No warpers required?

[Mahzrael]

I have just unlocked green tech, so my veins utilization tech is not super high. I was curious just how *optional* warpers are, as I was concerned about burning up green cubes. For anyone else thinking about sending cargo through the void without the benefit of warp, here's what I discovered : at a vessel speed of 1800 m/s ,vessel capacity of 1K, and 2 logistics stations (one sending one receiving ) , with 10 vessels per stations, roughly the speed at which cargo will move between two points is [ (337.5 / min) / (light years) ]

If your using 20 stations on each side at a distance of 2 light years, this is impractical but doable - I moved 1 million sulfuric acid this way. greater distances probably should not be attempted unless you want to fill up a quarter of a planet with logi stations on each side.

By "impractical" i mean that 5 hours of slow crawl cargo transfer saved me 62 green cubes. The line of hundreds of vessels moving between stars made me think of ants moving a wildebeest. If you have tons of free space and its just happening in the background, like the transfer of material between two outposts that your not really planning on using in the near future, it *might* be a sane plan. But in most cases, warpers are not really optional .

[Koro]

I wouldn't be too concerned about wasting green cubes.
Generally you will never run out of any material even at 1 multiplier.
I use about 4.500 warpers per minute with 0,01% vein usage and the mining system I set up about halfway towards the endgame is not even close emptying. It had about 100 million of each resource.
So there's a lot of resources.
The only concern is not to use up all the unipolar magnets before you get vein utilization up

[a*******ssetup]

I've wondered about this very subject before - how much scaling would you need to do on your transport capacity to make up for not using warpers. Really appreciate you posting your results.

If you're still playing around on the subject, I've also wondered how many vessel speed upgrades one would need to research to get their vessel speed equal to warp speed, as another alternative to using warpers.

Sure I understand that either alternative isn't as efficient or necessary, but that's not the point of trying these things out for curiosity's sake. So thanks for your first post.

[Koro]

I think I could do without warpers now actually but it would be a lot of effort to change all my towers to not require warpers.
I am at level 29 in the Logistics carrier engine but the amount of white cubres required are getting really high increasing exponentially. The next level is 1.2 million cubes which even at 14.700 per minute will take quite a while. My vessels currently fly at 8700 m/s and 0,73 ly/s. I wanted to get them to 1 ly/s just for the sake of it but well. Just dont want to leave my computer running and I can't be bothered to build more research at this scale without blueprints.
I'm sure someone has the numbers of how many km/s would be equal to 1 au/s
Ideally you wouldn't want your logistics vessels to fly less than 5-6 au/s. Not sure what the starting point is but it's less than your mecha at 12 au/s.

[a*******ssetup]

Originally posted by Koro:

I think I could do without warpers now actually but it would be a lot of effort to change all my towers to not require warpers.
I am at level 29 in the Logistics carrier engine but the amount of white cubres required are getting really high increasing exponentially. The next level is 1.2 million cubes which even at 14.700 per minute will take quite a while. My vessels currently fly at 8700 m/s and 0,73 ly/s. I wanted to get them to 1 ly/s just for the sake of it but well. Just dont want to leave my computer running and I can't be bothered to build more research at this scale without blueprints.
I'm sure someone has the numbers of how many km/s would be equal to 1 au/s
Ideally you wouldn't want your logistics vessels to fly less than 5-6 au/s. Not sure what the starting point is but it's less than your mecha at 12 au/s.

yeh that sounds right...I remember the vessel speed research getting super expensive really fast. I'll probably wait like you for the blueprints before trying to go down the rabbit hole.

[Nekogod]

I wouldn't worry too much, even at end game you're unlikely to be using more than 10-20 warpers per second which is only 3 green cubes per second.

[Koro]

Originally posted by nekogod:

I wouldn't worry too much, even at end game you're unlikely to be using more than 10-20 warpers per second which is only 3 green cubes per second.

Someone does not know the true meaning of building to scale :)..
I've consumed up to 5.400 warpers per minute when launching all of my rockets and keeping the research going at the same time.
It's a rather incredible sight to see.

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Koro:

Originally posted by nekogod:

I wouldn't worry too much, even at end game you're unlikely to be using more than 10-20 warpers per second which is only 3 green cubes per second.

Someone does not know the true meaning of building to scale :)..
I've consumed up to 5.400 warpers per minute when launching all of my rockets and keeping the research going at the same time.
It's a rather incredible sight to see.

True, but I would consider that beyond end game. Once you've got all the research and it's white then yeah you will use more, though 5400 warpers a minute is only 12 green cubes a second, still not an insane amount.

I would assume at that point you're already fairly deep into VU and making 30/60 green/white cubes a second.

But generally you'll be able to finish the tech tree and get a dyson sphere built using green cubes for warpers with little trouble and with plenty of resources to spare.

