Interplanetary launcher is extremely overpowered [feedback]

[he77789]

2 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

you should be able to bring it down to multiple launches per cycle with a nearby reactor imo.

Radbolt collisions give enough radiation that you can produce multiple radbolts per second in addition to sustaining the cycle with some radbolts.

[Sasza22]

Just now, he77789 said:

Radbolt collisions give enough radiation that you can produce multiple radbolts per second in addition to sustaining the cycle with some radbolts.

1 hour ago, n_t_p said:

Space/wheezewort rads -> nuclear rocket launch -> nuclear waste exhaust -> payload launcher -> infinite rad source on any planet you want, all without ever touching down on another asteroid. 

Not to mention the infinite rad generator exploit exists

The radbolt system is too exploity atm to be balanced. Given how much radiation we can get from passive stuff like nuclear waste the requirement for the launchers should be much higher. Optimally it should only be worthwhile to use one with a reactor nearby or after stacking 6+ wheezeworts nearby (research should be still possible with smaller amounts).

I also think every building storing radbolts should lose them over time based on how many it holds. This would create a threshold below which it wouldn`t be possible to power certain stuff with just a single wheezwort.

[babba]

21 hours ago, sakura_sk said:

Doesn't 1 diffuser provide oxygen for 6 and 1 electrolyzer for 8? Why would an advancement by 1 be "over the top"?  Playing with absolute numbers is easy.. 

My opinion since early DLC about cargo modules was to remove them completely and either have 1 module for every element or non at all and use only spacefarer. But there are many players attached to base game mechanics so...

And I think after playing like that you could show it off  

But until then I don't think interplanetary launcher needs that many nerfs

I started using the first rovers, I find it fun to drop lots of them on to some asteroid and to mine it away. I think the launcher ( have not built one yet ) and the rockets are two nice ways to "carry everything away", if one wants to do that.

Sadly, dropping rovers on to my fully built and established 2nd teleporter colony always makes the game crash, I think the devs didn`t consider that someone would do that

I hope the devs work on having rockets flying through the full map height, as as the rockets currently disappear flying a bit up through the map after launching them + that they work on the best rocket cargo solution(s) and rocket port user ideas and complaints, whatever Klei makes out of the player forum feedback.

I would not mind if a rocket ( with all its contents ) could be packaged up in to a tiny parcel and then been teleported to somewhere else as tiny package for 10000 rad bolts

Rocket packaged up as parcel, for warp teleporting ( costs 10000 rad bolts )

Rocket storage - Saves tile space

Perhaps there also could be a function "Create blackhole to suck asteroid away", removing the asteroid entirely "to bring in fresh stuff and other geysers". Once the player has sucked the asteroid away via black hole creation, a new asteroid could spawn in the star map after some time. Black hole creation costs 69 coconuts.

Coconuts require regular treatment in the Ectoplasma-Triangle-Machine @minespatch to retain freshness and atomic structure stability - Otherwise they crumble and desintegrate.

Rumors are that the machines creation idea got inspired by ONi professor @mathmanican ...however, the exact functionality and concept origin can not be for sure determined.

[Unfawkable]

9 hours ago, n_t_p said:

Space/wheezewort rads -> nuclear rocket launch -> nuclear waste exhaust -> payload launcher -> infinite rad source on any planet you want, all without ever touching down on another asteroid. 

Not to mention the infinite rad generator exploit exists

To be fair, this is only if all of the radiation system stays the way it is. If the Radiation system gets toned down to limit radbolt production, this would indirectly tone down the launcher as well, so it may be early to overdo it. I'd be fine for some minor tuning for now, so I'd even be fine of it only got a range reduction and power increase for now and we can check later after the Rad system gets ironed out.

[Electroely]

On 4/2/2021 at 8:34 AM, pether said:

TBH I really like how the launchers work. Didn't play long enough to risk statements that they are 100% OK, but at this moment I don't see the issues with them. About exotic cost - I feel like radbolts are one. The only problem is that they can be gathered from space for free - the same issue we have with too easy nuclear tech.

So instead of nerfing them, how about we focused on making rocket transport more usefull and easier to setup?

My thoughts exactly. I really like how the launcher currently works and I don't see why it should be nerfed to a point where it's practically unusable.

I think that if it needs any nerfs, it just needs a higher radbolt cost. 250 per payload was a lot which relegated the launcher to occasional resource transfer rather than a constant throughput, so I'm glad it was reduced from that. I also think that 240W is good as a power consumption, but from what I can tell it hardly comes into play. Maybe it should consume power for 5 seconds before launching each payload and during the entirety of the rail cleaning.

I think resource transfer via rockets works well as is (though buffs and QoL changes would really help), and if many of the nerfs suggested here get implemented into the game rockets would easily end up being the better option rather than a competing one. A rocket platform (which is needed to even land on the planet anyway) and a cargo port require much less infrastructure than a radbolt collector (and a source if you don't wanna limit yourself to 25 rads/cycle) and a launcher.

