not use any rockets while flying around first 4 planets, they will cumulate instead.

[h.q.droid]

A related issue is the 2000 flat physical resistance of larger asteroids. If they'd lower that to 500, legendary uranium ammo could become actually useful.

[pioruns]

I am happy with the challenge as it is. No need to lower resistances or increase ammo capacity in rockets. Current configuration is just a part of the challenge, I am happy with it.
My space ships produce red ammo and rockets in very big amounts, even on Aquilo asteroids are no problem.
Will see how that goes beyond Aquilo, but for that I will have railguns developed I think.

[Tertius]

I don't see an issue with uranium and ammo shipping. You don't need it.

- yellow ammo created on the space platforms is sufficient. To not waste ammo, you need to set a filter in the gun turrets to just target medium and small asteroids:

04-07-2025, 12-55-33.png (47.78 KiB) Viewed 1980 times

To allow space platforms going faster, you need more ammo, so a foundry to create iron plates is very useful due to its inherent speed and 50% productivity bonus.

- yellow rockets against asteroids, created on the space platforms, is sufficient. You need to set a filter in the rocket turrets to just target big asteroids:

04-07-2025, 12-56-02.png (49.01 KiB) Viewed 1980 times

You need advanced asteroid processing, then you're able to create sulfur on a space platform, which in turn is required to create explosives and rockets. A complete rocket production chain on a space platform contains iron plate production (2 foundries, shared with yellow ammo production), 1 advanced carbonic asteroid crushing, 1 coal synthesis, ice melting, 1 explosives, 2 yellow rocket. Balance power consumption, speed and productivity to get proper ratios and throughput with speed modules, efficiency modules, productivity modules and 1 or 2 beacons.
On Gleba it's a similar chain, except you create iron ore with bacteria, biosulfur, burnt spoilage (for carbon), and water is directly available.

I also don't see an issue with nuclear power supply. On Vulcanus, you replace reactors with Acid neutralization. On Gleba, you replace reactors with heating towers and they burn spoiled stuff and rocket fuel from jelly. Jellynut is the key for power production on Gleba. On Fulgora, you catch the lightning. On Aquilo, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Main power supply is fusion, but to get fusion, you need preliminary power production. I used heating towers with rocket fuel, then heat exchangers and turbines. That's synergy since you need heating towers anyway. Just build more of it.

Space platforms for the inner planets can run on solar power. For reaching Aquilo, it's actually a nuclear reactor. But since this platform will visit Nauvis frequently, there is no issue with nuclear fuel cell supply and disposal. Beyond Aquilo you use fusion power, and since Aquilo is a mandatory waypoint, fuel supply is no issue as well.

At least this is how I do it. I observed what options the game offers, and these seem the natural (and probably intended or default) choices.
If shipping uranium and ammo was cheaper, I would probably just ship it instead of looking for alternative solutions. So it's actually good balancing to make shipping expensive as an incentive to find alternative solutions, so in the end you have multiple viable solutions, of which shipping is one, and creating on the spot is another.

[eugenekay]

And the whole thing with nuclear bombs is just silly. You can ship an ENTIRE nuclear reactor but a single bomb is too heavy? And it's pointless anyway. It didn't stop me from sending the materials to make a couple on Vulcanus to kill my first demolisher, just forced me to wait a few extra minutes and launch a few more rockets. If that's not supposed to be a viable option, lock nuclear bombs behind Vulcanus science or something like that.

The real-world Titan Missile System is probably a good. Comparison for the Factorio rocket. It launched the Gemini space exploration capsules, and had an effective Mass to Orbit of around 3500kg. This provided a capability for early communication satellites, or a 1-man orbital demonstration.

The B-53 series of nuclear warheads bore little in resemblance to a Science Fiction “suitcase nuke” - it is a massive implosion-detonation device weighing about 4000kg! The Titan was only barely able to reach a Suborbital/Ballistic trajectory with this load. This makes sense, because Steel, Lead, and Uranium are some of the densest materials available - while a Capsule is mostly oxygen tanks.


