Energy setup on planet in another solar system

[texasmail]

I needed much more Carbon Nanotubes. If I could find Spniform Stalagmite Crystals, that would be a easier approach. None in my home solar system. The closest deposit was 21 LY away on a water planet. So, I built the land, mined some coal and the crystals powered with wind turbines. I sent the coal to Thermal Power Plants to provide power to the Interstellar Logistics Station which needs a lot of power to charge. Once connected, everything slowed down due to the power draw. I isolated the coal and crystal mining with separate wind turbines. The belts don't use power so I could get the coal to the Power Plants and the Crystals to the Logistics Station. But the Sorters for the Power Plants worked very slowly since they were on the same network as the Logistics Station. I dealt with it by storing coal and then manually transferring it to each Power Station until the Logistics Station was charged. I thought the 5 Power Stations would be enough to run the Logistics Station once fully charges. My setup sent the crystals to my home planet (needs Space Warpers), So, I transferred Gravity Lens from the home planet and converted them to Space Warpers. But these transfers took a lot of energy and the Power Station draw then slowed everything to a crawl like it was at the beginning. So I looked into Accumulators. I finally got it all to work with 4 Energy Exchangers on both planets. Home planet also manufactured Accumulators. New planet used the energy and transferred the spent Accumulators back. I did not know how many I would need. I started with one Exchanger with many charged accumulators. DId not keep up with power demand. It took 4 Exchangers on each planet. Not sure how many accumlators are in use since I just let the Replicator run. So I probably have a few hundred. But it works. Is there an easier way? Maybe if I transfer Space Warperts, not Gravitron Lens and then use Mini Fusion Power Plants and transfer in Deuteron Fuel Rods.

[Jan]

Early to mid game you can power every mining planet with solar/wind. I use a standard blueprint which goes around the entire planet.

Later on you got:

Option 1: Deuterium into Mini Fusion Power Plants for Mining Planets.

Option 2: Accumulator Charge/Discharge Cycle. Takes time to setup and you need power generation anyway. You could builda massiv e solar/wind powerplant on a good planet and transfer energy. But: You won´t need it once dyson spheres/artificial suns go online and you have enough hydrogen anyway to make deuterium.

I always go: Coal into minifusion into artificial suns. With solar/wind as first energy option for early midgame mining planets. Solar panels and turbines are also a nice tool to divide each planet in different areas, thereby producing a little energy, usually enough for early game mining.

[Tenzek]

Do not charge your ILS on the distant planet. Instead, have vessels from the destination world travel to it. A station does not need to be powered to store items or to allow vessels from a different station to take requested items.

[josmith7]

Originally posted by Tenzek:

Do not charge your ILS on the distant planet. Instead, have vessels from the destination world travel to it. A station does not need to be powered to store items or to allow vessels from a different station to take requested items.

That's my usual approach in the midgame. At that point I don't need to ship so much material that I need vessels launching from both ends - and that's the only reason to power the ILS.

(Even if I'm using advanced miners that I'm pulling from with drones I'll put those drones in a powered PLS and belt the material across to the unpowered ILS -- plus that way I can stick a traffic monitor on that belt to warn me if the material starts running out).



Late game, when I need the throughput, I'll ship in antimatter fuel rods and warpers to power the ILS (often adding multiple ILS on the mining worlds) so they can use their vessels too.

[Rekal]

Originally posted by texasmail:

So I looked into Accumulators. I finally got it all to work with 4 Energy Exchangers on both planets. Home planet also manufactured Accumulators. New planet used the energy and transferred the spent Accumulators back. I did not know how many I would need. I started with one Exchanger with many charged accumulators. DId not keep up with power demand. It took 4 Exchangers on each planet. Not sure how many accumlators are in use since I just let the Replicator run. So I probably have a few hundred. But it works.

You need to be careful with the accumulator production. If your factory is creating accumulators without any priority limit setup, you'll clog up eventually.

Easiest way to prevent that is to setup your energy chargers with a priority input. Your ILS requests the empty accumulators and sends them on a belt to your Energy Exchangers. Your assemblers that create the empty accumulators feed into this same belt with the priority given to the ILS input. Either side load the belt from the ILS or use a splitter. This way the empties in the loop that return take priority to be recharged before new empties are filled.

Eventually you'll have a full ILS of charged accumulators and the energy exchangers will backup. Then the empties coming out of the ILS will backup and the assemblers making new accumulators will stop as well because their output is backed up. The energy loop will still work, your outposts will empty the accumulators which are sent back to the ILS and order in charged ones. Once the charged are ordered, the energy exchangers start flowing again and the empties keep coming out of your ILS.

This works great as a sort of automation for expanding the network too. You can plop down another outpost with Energy Exchangers and once it orders in some accumulators the assemblers will get to start creating again to fill that new gap and will stop again when the equilibrium is met.

