All our internal R&D docs refer to it as aerodynamics. I will have to issue an internal review to determine if they're aware we're building a space ship not a plane, it could explain the pushback we got when requesting the removal of wings in an early design
Well the 12 parsec shortcut is common knowledge at this point. That's about 3.7e+14km, say 40km/s average speed because acceleration doesn't seem to be a thing in Factorio for 9.27e+12 seconds, or a little over 293,000 Earth years. As long as the flight path doesn't include having to shoot at asteroids I suppose because this model can't self sustain ammo, or maybe it needs a fleet of ammo ships sent to keep it supplied...
I'm not really sure what you mean by this but also your numbers aren't even accurate to what I was saying?
The idea of this design is to make a little fleet of them so we really want to nail the design before copy/pasting. I think we're just about there
We're planning to run a new year's special! Buy 3 at full price get 2 more at 12% off the first one and 9% off the second one but if you get 6 at full price then the discounts on the first set of discounted ones goes up by fifty percent!
It doesn't move very fast and is a bit inconsistent. So I guess that depends on if spending more time up front to build a faster ship outweighs being able to launch something like this earlier
You can actually differentiate a real Deliverator from a knock off by inspecting the Blinky Lights and their Blinky Logic
I wonder if I could tie the Blinky Logic to an existing combinator and remove the dedicated timer combinator
I did what I was "supposed to" until about 3.5 years into college. Then I dropped out, bumbled around trying to find meaning in what jobs I managed to sporadically have, and spent time in my marriage. In my early 30s now, newly divorced, realized I fell into doing what I was supposed to again, and I'm done with it
I'm moving to another country, I'm liquidating retirement to pay for college. In some ways it feels like I've lost so much but in other ways it feels like I get a second shot at the life I want and this time I'm a lot wiser
I consider $100k to be minimum wage in Seattle. It was just enough to not be constantly money stressed as long as I was living modestly. I could see doctors, invest in hobbies, have choices in food, build savings/retirement. Could not eat out every day, buy a house any time soon, or impulse buy particularly expensive stuff. Any time I made less than $100k here I felt like I was always two steps behind, at about that salary my life stopped focusing on scraping by. I make more now and I feel like I'm actually thriving here. Still quite a difference in what I'd consider to be middle class though like there's no way I can get a house here and I'd for sure be much worse off if I had kids
Behold, The Deliverator Slim. Storage tanks are a thing of the past
The Deliverator Slim: The fastest and slimmest Deliverator on the market
75 tons was ridiculous and honestly we never should have released such a bulky monstrosity in the first place. The new Deliverator Slim is now a mere 73 tons!
Turns out the amount of water produced from melting ice is 20, and the amount of water needed for fuel and oxidizer is 10 each. So instead of cycling between fuel and oxidizer with a water override, we can just cycle to run one of each recipe. No storage tanks necessary!
R&D was also informed about a width issue with previous designs. With the removal of the water storage tank we were able to dramatically improve aerodynamics. For very brief periods of time while flying towards a planet, this sucker can hit 50km/s!
Speed is real inconsistent not going to lie. Anywhere from about 15-45 between Gleba and Nauvis, depending on where it is in the path and what part of the cycle the chem plant is in. I'd say maybe an average of 25 but I haven't actually tried to measure it
Thank you <3
I've been having a lot of fun making small builds centered around set recipes logic. They're not exactly time or throughput efficient but they're an interesting puzzle
We got rid of our ozone layer ages ago
Nothing Left to Weep
So far speed has not been a concern for The Deliverator. I will let our R&D department know about the width situation though and see what they can think up
Added it to the description. Is there a better way to share them? Seems a bit error-prone to cram it into a spoiler section
New and improved Deliverator, 75 tons of pure fury
I've removed the self-sustaining ammo since it was just using up too many resources to be worth it for a small design. There were times where if it got low on ammo mid-flight it couldn't keep the engines on long enough to make up for being pulled into a planet's gravity due to the iron consumption. So I had to supplement it with ammo deliveries anyways, and I decided to just rely entirely on that. I also swapped out one of the solar panels for an accumulator and it seems to be working well.
The other main improvement is to the chem plant logic. It no longer needs buffers for the fuel and oxidizer. I use the on recipe complete signal to run a counter, mod by 2, then use that to flip between fuel and oxidizer. There is still a water tank to trigger a low water override.
If the chem plant is filled with too many resources it tries to run the recipes twice causing a lot of problems with the counting logic. Now the inserter is only active if the chem plant is not actively working which keeps it happy.
I noticed that when idling at a planet it backs up on fuel or oxidizer, clogs the pipe, then uselessly thrashes recipes. This creates an imbalance in how much fuel is available and while not proven I'm assuming it could create a condition where it can't use enough fuel to clear out the pipe and everything stalls. To prevent this I detect when I'm in orbit around a planet and stop producing fuel at that time. However I also realized if it somehow gets into orbit with a very low to zero amount of fuel that could prevent it from firing up again. So the orbit kill switch is hooked up to a timer and only disables the fuel/oxidizer production after 8 seconds.
I believe I could get the design down to 74 tons if I can figure out a consistently safe way to run the logic without the water tank, but 75 is such a nice number. I could also remove the accumulator but that causes worrisome power dips. The blinky lights are a core part of the ship's functionality and cannot be removed.
Miniature 89 ton ship that barely works, but it does work!
Part of our adventures making minimum viable transport ships. This thing barely works, moves slowly, can't fire at many asteroids, only sorta supplies enough energy. It gets where it needs to eventually though and includes the most important space ship feature: Blinky lights
Rocket engine supplied by a single chem plant
I've been experimenting with using circuits to set recipes. This latest one was a lot of fun because it has to make water to feed back into itself for the other two recipes. The circuit logic is surprisingly simple with the new selector combinator and combinators being able to use red and green wire signals separately