Help.
I can't design a working spaceship for Aquilo. You know, one using advanced asteroid processing, building rockets.
I do have broad idea how to place, what would go in where and then belt the products for further manufacturing, but when I do lay it out on a (much too large) floor... I can't continue. No Idea how many of what to place, so far I am still unable to build a ship which can relieably produce enough fuel for itself. Sooner or later, tanks will run dry an the vessel limps to its destination.
Yet, I do have to face the fact I am not smart enough to continue further on my own. So, anyone? Please?
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2025 9:39 am
by NineNine
I'm sure if you posted your current attempt here, we'd be happy to help you work through it. That's a whole lot more fun than just copying somebody else's blueprint.
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2025 10:05 am
by theolderbeholder
No idea how to attach the blueprint string.
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2025 11:36 am
by Tertius
You don't use advanced buildings such as modules, foundries, beacons. This can greatly increase output with much lesser footprint. You don't need this huge amount of turrets. You built much too big for no purpose. For the inner 4 planets, 6-8 gun turrets at the front with yellow ammo are sufficient for a (narrow) platform. 2 normal asteroid collectors are enough.
For an Aquilo platform, you additionally need yellow rockets. I didn't investigate the minimum amount of turrets, however it's not that much. The rocket factory needs much more energy and space footprint, so everything has to be bigger. A narrow design is better than a wide design, because the width of a platform limits the speed more than the length and you have to deal with less asteroids. And you don't have solar energy near Aquilo, so solar panels are (in my opinion) not sufficient any more - I started building a small 40 MW nuclear power plant. This rich power supply automatically enables module and beacon use so the factory footprint stays small.
It's probably the most ugly space platform I built. I hate it, but any time I try to improve it, the result is bigger and slower. It's flying with the maximum fuel throughput, resulting in about 300 km/s. It contains a fuel control circuit, but it turned out it's not required - 100% thrust is working.
The most difficult part is to start the reactor. Build in Nauvis orbit. I recommend you start by building the reactor parts and water pipes. Then import water barrels and ice and may be a few more solar panels. Make sure there is a stock of ice with 100-200. Drop it from some other platform to Nauvis, then launch it from Nauvis. Manually fuel the reactor until everything is heated up. As soon as the heat exchangers have some water and are above 500°C, it should run on its own.
My only platform with a clean interrupt-controlled schedule. The schedule is tailored to bring Aquilo's science pack to Nauvis and supply Aquilo with everything not possible to produce on Aquilo, and to bring a few Aquilo-specific intermediates to Nauvis.
11-29-2025, 12-27-58.png (1.66 MiB) Viewed 470 times
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2025 12:10 pm
by jdrexler75
theolderbeholder wrote: Sat Nov 29, 2025 9:02 amI am still unable to build a ship which can relieably produce enough fuel for itself. Sooner or later, tanks will run dry an the vessel limps to its destination.
If that's the main problem (rather than asteroid defence), there are three ways of tackling it:
Reduce fuel consumption: thrusters become really inefficient at full throttle. The common approach is to have a pulsed pump that limits either fuel or oxidizer to run thrusters at around 30% throttle. See the detailed discussion, personally I still like my really simple constant pulse rate setup though it does require manual tuning.
Reduce other water usage so more can be turned into fuel. You're probably using nuclear power which uses a lot of water, you can reduce that a lot with efficiency modules. Until I have fusion, efficiency modules are my default on space stations.
Or brute force, build more of the thing that's your bottleneck until it isn't, then repeat until fuel isn't your bottleneck.
The first station going to Aquilo doesn't need to be a speed racer, slow and steady wins the race until you have researched some cryo techs to make more powerful stations.
Reduce fuel consumption: thrusters become really inefficient at full throttle. The common approach is to have a pulsed pump that limits either fuel or oxidizer to run thrusters at around 30% throttle. See the detailed discussion, personally I still like my really simple constant pulse rate setup though it does require manual tuning.