 

[n_t_p]

22 hours ago, Electroely said:

250 per payload was a lot which relegated the launcher to occasional resource transfer rather than a constant throughput

250 is not a lot. It's at best an inconvenience, especially since more materials produce radiation now. There's no cap to how many radbolts per second the generators can make, which means you'll always be able to stuff more and more radiation into a tile to increase it's output. Adding a radbolt per second cap to the generators would just make it a problem of scale too, which isn't interesting gameplay as it leads to spamming them.

I'd be fine with the interplanetary launcher being capable of continuous throughput, but it should come at some expense compared to rockets. Ideally they would both come at very different costs. The types of resources and effort should be different from one another, which would lead to ballanced preferences and comparable but unique gameplay experiences.

Rockets are large, complicated, and take a lot of investment. One of the biggest costs of the rocket is the dupe's needs and risk. They should serve as a singular solution with very large throughput at a high cost. If hydrogen rockets are the endgame they need to be FAST and should carry a lot more than they do now.

The launcher is comparably very simple and extremely safe. It's just 3-4 buildings and a power source. It probably doesn't even need cooling in it's current state. To make these two systems comparable the launcher would need to be more complex, more expensive, or both.

[n_t_p]

rip rockets

[Apprisco]

I don't see the problem. This gives us an easy way to move items from planet to planet, without involving extremely complex rocketry. There shouldn't be a range limit, because why would there ever be? Once you shoot a projectile out of the orbit, it doesn't require energy to get to the destination (unless you need to adjust its course.) The current system makes sense scientifically.

The new planetoids are TINY. It's not worth attempting to setup automated cargo rockets in them. And yes, you can automate rockets using rocket platforms now. So, just leave the damn launchers alone, the infinite radbolt exploit from collisions are being fixed already next update.

[KonfigSys]

that topic was before the today's update which killed the radbolt collider. 

The launcher was not a problem before but a really nice feature, now it is even less a problem.

Now you have another usage for rockets rather than hauling goods between asteroids..... space mining

 

[Nebbie]

On 4/2/2021 at 12:27 AM, Unfawkable said:

Overall nerfs to this are needed as I've agreed, but it needs to be a direction of nerfs that still leaves it with a niche use. If both the rockets and the launcher have a role of transporting cargo between planets, the Rockets should obviously have the "transports lots of mass for bigger time and resource investment" role. This should have the role of "transports very little mass in a very convenient manner". Now whether the cost of that should match rockets is debatable, and it already has the convenience covered, so a couple of ways to bring it in line (One of these, or a combination of multiple):

1) Reduce (Drastically) the payload size and the frequency you can send them. By your calculations, this would require a significant nerf in reducation by a factor of 10 or more in order to bring it below rockets enough.

2) Make it only able to send one payload at max charge, and then have a more significant downtime before you can send another single payload. Somewhere between 2-3 cycles minimum.

3) Make it a late game option requiring exotic materials to use. If each launch required Thermium to use for the capsules, or Visco Gel to "fuel", it would discourage infinite use.

4) Limit the range it can launch so you can't cover the entire map with it and would at least have to build several on different planetoids. This one would definitely need to be a combo with some of the others, but I dislike this approach as it would reduce the convenience niche

5) The good ol' approach of give it a massive power cost wouldn't hurt as well, but with a catch. Say, it would need 1200 Watts to operate. BUT, you would need to keep it powered otherwise it would lose any stored radbolts and you'd have to charge radbolts from scratch when you turn the power back on.

I'd go with 1. Everything else seems like it would make me never build this thing again, especially 3 (I really enjoy being able to shoot over steel to the place I colonized with sugar engines, thank you very much).

On 4/2/2021 at 2:50 AM, n_t_p said:

My suggestions would be:

Buff rockets, increasing the capacity of all cargo holds by 2x, and give us better tools for restocking the command capsule so automatic rockets are possible. Piping fittings through the cargo hold is unintuitive and counterproductive to the end goal of shipping. Piping duplicant's base needs in and then getting it back out to put in the actual materials being transported requires esoteric automation that people aren't going to be able to do without looking it up online.

Nerf this thing. Massively increase the power cost to a continuous 800w per second while loading, firing or cleaning. Double the radbolt cost. Make can opening take half as long as manual opening. Rail cleaning requires dupe labor. Halve the payload capacity. Add a 5s warm up to each firing just because it's weird to have them all fire at once.

I like the range limitation suggested by unfawkable. Chaining these together to bypass the range limit seems interesting, and gives rockets an undeniable advantage.