I’m really not understanding how this “entire thing is just silly”. It seems to me like they actually did a really good job of balancing “Steampunk Nuclear” rockets. One of my Promethium Collecting ships uses Nukes instead of Railguns for Huge asteroids, so it is a Viable strategy: just not a Good one.

[Mr Wednesday]

If you want to get to Aquilo faster, you can ship massive amounts of explosives to a platform (I think they're 500/rocket). It's massively more efficient than shipping rockets. My Aquilo platform makes all of its rockets using explosives launched from Nauvis. Something like 800 explosives is plenty for a round trip with some loiter time at Aquilo. I just have to make sure not to park it there too long so that it still has enough rockets to make it back.

[h.q.droid]

I am happy with the challenge as it is. No need to lower resistances or increase ammo capacity in rockets. Current configuration is just a part of the challenge, I am happy with it.
My space ships produce red ammo and rockets in very big amounts, even on Aquilo asteroids are no problem.
Will see how that goes beyond Aquilo, but for that I will have railguns developed I think.

500 flat physical resistance won't change the challenge. You'll likely need quite a bit research productivity before overcoming that with legendary uranium ammo. The point is, diversification should become possible at very late game when mass-producing red rockets on board becomes too trivial.

[Rancara]

And as an extra bonus, if you set the target priority of the rockets to ignore small asteroids, you won't waste them as you let the gun turrets take care of them.

Indeed, as previous poster says, rocket turrets should be set to destroy medium and big asteroids only, ignore small ones, that way you will not use any rockets while flying around first 4 planets, they will cumulate instead.

They should be yet even more selective than this, actually. Gun turrets can deal with the medium ones just fine. Rocket turrets should only target the big ones.

On my Aquillo platform, I dump Iron/Copper Ore and Calcite into 2 foundries for molten iron/copper, which dump into 3 more foundries for Iron/Copper/Steel plate. Add 2 Eff. and 2 Prod. modules to each of those. Dump these contents, along with Carbon, Sulfur and a bit of water diverted from my fuel-production section, into a few clusters of Assembler 3's (also with Eff. and/or Prod. modules) to make Red Gun Ammo and Normal Rockets. Set Gun turrets to only target mediums and smalls, and Rocket Turrets to only target bigs, and the platform keeps up with operations just fine with minimal wait times for reloading.

Even so, I agree that the over-restrictive "This is SUPER HEAVIER than it is, because we say so" effect on anything uranium or ammo related feels just dumb, and it should be done away with. Ammo doesn't need to be hard to send up for people to quickly realize just how much easier it is to make things on-platform, or use the obviously provided and intended defenses native to each planet.

And in the few cases where it IS ideal to ship weapons and/or ammo from off-planet (e.g. Uranium Cannon Shells or A-Bombs for Demolishers, or basically any form of defense on Gleba), making it stupidly difficult like this doesn't actually deter people from doing it. It just makes it far more unnecessarily annoying and time consuming to do what they ARE going to do anyway, come hell or high water, no matter how hard it gets. In other words, it doesn't add anything to the game or make the game better in any way. It just makes the game more annoying, or in other words less fun.

[computeraddict]

In other words, it doesn't add anything to the game or make the game better in any way. It just makes the game more annoying, or in other words less fun.

Without the restrictions on uranium export it would be the best power source on any surface with water (or you could even just drop ice from ice harvesting platforms). The restriction encourages non-uranium solutions to demolishers, and encourages in-orbit ammo production.

So yeah, I think it does make the game better, because without friction on import/export of solutions you'd be shoehorned into using the same solutions everywhere.

[Rancara]

Without the restrictions on uranium export it would be the best power source on any surface with water

Patently false.

