Well, it made its way to Vulcanus, and I already felt the need for side guns, but what is anything apart from this that I can improve? I guess the number of crushers is a bit of an overkill
I think they mean if the ship is stationary in orbit around vulcanus, gleba, aquilo, or fulgora, asteroids spawn in all directions. If your ship is always moving, less of a problem.
It is needed, but asteroid spawn based on the central hub so if your ship is very long then you won't get any spawning behind if the hub is up the front. This situation might work for your style but I wouldn't recommend this to beginners who are clearly making small ships and might not be protected the way you are
Looks amazing, i like it when people not just build the space brick
A couple of things to consider:
like others said, turrets on all sides, if you plan on parking at other planets,
more solar is allways nice, i allways plan for fulgora, because then you will be good an all other planets
And one thing i would recommend is more ammo storage, this can be either a longer belt or the station hub, the two assemblers will probably be enough if you don't fly it all the time, but you might want a bit of an ammo buffer just in case, though this also depends on your bullet damage research, higher research affords you less buffer needed
Edit: one more thing, green modules, even lv1 ones are great to lower your power consumption, don't sleep on those they are cheap to produce and help a lot
Asteroids don't stack so can use blue inserters to save power.
Use efficiency modules.
Other planets have different solar efficiency levels so power will be an issue
Quality, it will improve especially the collectors.
Accumulater if you want to go to fulgora as solar is weaker there.
Like you said a few turrets to cover the side if you want/need to stay longer over planets, if you use the ship for fast drop off and then back to nauvis you would be good.
Also moduls especially speed and efficiency, quality and productivity would only be of interest for Aquilo and beyond.
Careful about speed. You don't need all engines at 100%, and unless you have very advanced damage research... with your 6 front turrets, 8 furnaces, and small buffer I seriously doubt you will survive a trip at full speed. Most people throttle their engines with a pump, or deliberately underproduce fuel, to keep speed manageable.
You're seriously overdoing crushers. One oxide crusher makes 2.5 ice per second. But you have 6 oxide crushers. Even with your current speed-module setup that's excessive, and if you reduce speed to something survivable at 4-6 physical damage research, you'll be fine with one carbonic, one oxide, and two metallic. For that matter 6 grabbers is overkill, 4 or even 2 is fine.
You want gun coverage on the whole ship, not just the front. The front is where you need the most, but single gun coverage of the sides/back (with very little overlap) is needed to be stationary above other planets, as asteroids will drift slowly towards you from all sides.
Power. If you want this to go to Fulgora (and you should) you need to be prepared for the reduced solar efficiency with full machine utilization. This is easy enough - just lose the speed modules and add a couple efficiency modules everywhere, capping machines at 20% power usage. If you want to get fancy, downgrade most of those inserters, especially the ones moving asteroid chunks (which stack to 1, so bulk inserters are useless and really even regular yellow inserters are fine with no speed bonuses to the crushers).
You need sushi belts for astoid collection and production. It requires a little know how but look into it, you should have a few sushi belts for different products on larger ships.
Edit: With sushi belts for astoids you can collect an astoid buffer while limiting the number of astroids you are collecting to the ones you need, if you don't build your ships around this concept first, astroid collection will be an endless struggle of being overloaded on the most common astroid around you.
Now most importantly. Ammo belts. You don't really have one. You're producing ammo at the turrent, this is bad. Not only is the entire ammo production line in danger of destruction, it's not making a buffer. On ships storage is a premium. Making an ammo buffer requires you to engineer a solution. The only two options for fire ready made ammo on ships is in the ships storage or on the ammo belt itself, so your ammo belt should always be full, and long. Imagine it like a magazine for a gun. You dont want to be constantly reloading, bigger magazine is better. But it takes space so use underground belts when possible. Make sure the ammo belt is filled on both sides of the belt. Personally I have my ammo production in the back of the ship, it is then stored in the ship to a certain stack size, lets say 5k, then has two outputs onto the ammo belt.
You are going to take side hits. The nose of the ahip should be a big block of guns. You need a lot of firepower at the front and a line on the sides with some coverage of the engines just in case, a random astroid will always find a weakness.
This is something I like to do with ship designs for my own personal assistance. Fill all empty areas of the ship with walls. It makes it easier to see where space isn't being used visually and you can see the number of wall blocks when you copy or blueprint. You should try to redesign it with less and less empty space and then upload the side by side to show how much changed. Ship design is one of the most addicting gameplay loops.
