How do veterans optimise their refineries and assemblers?

[Spice must flow]

Recently I've been experimenting with a vertical production system, which automatically refines ore and stores assembler products and uranium ingots in a cargo container. It works as intended, but now I need to decide on the actual number of assemblers and refineries.
I've figured, that two assemblers with modules should be enough.
As for refineries, I've decided to specialise them in refining specific ores by adjusting conveyor sorters and modules. Unfortunately, I don't have enough experience with "Space engineers" to determine how many refineries should be dedicated to specific ores. I will, probably, dedicate one refinery to uranium processing and install 4 effectiveness modules on it.
P.S. As of now, I am not using any mods. I want to discover the capablities of vanilla game, before modding it.

[Eskidead]

If you plan on building big ships, you need as many refineries as possible to refine all the inhuman amounts of Platinium, Cobalt and Gold ore needed for thrusters.

[ShadedMJ]

To add to Eskideads statement a little:

Bear in mind that some of the ores (platinum, uranium, magnesium...) take considerable time to refine. Refining iron ore into 5kg iron ingots may take about 6 minutes, but 5kg of platinum will take an hour. If you want a lot of platinum soon, best to split it among multiple refineries, and if you don't need it soon that one refinery will be doing platinum for a long time.

At one point I looked at the wiki for ores an looking at rarity. By that criteria, it'd be 25 refineries for iron, 2 for uranium, and one each for everything else, except for stone which gets dumped.

[Eskidead]

25 refineries for iron??? :O
In one of my older saves, I had 12 refineries for platinium only (all realistic settings). It would take them about 3.5 hours to refine enough Pt for one large grid Large thruster (or 12 Small thrusters) which is 384 kg of refined Pt.
Then there's the other ores (960 kg refined gold (10 tons of unrefined gold ore gives about 23 kg refined IIRC (4x effectiveness modules on your refineries)) and 9,600 kg refined cobalt (10 tons unrefined ore will give about 2,200 kg refined (4x effectiveness modules) but it takes AGES to refine) just for 12 large grid Small Thrusters.
Now, imagine trying to build a capital ship with, say, 30 large thrusters and 60 small thrusters....you will need hundreds of refineries unless you want to wait 4 months for all the ingots to be ready.

EDIT: it's 160 kg refined gold from 10 tons ore - I must've thought of something else

[Dragon Crisis Core]

Originally posted by shadedmj:

To add to Eskideads statement a little:

Bear in mind that some of the ores (platinum, uranium, magnesium...) take considerable time to refine. Refining iron ore into 5kg iron ingots may take about 6 minutes, but 5kg of platinum will take an hour. If you want a lot of platinum soon, best to split it among multiple refineries, and if you don't need it soon that one refinery will be doing platinum for a long time.

At one point I looked at the wiki for ores an looking at rarity. By that criteria, it'd be 25 refineries for iron, 2 for uranium, and one each for everything else, except for stone which gets dumped.

Why dump stone? Why not have a stone processor on your mining ship? So much resources lost in that seemingly useless stone.

[Crown]

Stone has wonderful uses in survival. For instance, dropping huge rocks on top of pirate bases. Out of their turrets reach.

[jacobellinger]

Originally posted by Kith:

Stone has wonderful uses in survival. For instance, dropping huge rocks on top of pirate bases. Out of their turrets reach.

drop them while moving and they will act as sheild for your chartacter to get within grinding range.

[Roddy_McRizzle]

Given the insane amount of Pt required to get any capital ships built using only ion thrusters, why not mix in some H2 thrusters?

I know that doesn't speak to the topic.

For that I have 12 refineries, 3 arc furnaces and 12 Stone Crushers (I forget which mod).
5 of my refs are set up for Pt and use 3x effectiveness and 1x productivity module.
3x refs set up for everything but U each with 2x effect and 2x productivity. the last 2 are for u with 3x eff and 1x pro.

So far its keeping me in material, haven't built a miner big enough to keep them all filled to capacity yet...

[RedCap]

been making large ships with H2 trusters only recently, it adds a nice layer to survival. jump drives/H2 thrusters is a fav