Rocket Range, aka Why Sucrose Sucks

[JaxckLl]

Right now we have access to two engines, Sucrose & CO2. Soon we will no doubt get access to the vanilla Petroleum, Steam, and Hydrogen. Until such time, I don't find any incentive to build rockets. Rockets are very costly to run & build and they don't generate resources. The options we have right now are barely capable of connecting the Terra & Swampy asteroids reliably. However these two asteroids are already connected by the teleporter, and both can function as completely independent bases. Early game rocketry needs to be more capable of exploring the map, it needs to produce resources, and it needs to be fully automatable without dupes.

My suggestions,

• Double the range of rockets. This lets us actually explore and allows for roundtrips with CO2 or better between Terra & Swampy without refueling. This last part is critical as it removes the need to build up each asteroid as a fully functional & independent base.
• Remove max take off weight. Instead, allow players to "spend" rocket range on weight. This allows for the building of light roundtrip ferries, heavy one-way tugs, and dedicated exploration vehicles. This would also happily defeat the exploits that can be achieved with the rocket cabin by creating a disadvantage to building out too far.
• This is probably coming, but we need a dupe-less rocket. It's so fiddly & annoying right now to prep a rocket for launch, 99% of which is making sure all of the dupe's needs are provided for. Early game rocket automation would exclusively crash, the internal robot incapable of landing carefully. Late game automation would become available long after dupe rockets, creating an incentive structure to use dupes.
• An alternative solution to the above would be a new kind of food which provides Calories & Oxygen need. It would be low efficiency, but the perfect resource for rocket pilots. "Oxybars" made from Protein Powder (crushed Nosh Beans) and Oxylite.
• Rockets are extremely costly to operate, requiring substantial infrastructure. This is expensive and ultimately is exclusively a resource sink. Rockets don't generate resources, which is a massive problem because it discourages their use until later on in the game. I have multiple 100+ cycle playthroughs in which I never touched rockets because there was more than enough to do without them. Why don't we place some minor asteroids on the space map which cannot be visited, but instead gathered as bonus resources? This also incentivizes using container modules which are otherwise somewhat useless.
• Could we please get a solid rocket booster for low-infrastructure set ups. I imagine they'd have good range, but cost rare Aluminium and always crash. Fire & forget is a major part of real-world rocketry, why not ONI?

Every building in ONI has some kind of purpose in the late game, even if you get access to that building right at the start. Mousewheels? Make a dupe power block, or good for starting up Petrol Generators or SPOMs. Algae Terrariums? Highly efficient source of Polluted Water. The same is not true of rockets. Sucrose rockets will likely be useable well into the late game thanks to the Sulphur Geyser, but they're so bad that such useability is kind of irrelevant.

[The Plum Gate]

I've been playing on and off again for three years and still have not built a rocket.

[JaxckLl]

On 12/31/2020 at 3:19 PM, The Plum Gate said:

I've been playing on and off again for three years and still have not built a rocket.

EXACTLY. I was in the same boat for a very long time. Rockets are a huge resource investment which does not translate to resources produced.