The beauty of steam rockets

[6Havok9]

Hello dupes and dupettes,

As you already know, steam rockets are painfully slow. However, they produce 600 w during travel.

This, in my opinion, makes them perfect as a research rocket. A fully fueled steam rocket with gas tank, liquid tank, battery, solar panel (or artifact module) will reach max height and travel 0.2 tiles per cycle.

With a max range of 6, you can just do a merry spacewalk around your asteroid, go one tile at a time and change destination midflight, or go for a LONG journey to the nearest artifact and back.

 

This rocket has a real storage bin (yes, for real) chock full of plastic, a useless fridge packed with berry sludge, a mini gas pump for co2 (almost completely useless, since ->) and it's pressurized to 3500 grams of o2 per tile. Needlessly automated lights help the dupes exactly when they need, to be that little bit faster. And two orbital research stations make sure that work is done, and it's done fast. No sink, we roll with a stack of basic medicine against food poisoning instead. Yay, doctors are actually useful now!

 

 

With 120 decor everywhere, bar the inaccessible "maintenance room", just a great hall and barracks are more than sufficient morale wise. Granite carpet tiles keep even the grumpiest of dupes at max difficulty happy and joyful. No plumbing, gas and automation overlays, as they are dead simple. The toilet is rotated, to put the dupe under light. There is not a single tile unused. Everything is cheap copper, granite and iron, plus two diamond aero pots and some reed fiber.

 

 

Jean and Gossmann had a great time on the rocket, much better than their asteroid bound fellows, and had to eat surprisingly few pills. Seldomly had the minipump wake up from its slumber to remove a wandering packet of co2. And the new fancy starmap location sensor... saw use just two times, during the preparations for takeoff to prevent sneaky dupes from putting their small hands where they shouldn't, and after landing.

Because this rocket just made one single, glorious flight. They unlocked all the final tiers of research in one trip.

ONE.

Steam rockets.. They truly are a thing of beauty. This one will be refitted as a space tourism rocket. Gotta make use of those 600w of power, and dupes surely will like to see their "home" from above while dancing, headbanging or playing ONI inside ONI.

Cya!

Havok

[NeoDeusMachina]

I love the food poisoning pills as alternative to save up on space by not needing a lavatory. I'll play with that idea for sure

[Gurgel]

13 minutes ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

I love the food poisoning pills as alternative to save up on space by not needing a lavatory. I'll play with that idea for sure

I did that in the past, works well.

I noticed the "This is NOT a toilet, eating place or bed!" sign in the pilot module for the first time. Is that usually present?

I have to say I love what people do with the large crew module. This one is pretty nice!

[6Havok9]

14 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

I did that in the past, works well.

I noticed the "This is NOT a toilet, eating place or bed!" sign in the pilot module for the first time. Is that usually present?

I have to say I love what people do with the large crew module. This one is pretty nice!

Thank you. That is the rocket control station function to allow or prohibit use of certain buildings, while keeping them serviceable. When restricting access, it shows that sign. Beds, toilets, mess tables, storages. There is a toggle button on each single building that allows to set if they have to obey the control station rules. The rules can be toggled on and off manually at the station, I used a starmap location sensor instead, so that everything is restricted but serviceable while grounded and free to use during travel. Plus, I had one last tile to fill, and it's cool! And you don't have to pull your hair when you forget to disable everything. We landed, you no touchie. Great sensor.

[sakura_sk]

Iron gut dupes need no pills 

[Ntr1cate]

Doctors have been useful for me for a long time for hard pushing slime biomes early, they are even more useful recently when they patched vanilla to stop atmo suits from using sinks to wash hands (but they didn't add suit washer which ment they are always covered in food germs after going to the toilet if they run suits all day)

Very nice setup

[Jurij I. Gorkij]

I share your interest in steam rocket because of it easy accessibility, nice power production etc.

I tend to get space research as byproduct of flight to other planetoids colonization, so I am using this design:

Before I send my rocket away, I deconstruct atmosuit checkpoint/docks and replace them with storage bin for plastic and microlab. Or telescope in some cases. After arriving on new planetoid, I coonstruct them again.

Thanks to fellow forum member @timohl I've realized rocket battery is not needed (as rocket is producing enough power), so I placed battery inside (in my case smart battery, however small battery could be enough and then there would be space for another container). In case my rocket is serving as temporary base on planetoid I deconstruct nosecone, built battery and connect it to two solar panels.

Because i am no longer using battery (and solar panel), i have 3 tile height place for another module - deploying robot rover to set up basic infrastructure, cargo module for material deployment etc. Or my most favourite tweak where I use large gas tank instead of small one, fill it with lot of oxygen and some steam. There's even enough space to fit several "full tanks" of steam (6 x 150Kg for example), then reach of rocket is much bigger than just 6 tiles (but with need of layover).

And while I am writing this, funny idea related to steam engine came to me - you could take polluted water produced by crew, pump it out of rocket storage, boil it and use produced steam to refuel rocket

[Primalflower]

I might steal the first design, replacing the singular lavatory with the space toilet. Very good designs all around everyone!