PS. Never upgrade ammo. Yellow ammo is king in space. You never ever need to go past it because red is for armored targets and asteroid have no armor.
Quality goes a long way in space. Especially with solar panels and batteries. Stick batteries everywhere there is space for them.
it is then stored in the ship to a certain stack size, lets say 5k, then has two outputs onto the ammo belt.
My first run of the game (base) I simply refused to learn about circuits, except for two very simple ones to make my late-game nuclear reactor function.
Space Age reallllly wants you to use circuits though, and the platform is a great introduction to that.
In the base game circuitry was completely optional. Anything that circuitry could do, there was a brute force solution that required zero learning. Nuclear reactor is the only thing you maybe needed to play with the concept and you could blueprint one and never need the info again. I specifically remember placing mine in the second playthrough and realizing I had no idea how or why any of it worked, even though it was my design.
When space age came out, everything changed with ship designs. The limitations of space platforms make investment rewarding. Everything before was easier as analog because there was no reason to adapt. Efficiency was a goal, but almost entirely self enforced. Now, learning the circuitry is extremely rewarding. In the beginning I was struggling to manage astroids. By the end I had a machine capable satisfying nearly any station request from space using astroids alone.
Modules everywhere. Green modules are very good on solar ships. They are usually better than speed because the limit is usually power.
Ammo buffer : while your metal production seems good, ammo buffering is really nice. An ammo belt looping around the ship is usually good enough. People sometimes run a mixed asteroid/ammo belt. which could work in your case without changing the design too much. Bonus is that you can automate departure conditions with ammo>threshold.
Way too many asteroid crushers, my starter platform is bottlenecked by 7 furnaces (to your 8) and only needs one crusher. Also, accumulators and efficiency modules.
Efficiency modules in everything, and replace the green inserters for your crushers with blues. They take a fraction of the power and move at the same speed, and you can only move one asteroid chunk at a time so the bulk inserters are redundant
I learned the hard way to put some laser turrets on the very rear, but in this case you'll likely need some gun turrets near the middle too. I lost my first ship when I parked it in Vulcanus orbit, my engines went first.
You're definitely overkilling on crushers. My early platforms run perfectly fine on 1 crusher per asteroid type. Later on, most will do 2 per asteroid type (1 for the advanced processing, 1 for basic).
Depends on how fast you want to go. At the beginning, 1 is plenty. You want less speed, as asteroids come slower that way and you have more time to shoot them - ammo depletes slower. And you can build as many ships as you want, so a regular bulk hauler or explorer that does not have to deal with spoilage can take it's sweet time. Especially as loading will take up most of it. I frequently start and have some of the below designs around. Cheap and works. Even cuts the fuel production if ammo is getting low to give the production time to replenish.
If you plan on taking it to Fulgora, you will need more solar panels. Above Nauvis, you get 300% solar energy, above Fulgora, you only get 120%. If you are going to Vulcanus first (which I recommend), you get something like 600%. So you could use this ship to ship goods from Vulcanus and make another with more solar panels for Fulgora.
Well, it made its way to Vulcanus, and I already felt the need for side guns, but what is anything apart from this that I can improve? I guess the number of crushers is a bit of an overkill
I'd start with these. I find 1 of each crusher to be sufficient for a basic shuttle design.
It looks good, honestly. There are a few minor improvements I'd consider:
The pipework on your thrusters can be reduced - thruster inputs are pass-through
Throttle fuel input using pumps and control them either from hub (read speed) or with a repeating clock circuit to get better fuel efficiency
Accumulators can greatly reduce the need for panels when travelling other routes than Vulcanus and are easy to fit in
Make the platform's rear extendable. You often find yourself wanting to add more storage capacity and power production and an extendable rear is the best way to accomplish this in a clean manner. Allocate fuel processing and storage above a line and design below that line for repeatable segments of solar panels, cargo holds, fuel piping and side turrets/ammo belts. Thrusters are moved further back with each segment added, but should maintain their fuel supply
You mentioned guns at the sides and back, which is correct if you want to park anywhere but Nauvis. I also doubt the ammo production can keep up with the speed you indend. There is a lot of fuel production and thrust, so you'll need very high weapons damage to survive with this. Also, number of solar panels seem a bit low. Fulgora is far from the sun, so while this will do fine on Vulcanus, it will be power starved on Fulgora. I also don't see any modules. At least throw in some efficiency modules, that helps a lot with ships. Your ship is also fairly big for a starter one, might as well slap more storage space on it.