I benefited greatly from this thread and used that throttling concept in all of my platforms. It's even in my proposal above, although there is enough fuel production to just run everything at 120/s. I guess it's the result after some iterations.
About fuel. You know the maximum amount of fuel you consume: it's 120/s per thruster. In my example, there are 7 thrusters, so the combined maximum fuel consumption is 7 * 120 = 840/s.
Now look at this setup:
11-29-2025, 13-30-05.png (593.47 KiB) Viewed 430 times
You see 2 chemical plants per thruster fuel, one productivity module 3 and one beacon providing 2 speed modules. This results in 775.5/s according to Rate Calculator:
11-29-2025, 13-34-50.png (38.09 KiB) Viewed 430 times
Combined with 1 storage tank per fuel and the inevitable loading/unloading pause at a planet, this results in the ability to fly with 100% thrust for the whole route, no matter the mediocre efficiency of 50%. This all is possible because of the power of the nuclear plant.
The first shown platform has 4 chemical plants per fuel with no modules and no beacons with the regular fuel recipe, which is 4 * 37.5/s = 150/s, which is distributed to 6 thrusters, so each one gets 25/s. More storage tanks don't help, because you need time to fill them. Important is a steady supply.
With a setup like this, fuel throttling has quite an impact: It can prevent the thrusters from running at 120/s consumption with 50% efficiency until the tanks are empty to run at 60/s and 90% efficiency over the whole journey.
This also shows how important it is to use the best available technology:
2 * 4 = 8 chemical plants with the regular recipe = 150/s fuel
vs.
2 * 2 = 4 chemical plants with modules and the advanced recipe = 775/s fuel
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2025 3:48 pm
by theolderbeholder
Ok, a lot to look at.
Concerning my ship - well, its the first one which made the trip, so I stuck with the design. Whenever I changed things, it deadlocked itself, usually in orbit. Or power failed and it was obliterated.
The amount of turets is a remnant from lack of damage resarch.
What I don't get is how (or rather, how to decide when) you change the recipe in othe crusher on demand, this will require more investigation.
I'll see how far I can get, pulsed engines and a working design to compare against might be enough. No sleep tonight!
Thanks, guys.
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2025 4:42 pm
by NineNine
theolderbeholder wrote: Sat Nov 29, 2025 3:48 pm
What I don't get is how (or rather, how to decide when) you change the recipe in othe crusher on demand, this will require more investigation.
I'll see how far I can get, pulsed engines and a working design to compare against might be enough. No sleep tonight!
Thanks, guys.
Changing recipies can be super complicated, and isn't necessary. You can just keep it simple and do one crusher for each type of ore. (That's what I do).
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2025 11:08 pm
by Tertius
The dynamic recipe changing on my platform is for reprocessing metallic and carbonic asteroids into oxide, if there is a surplus of metallic and carbonic and not enough oxide. It mainly helps with the first and initial start from Nauvis to build a buffer of ice, water and steam, but later it's not really required as far as I remember since you collect enough oxide while flying.
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2025 12:59 am
by NineNine
Oh sure. You can also just do that with belts, too. Or with a well-placed wire or two. I'm just saying that changing recipes is a relatively complicated way to go about anything. For somebody who's having some trouble completing the game, I'd normally suggest to simplify things to get past that hump.
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2025 9:20 pm
by theolderbeholder
Nauvis orbit is quite stingy with oxide asteroids, but outwards istr it is not that bad. Still the main reason I never went for reactors. This whole "plan the entire station ahead" thing is one of the main challenges I face.
Re: Spaceship blueprint requested
Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2025 4:56 am
by Mr Wednesday
Tertius wrote: Sat Nov 29, 2025 11:36 am
And you don't have solar energy near Aquilo, so solar panels are (in my opinion) not sufficient any more
You have plenty of solar energy, 60% of the baseline (Nauvis surface output). My Aquilo ship runs on solar.
You don't have solar energy past Aquilo, that's where I switched to fusion power.