Originally posted by texasmail:

Is there an easier way?

Isn't there always? If you don't have a huge amount of deuterium fuel rods available for mini-fusion, you can step back one tech and create hydrogen fuel rods to burn in the thermal power plants. But you'll still need a lot of thermal power plants at that point.

Each thermal power plant produces 2.16MW (I think? Without proliferator, be sure you do use proliferator on every fuel) so to charge an ILS at default speed (30MW?) you'd need about 14. Fewer when you calculate with proliferator, but the nice thing about fuel burning power plants is that they never over produce. So if you need 30MW you'll only ever burn 30MW of fuel no matter how many thermal plants are in place. So overbuilding is not harmful.

[josmith7]

Originally posted by Rekal:

Originally posted by texasmail:

So I looked into Accumulators. I finally got it all to work with 4 Energy Exchangers on both planets. Home planet also manufactured Accumulators. New planet used the energy and transferred the spent Accumulators back. I did not know how many I would need. I started with one Exchanger with many charged accumulators. DId not keep up with power demand. It took 4 Exchangers on each planet. Not sure how many accumlators are in use since I just let the Replicator run. So I probably have a few hundred. But it works.

You need to be careful with the accumulator production. If your factory is creating accumulators without any priority limit setup, you'll clog up eventually.

Easiest way to prevent that is to setup your energy chargers with a priority input. Your ILS requests the empty accumulators and sends them on a belt to your Energy Exchangers. Your assemblers that create the empty accumulators feed into this same belt with the priority given to the ILS input. Either side load the belt from the ILS or use a splitter. This way the empties in the loop that return take priority to be recharged before new empties are filled.

Eventually you'll have a full ILS of charged accumulators and the energy exchangers will backup. Then the empties coming out of the ILS will backup and the assemblers making new accumulators will stop as well because their output is backed up. The energy loop will still work, your outposts will empty the accumulators which are sent back to the ILS and order in charged ones. Once the charged are ordered, the energy exchangers start flowing again and the empties keep coming out of your ILS.

This works great as a sort of automation for expanding the network too. You can plop down another outpost with Energy Exchangers and once it orders in some accumulators the assemblers will get to start creating again to fill that new gap and will stop again when the equilibrium is met.

Yep, That can work. I've played around with it.

Just be careful if you decide to then shrink your interstellar energy exchanger network. That can overwhelm your automatic balancing of accumulator and then you're back to the entire network jammed up.


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Specifically if you don't have enough slack in the ILS that's handling the charging off accumulators then the remote ILS can't ship theirs out.

If they can't ship out empties then the belt carrying empties from the discharging energy exchangers on your outputs backs up, which prevents the energy exchangers from discharging their empties, preventing them from accepting new full accumulators and they stop producing power.

But, because they're no long draining accumulators those remote ILS don't request more full accumulators so the ILS handling charging can't ship any out to free up space for freshly recharged accumulators to belt in - and so the charging energy exchangers also clog up because their belts can't remove the fully charged accumulators.

And now you're deadlocked until you either expand your energy exchanger network, add more storage for empty accumulators, or just delete a bunch of now surplus accumulators to get things flowing again.


Did that to myself one time when I was tidying up planets I'd mined out, but because my VU was high enough that sufficient resources flowed in from my remaining mining outposts I wasn't building new energy exchange powered outputs to replace the ones I was cleaning up. Oops

[Fury Fairy]

Originally posted by Tenzek:

Do not charge your ILS on the distant planet. Instead, have vessels from the destination world travel to it. A station does not need to be powered to store items or to allow vessels from a different station to take requested items.

Thanks God there are some sane people who play game the right way, instead of drowning under the pile of self-imposed "challenges". Hats down dear sir!..

[Marakith]

The Artificial Star is by far my preferred power source to kickstart a planet ... with fully proliferated Antimatter Fuel Rod supply being shipped out a single star pumps out 144MW, plenty for most small planet setups but a late game tech so not available to all.
The Energy exchanger is great for tiny mining planets needing smaller amounts but soon starts to take up a lot of space for planets using hundreds of MW.
With both setups the amount of deliveries/collections needed are low by ILS so I've never found it an issue regarding warpers ... these are produced on a few of my major planets only and if warpers are needed on the smaller planets I remote supply them to the smaller planet.

Assuming you start to make multiple powered ILS...
Normally the first ILS on the smaller planet takes 200-500 warpers on remote demand local supply, and then if further ILS'es are made in the planet they use local demand to take from this 200-500 stock. (i'd can be fiddly setting this to 100 warpers but thats what I try to set it to per station)

[darkestkhan]

Originally posted by Jan:

Early to mid game you can power every mining planet with solar/wind. I use a standard blueprint which goes around the entire planet.