Another interesting nerf would be to massively increase the mass of the building. If it took, say 4t of refined metals I'd think twice about building multiple. This allows for interesting heat mechanics too. If you require a maximum firing temp of around -25 C and each firing adds a set amount of heat, enough to raise the temp to about 50 C for steel, then you've effectively got a rate limit that begs to be bypassed. Noobs will be able to use heat sinks on the starting planetoid's space biome and on the ice planet to dump the building's heat, and might even get creative about how fast they can get it out. Advanced players will build complex aquatuner setups that utilize supercoolant, or at least petroleum.

Leave the beacon how it is, that works fine.

Building an endlessly sustainable base is easy enough by mid game. That's uninteresting though. Expanding is the challenge in spaced out, and the interplanetary launcher makes expanding extremely easy. You know how much oxygen a dupe can unpack from this thing in a day? If you max out one launcher you can sustain 9 dupes on an off-world oxygen source. That shouldn't be possible. I shouldn't have to weigh the difference between piping oxygen to a planetoid on the other side of the solar system vs building a local supply. 

Agree on most of the first idea except dupe labor (that would kill setups that are based around setting up an automated volcano extraction solution and forgetting it).

[n_t_p]

On 7/2/2021 at 12:04 PM, Nebbie said:

I'd go with 1. Everything else seems like it would make me never build this thing again, especially 3 (I really enjoy being able to shoot over steel to the place I colonized with sugar engines, thank you very much).

Agree on most of the first idea except dupe labor (that would kill setups that are based around setting up an automated volcano extraction solution and forgetting it).

I still don't think these should have as high of a throughput as they do, but the dev's solution was to buff rockets and impliment automation tools like the packet counter. I don't think we'll see a nerf.

The interplanetary launcher is basically just a dupe-built teleporter with some extra steps. It shouldn't have enough throughput to provide oxygen or ship a volcano's production. Otherwise the progression goes: teleporter -> rockets -> diy teleporter (aka the interplanetary launcher)

The progression should go: teleporter -> cheap rockets -> this thing -> actually good rockets

With the occasional or niche use persisting into the late game. Otherwise the interplanetary launcher just becomes the final solution to everything requiring space logistics.

[JaxckLl]

A building that makes the late game fun & not fiddly, and you want to nerf it? What madness

[babba]

I would use it if there would be a big version in the game, offering 5 or 10 tons per shot - That would be great

https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Interplanetary_Launcher

[nyonyonyo]

What I find annoying about it is the small packages. It should cater to larger package sizes, maybe at a cost of 1 radbolt per 10kg. 

I can see it now... The Interplanetary Railgun Launcher bombarding other planetoids like a mass driver.

[KonfigSys]

the nerf team is detected on the horizon.....

first, they use some bugs (unintended game mechanics) and then they complain it is too easy....

second, they simply can stop using some features rather than ask to exclude/nerf some features for other players to enjoy....

Klei, please do not kill the game it is just fine as it is.

If you want to nerf the launcher, you have to provide a much better automation for rockets. It is far from perfect now but it is ok if complemented by the launcher at its current stage.

the last nerf of vacuum did not bring much to the game but shifted many players to focus on mainly berry sludge production away from the food variety.

[Glassyfo]

On 10/28/2021 at 7:25 PM, KonfigSys said:

the last nerf of vacuum did not bring much to the game but shifted many players to focus on mainly berry sludge production away from the food variety.

Those players have themselves to blame.

[juni3227]

 

On 4/2/2021 at 9:34 PM, pether said:

TBH I really like how the launchers work. Didn't play long enough to risk statements that they are 100% OK, but at this moment I don't see the issues with them. About exotic cost - I feel like radbolts are one. The only problem is that they can be gathered from space for free - the same issue we have with too easy nuclear tech.

So instead of nerfing them, how about we focused on making rocket transport more usefull and easier to setup?

The rad all over the place got 10 folds harder and collector collects 10 folds less. In other words, to power my interplanetary launcher, I need a reactor, 6 radvolt collectors, which is a lot. In my base, that two interplanetary launchers cost 6KW to power (because of radvolt) and two research reactor. And I only have 18KW in my base and its draining my electricity when I enable it because I consume 16KW all time. (Yes I have petroleum, and they are on the separate grid, far, far away from main base, and is powering teleporter asteroid)

Unless you do glitch, it's very expensive and convenient. Because to power same amount of radvolt using ambient radiation as before, you need 50KW.

I have seen really creative and risky placement of research reactor by exposing it in the space, which reduces the collector by half, but I am not taking the risk of meltdown.

And you need careful planning because of this. You can not put reactor at the bottom like most industrial would do. And Nuclear power plant cost a lot of real estate. And its radiation is no joke now. It will kill dupe in a minute without and proper shielding. And If your purpose is solely one collecting rad volts, you will have net negative power because of exposed core.

 

And dupes are dupes. They just walk into there if with no checkpoints. They constantly "deliver" uranium there. They grab uranium just to "clear the floor".... Which means this facility had to be autonomous.

 

No joke, but I got a great grade on computational theory thanks to this. This game is somthing....