Factorio Forums

Many players enjoy coming up with their own designs, and just playing games "blind" in general.
Sure, your first designs aren't optimal (and aren't even good), but they are yours and you've managed to make them work.
This also applies to ship designs you make on your first playthrough - your ships are going to be poorly designed, and each rocket launch costs like an Apollo mission because you barely make any blue chips, but you can get things moving between planets...

Until your next destination is Aquilo.

There's several challenges that make putting together an Aquilo ship on the fly unreasonably hard.

• An Aquilo ship's ammo production needs to match the ammo consumption in real time, while an inner planet ship can safely sit idle at Nauvis, slowly building up the ammo supplies, or even just import bullets from the planet.

• A rocket turret knowledge check - you can't travel to Aquilo without some rocket turrets, and thus, without the second type of ammo you need to produce (again, at speeds faster than consumption!) and weave through your ship. It also requires carbon fiber, which you've likely skipped because the Stompers broke your supply of brain fruit and your factory fell into a spoilage death spiral.

• The cost of an Aquilo ship is intimidating - while yes, resources in Factorio are practically infinite, a relatively new player hasn't realised it yet. An Aquilo ship won't reach its destination if it's not a decently sized flying factory, while an inner planet ship can be barely holding together. When put side-by-side, just this difference alone will feel like a massive wall you need to climb, or else no further progress.

• Asteroids above Aquilo are all ice. If you didn't see that coming and haven't built asteroid reprocessing, your ship will get stranded with no ammo, no fuel, and with 20-30 minutes of playtime lost to loading the save taken before the flight to Aquilo, as the ship was too expensive to accept losing it.
  • Giving that a uniquely named auto-save is created upon your first flight to each planet, reloading after a failed maiden voyage appears to be intentional game design. Not a big fan - I feel like one could balance the ship cost in a way where rolling with the punches and building a new ship in place of a destroyed one would be reasonable.

Ultimately, these bullet points converge on having to be informed about the upcoming challenges in advance - watch videos, have a creative test world, use someone else's blueprints. In other words, on spoiling the challenge, while many would prefer to approach it blind. And you can play Factorio blind reasonably well, except for this one case.

I resorted to making a creative test world, but seeing your ship successfully arrive to its destination for the first time was undermined by already seeing that happen in the test world.

I want to re-emphasize again that I'm talking about playing Space Age (or even Factorio) for the first time - the player isn't aware yet that resources are pretty much infinite and the player wants to experience the content in real time as it unravels. This player, by definition, still hasn't "gitted gut" yet.