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Are solar panel worth it?


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I find solar to by an incidental byproduct of my scanner setup (the column(tm) could change that, but...

if I want rockets I need a telescope. To have a telescope that doesn’t constantly break I need to know when asteroid season is. To do that I need scanners that are open to a large area. If I’m gonna build bunkers etc for them, why not put solar underneath? 

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I wouldn't bother with them when not going for super sustainable achievement, as you need a lot of steel to set them up and a lot of refined metal to connect them to your main base. To get them to work well, you also need either a lot of batteries or a very "dynamic" energy usage, with non-essential, non-dupe-operated machines automatically shutting down at low battery.

Still, they're good if you want a lot of free energy to waste on luxuries and sweeper-fed smart coal, petroleum (vent CO2 to space if you don't need it) and natgas is just not cutting it.

Has a minor synergy with steam, since steam requires heating, which is costly but can be shut down. You can run solar in the day to produce steam and then consume it during the night.

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I don't know any funky mechanics that go against what seems logical, and in such case the solar panels are quite eh. The energy they produce will be used up by the autodiggers, sweepers, and bunker doors required to keep them from being obscured by regolith.

Someone mentions door crushing here, I guess you may need this sort of tricks to make it flow nicely, but I prefer not to use them as doors don't tend to eradicate materials :p If that's what it means anyhow.

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7 hours ago, caffeinated21 said:

I find solar to by an incidental byproduct of my scanner setup... If I’m gonna build bunkers etc for them, why not put solar underneath? 

This.If you are going up to space anyway, why not set some up?

I set up a bunch on my current map when I put up my scanner/telescope and honestly it brings in a ridiculous amount of essentially free power. Yes, it generally takes a big battery bank to make it work well, but I put them in the empty space in my big natural gas storage chamber.

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5 hours ago, Ellilea said:

I don't know any funky mechanics that go against what seems logical, and in such case the solar panels are quite eh. The energy they produce will be used up by the autodiggers, sweepers, and bunker doors required to keep them from being obscured by regolith.

Someone mentions door crushing here, I guess you may need this sort of tricks to make it flow nicely, but I prefer not to use them as doors don't tend to eradicate materials :p If that's what it means anyhow.

I am not sure about now (it was approx this spring), but I was not using sweepers and miners - I used some automation tricks that forced doors to re-close after meteor shower, which let the regolith fall and stay on the door and not block the sun. The only draw back - you need to build a diamond/waterflow tile right under the door, so the explosion from meteors breaks them a bit (which is really meh for a free power)

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They take heaps of setup time and a lot of materials. But, they are worth it given they are build on a large scale (across the whole width of the map). They'll power all of your surface operations.

Also, I don't bother with auto diggers. Assign 2 dupes on it and you are getting the job done just the same. Yes, that does require a bit more micro management.

 

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2 hours ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

They take heaps of setup time and a lot of materials. But, they are worth it given they are build on a large scale (across the whole width of the map). They'll power all of your surface operations.

Also, I don't bother with auto diggers. Assign 2 dupes on it and you are getting the job done just the same. Yes, that does require a bit more micro management.

 

If you want to mine regolith with dupes have a row of drywall then block off the material like sandstone and the dupes will dig out the regolith no micromanaging. 

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11 hours ago, Ellilea said:

I don't know any funky mechanics that go against what seems logical, and in such case the solar panels are quite eh. The energy they produce will be used up by the autodiggers, sweepers, and bunker doors required to keep them from being obscured by regolith.

Someone mentions door crushing here, I guess you may need this sort of tricks to make it flow nicely, but I prefer not to use them as doors don't tend to eradicate materials :p If that's what it means anyhow.

Door crushers take no power and destroy most of the regolith.  If you want to save other fuel surces and have the steel for more bunker doors and other metal for the door crushers, it seems like a good thing to do.

Also if your power grid is set up right you don't need a bunch of batteries... just have all the other generators shut down when solar is producing enough power.

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