Later on you got:

Option 1: Deuterium into Mini Fusion Power Plants for Mining Planets.

Option 2: Accumulator Charge/Discharge Cycle. Takes time to setup and you need power generation anyway. You could builda massiv e solar/wind powerplant on a good planet and transfer energy. But: You won´t need it once dyson spheres/artificial suns go online and you have enough hydrogen anyway to make deuterium.

I always go: Coal into minifusion into artificial suns. With solar/wind as first energy option for early midgame mining planets. Solar panels and turbines are also a nice tool to divide each planet in different areas, thereby producing a little energy, usually enough for early game mining.

You missed geothermal. Lava planet can easily get you into ~GW power output. This can easily lead to efficient EE charge - discharge cycle.

[texasmail]

Thank you for all of the comments. When thinking about some of the comments that are about huge amounts of energy especially with the Artificial Stars and Lava planet which I have considered. I return to the question of what is the objective of the game. You can complete enough of the research to get Mission Completed and you don't have to design a Dyson Sphere or launch any Small Carrier Rockets. Solar Sails are sufficient and only needed to capture the photons needed to help create the Universe Matrix. My system is making only about 16 small carrier rockets a minute, but it takes a lot to get even to this level. But I'm not building anything on the system right now. I'm just letting it run to try and finish all of the Upgrade research (10's of thousands of Universe Matrix required) and to complete more of the Dyson Sphere. Since I don't really need the Dyson Sphere, what is the purpose of continuing? I think most of us played Factorio and loved it, but the objective was to launch a rocket with a satellite. After that first one, the only objective was to expand to launch more rockets faster. By the way, what is a Cell Point?

[josmith7]

Originally posted by texasmail:

By the way, what is a Cell Point?

Dyson spheres can be set up to absorb solar sails to make a shell which fills in the gaps between its structure. One solar sails (normally produced 36 kW for its limited lifetime) getting absorbed coverts to 1 cell point (and generated 15 kW * solar luminance; but has unlimited lifetime).

(Similar to how 1 small rocket converts to 1 structure point; which produces 95 kW * solar luminance)

[mreed2]

Originally posted by texasmail:

... I return to the question of what is the objective of the game. You can complete enough of the research to get Mission Completed and you don't have to design a Dyson Sphere or launch any Small Carrier Rockets. Solar Sails are sufficient and only needed to capture the photons needed to help create the Universe Matrix.

Yes, this is correct.

My system is making only about 16 small carrier rockets a minute, but it takes a lot to get even to this level. But I'm not building anything on the system right now. I'm just letting it run to try and finish all of the Upgrade research (10's of thousands of Universe Matrix required) and to complete more of the Dyson Sphere.

Well, given that those are infinite researches, with exponentially increasing costs... Good luck completing them. :)

Since I don't really need the Dyson Sphere, what is the purpose of continuing? I think most of us played Factorio and loved it, but the objective was to launch a rocket with a satellite. After that first one, the only objective was to expand to launch more rockets faster. By the way, what is a Cell Point?

As with Factorio, once you've completed the official objective, the only goal is to produce more stuff faster. In Factorio, this is additional rockets -- in DSP, the goal is to produce more white cubes (to research infinitely repeatable technologies, which help you to produce even more white cubes).

[Kyrros]

Originally posted by texasmail:

I sent the coal to Thermal Power Plants to provide power to the Interstellar Logistics Station which needs a lot of power to charge.

Yeah, that initial charging of the station can be rough, but once it IS charged, things run much smoother.

As for coal itself, it actually IS a feasible method of powering a small mining colony with an ILS.

The trick is to not use the raw coal, rather to process it into Energetic Graphite which is a bit of a bump in energy over raw coal... in addition to Mk2 Proliferator on top of that. Proliferated fuels will burn faster and release more energy in a TPS, which amplifies that bump over raw coal even more.

Mk1 (+12% bonus) and Mk2 (+20% bonus) proliferator can both be created from a single coal patch. It's actually a trick I use when I need some quick energy in a pinch, grab a single coal patch and throw down a few miners. Then run that coal through smelters to create the rods, while also sending side-coal through the Proliferator-creation process to then coat the rods before casting them into the fire for a quick infusion of planetary energy.

You can get a surprisingly large amount of Mk2 Proliferator from a small amount of coal, so long as you proliferate each step along the way. Then, remember proliferate the final proliferator product before dumping it into sprayers and using it to spray your graphite rods (Make sure the output of your proliferator process goes through the bottom part of the proliferator sprayer FIRST, then loop back up through the top level of the sprayer after - otherwise, if you do it in the reverse order you will always use untreated proliferator to spray, wasting/losing product, instead of the other way around) - this saves most of the coal patch for energy consumption - and makes the coal you extract that much more efficient.