Sharing my rocket interiors

[myxal]

Hi all. Feedback/suggestions welcome, though I'm mostly posting this to save myself from having to tease out the mechanics, how's and why's of the design again and again as I spend a lot of time on one save, where I built these once and used them for the rest of the playthrough, with some fixes here and there.

These are mid/late game designs, in that:

• No effort was made to restrict materials used, or research needed. Dried food is assumed to be available.
• They've been working very well on saves where the rocket infrastructure is more built-out - not just platforms built but fuel/oxygen/water pipes, existing colonies with suit docks of their own, etc.
• Oxylite used as both oxidizer for the rocket and breathing for dupes. (I like pufts. S tier critter. 😛)

Buzzwords Notable features:

• Great hall included! (for the 4-dupe build, until Klei fixes the floating building exploit...)
• Player-unattended resupply of vital consumables (food, reed fiber, pills...)
• Oxylite use minimised if external oxygen is provided.
• Seamless transition from in-cabin oxylite to externally-piped-oxygen and back. (no construction/deconstruction/cutting/joining needed)
• Water pipes double as cooling loop.
• Suit checkpoint disabled on selected planetoids to allow more workers to enter. Useful when re-building or moving materials. Mass move is awesome.
• Mechanical filter with oxygen ensures docks never receive wrong gas.
• 1-tile storage out of the way to minimise decor blast zone and allow covering with naphtha without subjecting dupes to wet tootsies debuff.

The gas routing was particularly troublesome. Both builds use topologically the same setup. Here is another arrangement, in a much more readable layout:

Spoiler

Note where the gas pipe elements sensors are placed:

Ventilation overlay, broken down into functional parts. The hanging bridges represent the crew module's ports.

Automation, doing the magic:

1. Memory toggle is enabled by absence of oxygen all the way down at consumers.
2. When enabled, pump turns on first to pick up CO2 and expel that from the rocket.
3. After a delay, shutoff opens and lets external gas flow in, blocking the pump. This minimises oxylite consumption after external oxygen production is built on the colonised planetoid.
4. When oxygen starts to back up, the left pipe sensor stops the flow of incoming gas, and the buffer takes up the oxygen already past the shutoff, to prevent the mechanical filter from backing up.

There is small risk that packets of oxygen making their way through the buffer have cleared the buffer section's pipe sensor, but haven't reached the consumer section's sensor, triggering the memory toggle prematurely and allowing for eventual "buffer overflow" - oxygen backing up to the mechanical filter, and letting oxygen escape through the waste pipe. This can be solved by short-cutting the gas buffer section with more bridges, or automation-buffering the memory toggle's reset signal for as many seconds as the buffer is long.

1-dupe explorer/harvester/sentry

Blueprint: 1d-v2.blueprint

Yea, I've got nyctophobic pilots. The ones that aren't drop the lamp to the control station.

This one is used on rockets mining POIs and harvesting mugs for vacillator recharges. Telescope used late-game for meteor ID. It might also make a great starmap exploration build, but I rushed that well before the design got its first iteration.

Overlays:

Spoiler

4-dupe coloniser

Blueprint: 4d-v2.blueprint

As the name implies, this shuttles 4 dupes to work on colonising, or just harvesting a planetoid from 1 rocket. (I tried colonising with multiple rockets once... No thanks. Dupes constantly getting in each other's way as dupes from one rocket entered the other, blocking entrance through dock.) It's handy, having 4 dupes to split demanding skills (demolition, mechatronics, super-duperhard digging, masterworks) between.

The power outlet fitting is behind the naphtha blob, under the bathroom's floor.

Overlays:

Spoiler

 

Edited October 22, 2025 by myxal
blueprints added, wording

[bobthedog]

How dare you praise pufts when you could get oxylite from Alveo Veras?!

Some cool design ideas there, kudos!

[myxal]

Gotta be honest, the space location sensor was a late addition which doesn't work well for ventilation. I'll only use it to control suit checkpoint and ground the rocket on planetoids with a built-out base.

With U57's public mess tables (don't need 4 anymore) and in pursuit of the banquet hall build (not achieved here), I tweaked the 4-dupe build's ventilation system. Exploded view:

Spoiler

• input is now enabled by a single gas-pipe element sensor, no need for memory toggle
• gas vent is enabled by presence of oxygen in pipe from module input
• optional: enable gas vent if too much CO2 accumulates in the module (this may occur on extremely long flights - O2 for breathing is provided by oxylite, so pump has no other reason to turn on)

Yellow circles are segments with gas pipe sensors.

Module build:

4D-V2.1.blueprint

Overlays:
 

Spoiler

 

Edited December 27, 2025 by myxal