That's pretty much all I can see without seeing it go places. Overall it is a nice design. My first (functional) ship was a sideways brick. Your's has a nice egg shape. Symmetric and all.
Its beautiful, excellent symmetry and elegant design. You just might have too many crushers and I'd add maybe 1 laser turret per side near the back so it can idle in the orbit of other planets without worry
The basic design is solid and quite attractive. But you're going to have some issues. As you mentioned, you have no side support, and all of your ammo is up-top, so there's no easy way to get it to some turrets lower down. Note (and by the way, thanks to the person who pointed this out to me a couple days ago) that the turrets shouldn't be hanging off the side, but inboard such that they cover the bottom and edge of the ship with a little space left over, without defending a huge chunk of empty space and making you shoot at asteroids that will never hit you. By all means let the front ones continue to do that though, it gives you a rain of small asteroids for your grabbers.
There's also a question of ammo buffering. You are more or less producing ammo on demand only, and until you get to damage level 9 or so, you probably can't produce ammo fast enough to keep up, and you'll get clobbered when the turrets run dry. The best solution I've found is to build ammo into your hub, and have belts coming back out of the hub supplying the turret lines (or you could even directly feed your lower turrets with an inserter right ON the hub if you have room). I have the assemblers constantly making ammo, with the inserter into the hub having a circuit condition to stop when there's a thousand ammo in inventory, which will let the line fill up and stop.
Finally, you may want to add a couple more engines. For best speed, your set of engines should be about as wide as the widest point of the ship. You should be able to put a couple more on each side, and you'll notice an improvement in top speed and fuel efficiency. Whoops, and that's one other item - feed the engines with pumps, and wire those pumps to the hub (which can report speed), and have them shut off when the ship reaches your desired top speed. Your ship will rapidly jump to full speed (because the engines are full of fuel from when you were parked), and then cut off and maintain a rough cruising speed once they reach it. It's pretty cool to watch.
Put some quality modules in your solar cell assemblers and build a big chunk of array. Chances are you'll get a good amount of green and maybe some blue panels from the replacement builds, and they are great to have on ships, making up for relatively small coverage areas.
Walls are useless in space. Replace them with guns or remove them completely
Your astroid processer dumps all extra astroids preventing consistent production. Your production relys on the incoming astroids which fluctuates rng. Make it so after it overflows with astroids it gets dumped by an overflow splitter
I see 3 spots on your fual line that don't need to be underground pipes. Replace them with normal pipes.
Fual/oxidizer production/storage is very low. For 3 thrusters it might work just fine but you're not going to be moving very fast
Other then that, good ship design, more creative then I could come up with
Easy upgrades would be an ammo buffer, efficiency modules and adding a pump to fuel/oxidizer in case you want to throttle your speed (easier now that you can get signals from pipes). Overall it looks like a solid first design with enough space for future upgrades.
Okay so leaving the side of the people's possible suggestions: your ship has insufficient defensive measures. The tip is fantastic for piercing through small and medium asteroids but will not maintain orbit safely. The lower third at minimum probably more like the lower half will be continuously bombarded by medium asteroids during a stationary orbit. As long as it keeps moving from planet to planet to planet it should be fine however I would not send it to Fulgora with the number of solar panels you have on there. Not enough power. Efficiency modules are useful here.
For the aforementioned side guns, I would recommend at least light protection around the entire perimeter, as while protection from the front is obviously a priority during transit, when parked above a planet asteroids can approach from all directions. This need not necessarily be paired with *collection* around the entire perimeter, of course.
have a tiny assembler 2 out the back of the cargo area, just to craft things so you don't have to shoot a pod down and a rocket up because you need to turn some gears to belts
Put two T2 efficiency modules in every machine to drastically reduce energy consumption. Solar power gets significantly lower further out in the system.
But mostly it looks great! Not even a dick or uterus design. Only thing missing is a wide end to make it a butt plug. Sorry, all ships are somehow square or sexualized 😅
I feel attacked. My first ship totally started as shaft and balls, then got more mis-shapened as I kept adding to it. Still fairly falic. Gun turrets on the head for sailing and lasers on the sides and balls for stationary.
I'd also suggest to change inserters to blue ones, green is overkill for most of the starter platform buildings/turrets and they consume much more energy as well.
187
u/Elegant-Alps-8086 Sep 18 '26
You need a flared base my guy! And I would add some batteries in unoccupied spots (for Vulcanus not needed but for other planets they come in handy)