Tungsten

[Xadhoom]

I just realised, that since my colonly lacks a cold biome, i will not be able to get tungsten naturally in my colony. so i would need to go out in space to find it, else i will never be able to make thermium. but.... its 170 MM away.... i need a hydrogen rocket and a LONG travel time, just to get around 400kg of tungsten. it sucks

while i do think its a good idea to have colonies without all types of resources at start, i feel the more necessary ones for manufacturing of specific materials should be reasonable easy to get in space once you get there. after all, Niobium, isoresin and fullerene can be found at closest planets. i feel there is an argument for small amounts of wolfram to be found on ice planets.

[Grimgaw]

That's the point of different asteroids. Variety. It's your choice to not have certain resources.

[Xadhoom]

2 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

That's the point of different asteroids. Variety. It's your choice to not have certain resources.

well, that is fine when there is other options to use. but for thermium there is no alternative.

[DarkMaster13]

1 minute ago, Grimgaw said:

That's the point of different asteroids. Variety. It's your choice to not have certain resources.

I think the request is for one of the first few rocket destinations to always have a source of tungsten so that once you reach space you can make thermium.  The other materials needed to make space materials are far easier to get, satellites and at the moment all asteroids have drekos for reed fiber.

[Nitroturtle]

3 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

That's the point of different asteroids. Variety. It's your choice to not have certain resources.

Is it though?  The asteroid descriptions give no indications about the missing materials.  Without going into debug mode, or researching external sources beforehand, how exactly do you make this informed decision?  Not to mention the RNG game with geysers.

[MorsDux]

20 minutes ago, Nitroturtle said:

Is it though?  The asteroid descriptions give no indications about the missing materials.  Without going into debug mode, or researching external sources beforehand, how exactly do you make this informed decision?  Not to mention the RNG game with geysers.

I can understand both sides, if the game tells you where you are going to hit the fan in advance, that does take some kind of randomness and excitement elements. Also if someone would like none of that randomness and excitement element the problem (and the need to restart maybe) will become apparent after a longer playtime.

Maybe the game should ask what kind of player you are and hand you information beforehand depending on your answer

[asdf11784]

44 minutes ago, Xadhoom said:

well, that is fine when there is other options to use. but for thermium there is no alternative.

For what it's worth, there's really not much you need thermium for that niobium wouldn't be good enough for (a niobium aquatuner overheats at 625 degrees which is more than enough for a sour gas boiler for instance). Tungsten is also technically renewable on any map (you can melt insulation on any map, it just takes a lot of effort to do).

 

I think the biggest offender personally is not being able to use gold for super coolant if you have no gold volcano or gold planet. Super coolant is something that isn't really replaceable in the places it's used, and having a map where you can't get super coolant in any way feels kind of lame to me even if it isn't really necessary for survival.

[Nickerooni]

1 hour ago, asdf11784 said:

For what it's worth, there's really not much you need thermium for that niobium wouldn't be good enough for (a niobium aquatuner overheats at 625 degrees which is more than enough for a sour gas boiler for instance). Tungsten is also technically renewable on any map (you can melt insulation on any map, it just takes a lot of effort to do).

 

I think the biggest offender personally is not being able to use gold for super coolant if you have no gold volcano or gold planet. Super coolant is something that isn't really replaceable in the places it's used, and having a map where you can't get super coolant in any way feels kind of lame to me even if it isn't really necessary for survival.

Can you even win the game without gold? Or are there other tricks to liquify hydrogen?

[Yunru]

5 minutes ago, Nickerooni said:

Can you even win the game without gold?

Flood every gas and polluted water geyser and vent everything else to space.

Oxygen's not included, roll credits.

[asdf11784]

1 minute ago, Nickerooni said:

Can you even win the game without gold? Or are there other tricks to liquify hydrogen?

There are technically 2 ways to go about it.