Heaters on Gleba are exactly as powerful as nuclear reactors, and even more efficient with the ability to burn and run on almost literally anything, including all the extra crap and spoilage (or would-be spoilage) that you WILL very quickly realize you need a sink for. No matter how easy it was to ship uranium fuel cells from Nauvis, it would still be a tedious extra step that folks would quickly realize that there is absolutely no point in bothering with.

Vulcanus is even better in this respect. From the VERY START of getting onto the planet, it becomes obvious that solar panels are already almost ridiculously powerful, making the bother of setting up interplanetary shipments for anything power-related utterly pointless, even if such shipments were relatively easy. And it gets even more like that once you figure out that Vulcanus can give you all the steam for nuclear turbines... without even using the reactors. Just the one easy step of acid neutralization with nothing but a freakin' chemical plant.

And do I really need to address Fulgora? I hope not.

No. All this artificial difficulty doesn't accomplish anything.

The restriction encourages non-uranium solutions to demolishers, and encourages in-orbit ammo production.

Also false.

Did you even read the end of my last post? The whole point I made was that it doesn't effectively encourage those things, and wherever it does, you don't need the artificial extra difficulty for it to do so. Just the inconvenience of an extra step or two of sending things up and shipping them over is enough. Even if you could send a whole warehouse full with just one rocket. To repeat myself in more detail...

If Uranium Cannon Shells are the best way to kill demolishers, then people WILL send them over for the job. Even if they have to send up a whole rocket, or even multiple rockets, for every single damn shell.

For example, the only reason that I didn't use uranium shells to kill my first few demolishers was because I made the mistake of bringing explosive ones instead of the super-high-penetration normal ones when I first made the trip, and I didn't want to bother sending my platform back to get them. Besides, I had it busy farming space metal and space water/carbon for me while I figured things out.

It had nothing to do with how difficult it was to send up the ammo. I'd already brought uranium ammo already anyway as a "just in case" measure to deal with whatever I might encounter on a new planet that I didn't watch a guide for first.

Then there's the nonsense of trying to force non-imported defense on Gleba. Gleba already basically requires that you import Tesla Turrets, and Artillery Turrets and Ammo, or at least the materials and/or production structures for them. Even if the teslas might be better supplemented with locally-supplied rockets later on. So why exactly is this being made so ridiculously exorbitantly difficult? There is literally no point. It's just a detraction from the game.

[computeraddict]

For example, the only reason that I didn't use uranium shells to kill my first few demolishers was because I made the mistake of bringing explosive ones instead of the super-high-penetration normal ones when I first made the trip, and I didn't want to bother sending my platform back to get them.

Isn't this my entire point in one example?

[Rancara]

For example, the only reason that I didn't use uranium shells to kill my first few demolishers was because I made the mistake of bringing explosive ones instead of the super-high-penetration normal ones when I first made the trip, and I didn't want to bother sending my platform back to get them.

Isn't this my entire point in one example?

Lol. No. Read the next paragraph.

EDIT: No wait. That sounded really condescending of me to laugh like that. Sorry. I often don't realize how other people will probably take what I say until some time later. Let me explain why my example is not a summary of your point.

Your point (if I'm getting you right), is that the difficulty of sending up ammo adds to the game by discouraging people from doing that instead of discovering local options for defense.

My point with the example, as clarified in the next paragraph, is that the ammo weight and extra difficulty of sending up ammo is just that. Extra. It's redundant and pointless difficulty for something that is already discouraged to the appropriate level just by the fact that it requires off-planet shipments at all, regardless of the difficulty of sending things up to the platform from where they are made.

And considering that there are cases where you should in fact, perform ammo (or ammo-related) shipping, it's a bad handicap to put on the game.

Furthermore, if just needing to easily ship it isn't enough to discourage people, then the artificial extra difficulty won't be either. Demolishers being the prime example of that.