[Arcane]

Originally posted by Koro:

I think I could do without warpers now actually but it would be a lot of effort to change all my towers to not require warpers.
I am at level 29 in the Logistics carrier engine but the amount of white cubres required are getting really high increasing exponentially. The next level is 1.2 million cubes which even at 14.700 per minute will take quite a while. My vessels currently fly at 8700 m/s and 0,73 ly/s. I wanted to get them to 1 ly/s just for the sake of it but well. Just dont want to leave my computer running and I can't be bothered to build more research at this scale without blueprints.
I'm sure someone has the numbers of how many km/s would be equal to 1 au/s
Ideally you wouldn't want your logistics vessels to fly less than 5-6 au/s. Not sure what the starting point is but it's less than your mecha at 12 au/s.

40000m = 1 AU
1 ly = 60 AU

So your setup has vessels travelling at 0.22 AU/s (8700 m/s) without warpers. Which is lower than starting vessel warping speed (0.15 ly/s = 9 AU/s). You can probably make it work without warpers but it will be significantly slower.

[Koro]

Ah I didnt see your math. Thank you, Arcane.
I've just sent out a set of 10 vessels to collect critical photons and it will take a really long time for them to go the 10 LY to the star and forever to get back. It isn't really viable.
The next level of logistics vessel speed is 1.2 million cubes so can't really increase that fast either.

[Selection]

Hmm.. that's not bad at all, i might try this "no warpers" thing out once blueprints kick in... but.. well i do like the light show atm.

[Kyrros]

There's a handful of problems with going "No warpers". Travel time itself is not necessarily a problem once you get a transport cycle going - the problem is that you can only have AT MOST 10 vessels in transit from any single Station, and once those 10 are inflight, that 'pipeline' is now locked for the next hour or two (depending on range). if there were a way to have a continuous stream of vessels from a single station, that would be quite viable, as you only have to wait for the initial delivery and after that, it's a continuous stream.

The other issue, is that higher tiers of Transport Speed tech cost scales exponentially - as opposed to the cost of Vein Utilization itself scales linearly - but the speed increase is only marginal and also linear on top of that; such that, by the time you reach even low tiers 10+ in the tech, you could literally spend more green cubes research for the next tier than you would an entire game's worth of warpers and not much extra speed gained from it.

I personally avoid using non-renewable resources on items that decay or are consumed in-game, hence my avoidance of Solar Sail swarm and not using coal for Graphite, so I definitely understand wanting to avoid wasting materials on something like warpers. As long as I'm using the Green Cube -> x8 Warper conversion, as opposed to just the Gravity Lense -> x1 Warper, I easily keep my material usage down.

On the flip side of that, Vein Utilization research pretty much solves most material cost issues since it does only increase in cost linearly - and if you're using so many warpers that you're concerned about material usage, then chances are, your infrastructure is quite large enough to be reaching quite advanced levels of Vein Utilization anyways.

[aub]

Is there really much reason to avoid spending coal on graphite? The only other use for coal is to burn it, right?

[Xilo The Odd]

Originally posted by tony:

Is there really much reason to avoid spending coal on graphite? The only other use for coal is to burn it, right?

yeah, which even spending the energy to turn coal into graphite, you still come out ahead with more potential energy in thermal plants as graphite than straight coal.

i do think it'd be neat if they had like a coal cracking oil production that made coal into more refined oil and less or equal hydrogen from a refinery. worst case you reverse it with X ray to get the energetic graphite back.

[Xilo The Odd]

Originally posted by dendriti:

Originally posted by Xilo The Odd:

yeah, which even spending the energy to turn coal into graphite, you still come out ahead with more potential energy in thermal plants as graphite than straight coal.

Not really. I worked out the maths and and you lose a little bit, factoring in the energy cost of smelting graphite.

weird, i saw someone math it out in another thread. too lazy to hunt it down myself tonight, tomorrow i'll hop in game and do the math myself. i do know its power positive though. so if you start a thermal gen with say,2 or 3 bricks of graphite and use it to soley power a furnace to make more graphite to feed the thermal plant, you'll make more than you start with over time.

unless they changed something and i missed the note.

[Kyrros]

I use my initial coal patch when starting out, but eventually, the only thing I use coal for is making diamonds, since entry level renewables Wind/Solar are so accessible. The rest of my needed graphite comes from X-ray cracking since I end up needing the Hydrogen anyways.

Originally posted by dendriti:

Not really. I worked out the maths and and you lose a little bit, factoring in the energy cost of smelting graphite.

I would be interested in seeing that math, given that before 0.7.18 it was exactly even, but you lost a minuscule amount because you had to use sorters to move materials in and out of the smelter.
Post 0.7.18, fuels were tweaked, so now you net a small positive in the Graphite conversion.

There's actually a guide here on Steam™ for DSP that delves pretty deep into burnable fuels (for the TPS) - it's math'd out pretty well there.