 

1) You could get a small amount of liquid hydrogen by letting it break the pipes (technically you could also just keep doing that and eventually get enough, but that would be incredibly tedious), and then use that liquid hydrogen to get more liquid hydrogen by very carefully controlling its temperature (while the freezing and boiling point may be <14 degrees apart, remember that the boiling and freezing points will only happen if it goes 5 degrees past the boiling/freezing point, which does give you a small amount of room to work with where you could use liquid hydrogen in an aquatuner without it freezing if you set the hydrogen to the right temperature before putting it in the aquatuner).

2) If you have <10% of a pipe full,  then state changes won't happen (ie. <100g for a gas, or <1000g for a liquid), in which case you can use any gas or liquid in a pipe and reduce it to any temperature and it'll stay in the pipes, as long as you keep it at a low density using a valve. I really have no idea why they designed the game that way - it doesn't seem like it serves any purpose at all to me, but that's the way it is.

[DarkMaster13]

27 minutes ago, Nickerooni said:

Can you even win the game without gold? Or are there other tricks to liquify hydrogen?

The larger problem is how incredibly tedious it is to do the rocketry research with only the steam engine and no thrusters.  You can't make oxylite without gold or getting a puft care package and then ranching dense pufts.  So you're stuck just running steam rockets to the nearest destination over and over and over again until the minimal research rewards finally give you enough to make liquid oxygen tanks.  After that you can use rockets to go out to space destinations with gold and get it from there.

[Xadhoom]

1 hour ago, Nickerooni said:

Can you even win the game without gold? Or are there other tricks to liquify hydrogen?

hmm, i actually didn't consider gold, but yeah, id say its even higher priority then wolffram/tungsten.

but for oxylite for the rockets, id say the best option would be skip oxylite and go for LOX using hydrogen gas as coolant. just make as many science segments on a steam rockets as you can and keep sending them untill the research is done, slow and tedious but better then ranching pufts imo.

[DarkMaster13]

10 minutes ago, Xadhoom said:

hmm, i actually didn't consider gold, but yeah, id say its even higher priority then wolffram/tungsten.

but for oxylite for the rockets, id say the best option would be skip oxylite and go for LOX using hydrogen gas as coolant. just make as many science segments on a steam rockets as you can and keep sending them untill the research is done, slow and tedious but better then ranching pufts imo.

That's only ten data banks per science module per trip.  Which means you need five or six times as many trips to get the same amount of research.  Also steam rockets take ten times as long to fuel as liquid rockets and are generally more annoying to deal with.  Plus once you do get to liquid oxygen tanks, you'll need to manufacture that liquid oxygen without using space materials, which is rather tedious as asdf pointed out.

[asdf11784]

32 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

That's only ten data banks per science module per trip.  Which means you need five or six times as many trips to get the same amount of research.  Also steam rockets take ten times as long to fuel as liquid rockets and are generally more annoying to deal with.  Plus once you do get to liquid oxygen tanks, you'll need to manufacture that liquid oxygen without using space materials, which is rather tedious as asdf pointed out.

Liquid oxygen isn't that bad without space materials (you can just use a thermo regulator with hydrogen for instance, and switch to an aquatuner using LOX once you have some of it to make it more efficient, and LOX is a lot easier to manage in an aquatuner than liquid hydrogen is), it's liquid hydrogen that's troublesome.

 

As far as the number of rocket trips required - while it's true you'll need 6x as many trips, it's worth remembering that you're only going to 10000 distance planets so the trips will always be only 2.7 cycles (if you were going to further distance planets the trips would take a lot longer), so in practice it probably won't take *that* much longer to get the research done.

[Zakery]

For now, with incredible travel time for far planets, for me it looks simpler and fater to use 2-4 steam rockets with 5 sc module to farm 50DB per rocket / 3 (2,7) turn. we can use oxilyte rocket to farm DB from far planets, but we have 300 DB for 6 and more turns, with 4 steam rockets i have 200 DB per 3 turns - so steam more effectiwe.... (if you have steel). Oxilyte stage rockets useful only to farm some space material for normal LO fabricator.

Without travel time fix, we not need to waste time to oxilyte science rockets