The Meteor Blaster does not impress

[Gurgel]

Just ran one for the first time and found the situation below about an hour later. Shots and power were available. This does not seem to work well. Do I need to set up several blasters here for this to become reliable? Or do I need to combine with auto-miners? Has anybody else any observations or designs that work?

 

[meekay]

Just curious how close are you to the top of the map?

I haven't played with this yet because I'd rather take the damage and keep the resources than have them vaporize. But I've wondered how much "headroom" the blaster needs to detect and intercept the incoming object.

[Gurgel]

I am right up to the limit, see picture below. You may be on to something there. I will try to place it a lot lower next.

 

I will now run this one below for a while. Not as far down as possible, but I would have to move some things to get there. Lets se how it goes.

Update: Ok, that works a lot better and as expected. I have some Regolith on the side but hat was from the secondary spray of an impact outside the blaster range (left, top area). I also observed some impacts. The meteors get detected in the forbidden zone, but the missile cannot get there and hence has very little time for the intercept with what I tried first. With this is has comfortably enough. 

My intuition is that you want at least something like 20 tiles of "headroom" for the blaster to work reliably. This one here has 25 tiles. You can place ladders (may get damaged but should continue to work), wires, pipes, rails and rockets and rocket platforms into that range, but not any solid tiles.