Non-quality promethium science ship and design principles for making non-quality ships
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2026 7:58 pm
Hey folks,
Couldnt find one, but here is mine. A promethium science ship that works fully automatically and can go at least 1.5 mio km towards the shattered planet at stronger explosives lvl 12. With more upgrades it should be able to get there? Never tried though. One round trip with the set schedule takes around 1 hour and yields roughly 10 k promethium and around 7 k promethium science, so it should be around 1-2 promethium science per second.
The requirements for the ship were:
- as cheap as possible
- as small as possible
- as fast as possible
- as little research as possible
- no supervision for trips
- self sustainable
- bring back enough promethium science to sustain 1.5 science/second, that is my current base science production
Anyhow, it has a schedule that is set such that you load it with biter eggs and processors on nauvis and then it goes until all the eggs are consumed to make promethium and then a bit further to load the belt storage fully with promethium chunks. On return, it will wait until all the promethium chunks have been made into promethium science and new eggs have been loaded before it goes for another round. Its a reasonably fresh blueprint that has been in use for 30 hours without any issues.It needs at least asteroid processing lvl 10 and rockets lvl 12. Before that it wont be able to make enough rockets to survive past aquilo. You can kick start the ship by loading ammo manually and then have it go for some 30 mins between nauvis and vulcanus to to get rocket production starting. It needs a solar panel module to get the fusion reactors going just attach this and load 1000 units of fluoroketone and some cells.
Best used in the early endgame. Its reasonably cheap in terms of resources. I lack the creativity to make a smaller ship without quality.
One more word on the schedule, the 1.9k promethium chunks is an experimentally determined value that determines at which point the ship has to return when flying towards the shattered planet. It is set such, that if you load 1.8k eggs and all of them have been made into promethium science,it will need another 1.9k promethium chunks to have covered exactly half of the journey. This will prevent the ship from going closer to the shattered planet than it has to. It essentially makes sure that the promethium chunk storage reaches around 95%. The ship also automatically changes the target priorities and adjusts the speed it uses depending o where it is, that is past the solar system the railguns will only shoot at huge asterioids and it will go much slower. This is necessary, because this is a non-quality ship and it simply couldnt produce enough rocket at a reasonable size to go any faster and not get wrecked by the asteroids past the solar system.
Also a few design aspects that I noticed which essentially restricted me from making the ship any smaller:
- most of the asteriods for pickup are in front of the ship and next to it at the front of the ship, dont use collectors in the rear of the ship, little to pickup
- most of the damage and clearing is done by rocket towers, keep them and the rail guns very close together.
- Longer is better than wider because of space drag
- Although its better to have a full rail gun front, at lower speeds, low asteroids, and low asteroid processivity, you have to collect asteroids in the front
- better to make promethium science in space because it takes a lot of resources to send them to space with rockets after dumping
- if you go slow, some of the huge asteroids gravitate towards the ship and eventually will damage things at the rear. Either you go faster, or smaller or both. It also makes inverted wedges to be the optimal form for ships, that is wider in the front than at the back
- Weight doesnt really affect max speed below 5000 tons...
- eventually you should stop collecting promethium asteroids because you cant collect enough of the others asteroids
Many of these issues are resolved with legendary collectors which have much higher collection range and rate and the higher throughput of legendary assemblers/foundries.
Let me know what you think of it and/or share your non-quality ships! Happy to get some inspiration!
Couldnt find one, but here is mine. A promethium science ship that works fully automatically and can go at least 1.5 mio km towards the shattered planet at stronger explosives lvl 12. With more upgrades it should be able to get there? Never tried though. One round trip with the set schedule takes around 1 hour and yields roughly 10 k promethium and around 7 k promethium science, so it should be around 1-2 promethium science per second.
The requirements for the ship were:
- as cheap as possible
- as small as possible
- as fast as possible
- as little research as possible
- no supervision for trips
- self sustainable
- bring back enough promethium science to sustain 1.5 science/second, that is my current base science production
Anyhow, it has a schedule that is set such that you load it with biter eggs and processors on nauvis and then it goes until all the eggs are consumed to make promethium and then a bit further to load the belt storage fully with promethium chunks. On return, it will wait until all the promethium chunks have been made into promethium science and new eggs have been loaded before it goes for another round. Its a reasonably fresh blueprint that has been in use for 30 hours without any issues.It needs at least asteroid processing lvl 10 and rockets lvl 12. Before that it wont be able to make enough rockets to survive past aquilo. You can kick start the ship by loading ammo manually and then have it go for some 30 mins between nauvis and vulcanus to to get rocket production starting. It needs a solar panel module to get the fusion reactors going just attach this and load 1000 units of fluoroketone and some cells.
Best used in the early endgame. Its reasonably cheap in terms of resources. I lack the creativity to make a smaller ship without quality.
One more word on the schedule, the 1.9k promethium chunks is an experimentally determined value that determines at which point the ship has to return when flying towards the shattered planet. It is set such, that if you load 1.8k eggs and all of them have been made into promethium science,it will need another 1.9k promethium chunks to have covered exactly half of the journey. This will prevent the ship from going closer to the shattered planet than it has to. It essentially makes sure that the promethium chunk storage reaches around 95%. The ship also automatically changes the target priorities and adjusts the speed it uses depending o where it is, that is past the solar system the railguns will only shoot at huge asterioids and it will go much slower. This is necessary, because this is a non-quality ship and it simply couldnt produce enough rocket at a reasonable size to go any faster and not get wrecked by the asteroids past the solar system.
Also a few design aspects that I noticed which essentially restricted me from making the ship any smaller:
- most of the asteriods for pickup are in front of the ship and next to it at the front of the ship, dont use collectors in the rear of the ship, little to pickup
- most of the damage and clearing is done by rocket towers, keep them and the rail guns very close together.
- Longer is better than wider because of space drag
- Although its better to have a full rail gun front, at lower speeds, low asteroids, and low asteroid processivity, you have to collect asteroids in the front
- better to make promethium science in space because it takes a lot of resources to send them to space with rockets after dumping
- if you go slow, some of the huge asteroids gravitate towards the ship and eventually will damage things at the rear. Either you go faster, or smaller or both. It also makes inverted wedges to be the optimal form for ships, that is wider in the front than at the back
- Weight doesnt really affect max speed below 5000 tons...
- eventually you should stop collecting promethium asteroids because you cant collect enough of the others asteroids
Many of these issues are resolved with legendary collectors which have much higher collection range and rate and the higher throughput of legendary assemblers/foundries.
- 02-21-2026, 19-36-12.png (13.09 KiB) Viewed 127 times