[computeraddict]

My point with the example, as clarified in the next paragraph, is that the ammo weight and extra difficulty of sending up ammo is just that. Extra. It's redundant and pointless difficulty for something that is already discouraged to the appropriate level just by the fact that it requires off-planet shipments at all, regardless of the difficulty of sending things up to the platform from where they are made.

Your argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is just that rockets should either have infinite capacity or the weight mechanic should be dropped in favor of something else.

Tungsten and lithium also have rocket ore capacities less than 500. The biggest difference is that uranium isn't given a similar capacity forgiveness when being processed as other resources until it becomes a non-fuel final item. For ammo, though, uranium ore is treated about the same as iron and copper. Rocket capacity for magazines goes from 100 to 50 to 25 as the naive ore cost for each goes from 4 to 7.5 to 17.5. Similarly for uranium cannon shells - the capacity goes from 50 to 25 as the ore cost goes from 11.5 to 21.5.

[Rancara]

Your argument, taken to its logical conclusion, <snip>

No. You are not taking the argument taken to its logical conclusion. You are taking it to its maximized conclusion. Completely failing to analyze it with the obviously implied "within reason" clause that such arguments should always be considered with.

You are failing to take the current universal set into account when considering the phrase "no matter how easy", and bloating that universal set of all cases we are considering to have it include the absurd, which it was obviously never intended to include.

I hate it when people do this. It is a similar fallacy to the question atheists like to ask: "If God can do anything, then can God make a rock that God can't lift?"

Of course I'm not saying that rockets should be able to send up infinite loads of ammo, or some such nonsense. That would break the game for anything you did it to. Ammo or otherwise.

Tungsten and lithium also have rocket ore capacities less than 500. The biggest difference is that uranium isn't given a similar capacity forgiveness when being processed as other resources until it becomes a non-fuel final item.

Exactly. It shouldn't be any different, or made artificially more difficult than other materials. If they are balanced by giving them processed weight forgiveness, then uranium products and non-uranium ammo products should be no different. Yet they are. They are denied that capacity forgiveness to make them artificially harder to send up. And I'm saying that that extra difficulty is redundant, artificial, pointless, and dumb. It also feels like the game creator's equivalent of things that story writers would call 'handwavium', 'ignorium', 'plot-hole juice', 'dues-ex-machina', or other such lazy writing tricks.

[mmmPI]

The extra difficulty of shipping uranium is its weight, it's what makes it different than the other material, thus it's not redundant, on the contrary it's unique to uranium, because of its gameplay implication.

Uranium is also the only non renewable ressource, it's well thought of that it's very expensive to ship on space, because it gives a player a reason to think about why, and an incentive to make a platform that uses either renewable material for ammo, or very low quantity of things like uranium fuel cell.

[KillingTimeItself]

i kind of wish they would debuff reactor fuel somehow, and just add a real nuclear bomb to the game, similar to artillery, or maybe literally used with artillery. It's weird that you can just stuff 100 u235 into what is presumably, a manpad, or RPG type weapon. That amount of uranium alone would be sketchy.

It feels a little bit like it's a 10 year old feature that's still kicking around all these years later sometimes. Sure i can put them into spidertrons, but they barely stack to useful quantities, i could put them on my player, but by that point im probably just going to use spidertrons or artillery instead. And if im already using artillery i see no reason i shouldn't at least have access to uranium artillery shells, like all other ammo types, including tank ammo, or nuclear shells.

anyway this thread isn't about this lol, idk how i feel about uranium being expensive to ship tbh. On one hamd, it's a horribly painful material to deal with (irl) and it's also known for being incredibly dense, one of the most dense materials we see in game realistically. So it should be expensive to ship. But uranium as is, it's practically a joke, there isn't anything you can use sufficient amounts of uranium for to actually get rid of it faster than mining productivity research generates new ores for you to mine into processed uranium, let alone the existing ore patches you have lol. I feel like SOMETHING should be done about uranium long term at some point.

sorry about the mostly off topic post, i feel like there's not much that can be said anyway.