How to set up long term rocket platforms?

[Sotanaht]

Every guide on rocketry I've seen only seems to focus on the immediate use of dropping a platform and some ladders so you can launch ASAP.  That's fine in the short term, but you can't automate (at least without Thermium) because everything melts, and you constantly have to replace pipes and wires.  Even the rocket platform will eventually break due to heat from repeated exhausts if you use certain engines.  There are also some guides on rocket tubes for collecting exhausts, but that's not what I'm looking for either. 

What I want is a permanent rocket outpost with minimal dupe labor upkeep required and especially minimal player input.  So it manages cooling and waste cleanup and is set up in a way that steel automation doesn't melt and meteors don't break anything.  I particularly like radbolt engines so I need a way to deal with the condensing liquid waste which can get stuck on platforms and such.  Sure I can build a box, fill it with atmosphere and close it off with some combination of bunker and airlock doors, but I'm sure there are a lot of ways to improve.

Spaced out, but vanilla style asteroids.

[SGT_Imalas]

52 minutes ago, Sotanaht said:

Even the rocket platform will eventually break due to heat from repeated exhausts if you use certain engines.

nope.

rocket platforms dont exchange heat

[pnambic]

Rocket platforms don't participate in heat exchange to the best of my knowledge, so you can make them from any refined metal and they'll be fine. Everything else directly in contact with the exhaust of radbolt or hydrogen engines, I build from tungsten/wolframite/obsidian. Nothing melts; the exhaust is hot, but not that hot. Keeping things in space helps with condensation, unless you want to use the steam/fallout/CO2.

The easiest way to deal with meteors is using blasters, in my opinion. The slime meteor showers on Classic starts are really annoying to deal with using the traditional bunker door + miner/crusher setup. I still get the occasional damaged ladder, but since damaged or broken ladders still function as ladders, that's not too pressing of an issue. You will need some cleanup after slime showers to avoid cooking the stuff into dirt tiles or sand. I do that manually, but you could use some shipping equipment, and I've also seen sweepies used for that.

[Sotanaht]

I could swear I've had platforms overheat, but I can't replicate it now.  Maybe they were exchanging heat with a pipe or something directly on their tile.  I hadn't considered making automation from Tungsten.  I guess do the same with liquid pipes, wires.  That just leaves the loaders/unloaders as a problem.  They'll overheat at Radbolt temperatures, probably even with Thermium though I haven't tested that.  I suppose that with enough mass and their extremely high 2000 overheat temperature, I could just run a cooling loop with conduction panels.  They shouldn't be able to overheat in a single launch and I could probably cool them before the next.

[SGT_Imalas]

1 hour ago, Sotanaht said:

loaders/unloaders

these can be handled quite easily:

rocket platforms have these ports on their side where you attach them.

these link EVERYTHING together, so any rocket on any platform in the chain can be loaded/unloaded by all loaders/unloaders in the chain, their actual location is irrelevant for that.

this means, that you can built extra rocket platforms between the one you have your rocket on and the loaders, creating enough distance for the loaders to be no longer affected by the rocket exhaust.

On the modded side of things, Rocketry Expanded adds (among lots of other things) insulated wall port adapters and vertical port adapters. These allow you to put insulated walls between the rocket exhaust and the loaders or to put the loaders deep into the asteroid, away from the exhaust.

[pnambic]

2 hours ago, Sotanaht said:

They shouldn't be able to overheat in a single launch and I could probably cool them before the next.

I just launched a full-height radbolt miner into orbit and back five times in a row, within half a cycle or so. The (uncooled) steel rocket port unloader and port extension (on the respective sides of the platform) didn't overheat. And that is after using that pretty much improvised setup (with two more identical platforms attached; see spoiler below) to do most of the heavy lifting for the "Mine the Gap" achievement. I would suggest you try it out. If it does break eventually, you'll know what to cool.

Spoiler

 

[Primalflower]

Unrelated but for some reason that drillcone rocket setup is so pretty. So aesthetically pleasing and neat

[blakemw]

As a lazy person, I am quite fond of setting up Robo-miners like this:

They may require Duplicant repair depending on how hurty the meteors are. If the meteors destroy tiles you may want to use bunker tiles. The introduction of Conduction Panel made these kind of setups quite a bit more trouble-free, because even if they briefly overheat after being mined out the Conduction Panel can cool them back down. Also conduction panel doesn't need liquid, if you have a large block of coolness under the platform it can just thermally couple to the floor.

There's also the "rocket tug" layout. Purely an exploit but hey the game lets you do it and if you're sick of exhaust heating stuff then it's a very simple solution: