Greedy Goblin

Friday, March 29, 2013

Low maintenance, high income PI

Whatever you import to your planet is arriving to launchpads. Whatever you create in your planet is leaving in launchpads. Launchpads have mere 10000m3 storage space. A basic factory produces 40*0.38 = 15.2m3/hour P1 materials. An advanced one eats up twice as much. So if you run a P2 or P3 planet that has 20 advanced factories eating P1, you have to restock the launchpad every 16 hours. If you have two launchpads, 32 hours. Of course you could increase the amount of launchpads, but they eat up 3600 units of CPU, way more than anything else. An advanced factory needs 500 CPU. So anything beyond 4 launchpads is seriously crippling your output. 4 launchpads are still just 3 days worth of storage. So you have to choose: visiting your planets often (not just restarting extractors from afar, but flying to the POCO to restock) or toning down your income seriously.

From now on, you can have both. Behold the secret:
This is the Neocoms producing P3 factory from yesterday. It imports Silicate Glass to the launchpad to the right, Biofuels and Precious metals to the left. Since you need 2x more from those, their launchpads are doubled... by storage silos. The silos have 1/6 as much CPU need as a launchpad and just as good for storage. In the middle you can see the command center which is on full load on both powergrid and CPU, having 2 more launchpads would demand cutting down lot of factories.

How to fill them up? By the feature "expedited transfer". You move the new batch of raw materials to the launchpad, enter your planet and expedited transfer the whole amount into the storage silo. Then exit the planet and send down another batch of raws to the launchpad. Doing this you can fill both of them, like both were launchpads. Unfortunately you can't fill more than one storage from one launchpad because expedited transfer has a time limit, you have to wait about 8 hours after moving full cargo.

Utilizing storage silos you can actually set up something like this Coolant producing colony that runs all by itself for more than 6 days:

The storage-as-launchpad can be also used by those who visit their planets often. Freeing up CPU allows more factories to run which is especially useful with those pesky high-tech factories. A P4 factory can operate with a single launchpad.

Since launchpad is 100003 and the silo is 12000, you might want to equalize them, so you don't have 20003 of valuable material rotting in the silo forever. Fill it with 20003 aqueous liquids when you build up the colony!

5 comments:

OskaRus said...

This seems quite reasonoble. It inspired me to do some more spreadsheet crunching.

Anonymous said...

You can upgrade the links and get the expediated transfer time down to 5 minutes. I run factory planets with a single launchpad and everything else is silos.

Anonymous said...

Is the "expedited transfer" something I can use per launchpad? So can I fill up 4 silos with 4 launchpad immediately?

Gevlon said...

yes, every launchpad is individual

Anonymous said...

Are you paying empire import/export taxes or running under a player owned customs office?