Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
Problem with that:
- Refineries do not process ores fast enough to be used like that.
- The refinery consumes a lot of power, so it will require an uranium reactor to be practical.
Uranium is only found in asteroids and some shops, so if you are using uranium you are probably not in the market for a rover with a refinery.
I'm still trying to figure out a use case.
I'd have much preferred an assembler.
I'm not even sure what you're saying there.
Refineries are faster than Survival Kits, yet those are still used.
The small grid refinery is like a large grid refinery with both speed and yield modules (although not as fast as the large grid Prototech version).
https://spaceengineers.wiki.gg/wiki/Prototech_Refinery
Yes, REALRACE already linked to that, but you seem to have missed it as your comment ignores the fact that it's actually faster than a normal refinery.
That's funny, as I almost never power them with reactors.
I pretty much always power my fully kitted out refineries (with 4 yield modules each) with wind (if on a planet) or solar (if on an asteroid).
This is how I process uranium, as it takes way too long to refine:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3376255575
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3376255761
Aside from all that, the small grid refinery draws 1/3 of the power of the large grid version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WiClO82mp0&t=184s
Jump to 3:04 if Steam is still eating time indexes.
You do realize that small grid ships are a thing, right? (as are large grid rovers)
Some people actually like small grid ships and lament having to use mods to get a refinery and jump drive (both of which are now in the game with this update).
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2678657382
(this has almost 53k subscribers)
If you play on a server, you can always sell it or trade it with someone who wants one.
It just makes more sense.
The Survival Kit still has purpose after its secondary refinery component (and assembler component) has been made redundant, obsolete, and irrelevant. The "Medical Room" functionality, is not superseded by any other small grid block.
My small grid ships are quick maintenance craft. Light mining, welding and grinding, and various shuttlecraft. With batteries I generally want range, not refinery capacity.
Adding that much solar power to a small grid ship kind of defeats the purpose of a small grid ship, imho.
I've many times wanted the simplicity of having the primary Progression blocks, Basic Refinery and Basic assembler on a small grid ship. However, unless you're running with the highest Refinery speed in the game settings, you're eventually going to need to offload supplies and let them sit with wind power or a large solar array. Most notably this occurs with Cobalt, Uranium, and Platinum, the slowest refining ores.
If you're in multiplayer, then let it refine while offline applies, but small grid ships are more likely to become unpowered grids and despawn. It isn't like you can park it at a Trade Station and get infinite energy. If you're overbuilding for refinery capacity, wouldn't it be smart to give the ship more armor and large conveyor ports?
The use case you are proposing is:
- Small grid miner with onboard refinery for compacting ores while mining.
The use case is invalid because:
- The drill will collect the ores far faster than the refinery can process them. So then you would have a miner that is unavailable for mining until it is done digesting the ores.
In addition:
- The wind power argument is invalid because small grid miners cannot use wind.
- The solar power argument is impractical because fitting enough solar panels into a miner to run the refinery does not provide sufficient benefit to justify the impractical increase in dimensions.
So we are back to my reasoning:
- Any practical use case would require uranium based power.
- It would not be useful for a mining grid, just for a refining grid.
You *could* create a small grid mobile refinery, to process ores and ice and make fuel and ingots. But the problem with this use case is that you cannot get the refinery until you have the capability to liberate it from the factorum.
If you have the capability to liberate prototech blocks from the factorum, you are already at a stage where you mine and refine ores in BULK AMOUNTS. This means you are already using refineries that are superior for the purpose (either by yield or power consumption).
A Survival Kit labeled Lazarus "drop pod" could provide an option, even without a Jump Drive. On multiplayer servers it would seem that only new players would spawn in the vicinity of your Lazarus pod, and I assume that only happens after you actually start using it. Maximum start distance and all that.
The use case I'm assuming is a highly detailed craft one would more expecting from Space Engineers 2's unified grid. The Small Gridders did get an entire kitchen set in the Contact DLC.
But I've never actually needed to use it, sure it's a nice bit of fluff to add to an RP scenario, but once you have 2-3 respawn points on your main base, it becomes very difficult to be completely killed off unless you do something extremely foolish.
It's probably been 5+ years since I've used that setup...
No need to take up the PCU of a refinery to have it idle.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2972679830
What I did say is that "Some people actually like small grid ships and lament having to use mods to get a refinery and jump drive", and pointed to a very popular mod that adds those.
It's even been brought up in some of the videos that Xocliw posts, where some people just love the detail you can add to a small grid ship, but lament the lack of facilities provided by large grid ships.
I, personally, wouldn't put a refinery on a dedicated miner. Although I've seen some impressive ships made that way. I'll post the video if I can find it.
What I would do is put a temporary (or retractable) drill on a mini-exploration vessel. That is, if I had the option to do so. I might even be able to sell some ore at a trading station.
What I have done, many times, is have an array of drills on the front of a large grid ship (mobile base) with multiple refineries. They're slow, so a mobile refinery use case is "invalid" as you like to say even in large grid form. That's why I almost always make dedicated systems with many (16-32) refineries running in parallel, but never mobile (for large deposits, not for shallow surface ones that get mined out in 2 minutes).
If you only need a certain amount, that's not a problem. There's been countless times that I've found deposits bigger than I could carry. When that happens, I set up a dedicated operation like I previously shared.
Besides, why would you expect a refinery to work as fast as a drill? It doesn't work that way on large grid either, therefor your argument is invalid.
Again, insisting I said something about a small grid miner when I didn't.
Now insisting I said something about small grid wind power when I didn't.
Now insisting I said something about small grid solar when I didn't.
Again, assuming that the refinery would be running full-time.
Here's an analogy: Sometimes when I take long road-trips (IRL), I bring a small refrigeration system. The fact that it holds less than the giant fridge in my kitchen and is less efficient doesn't make the use case invalid.
You seem very stuck on this. You do know that you can have more than one grid in the game, right? I typically have many ships and multiple bases, all for different purposes.
That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to have something useful on one of the ships that's not dedicated to that particular purpose.
I rarely use uranium as a power source, as I typically have enough battery power to get me from station to station (usually way more than I need). My stations all have far more power than they need, so I can charge quickly when I dock (I even have event controllers setup to automatically charge as soon as I do, and before they were in the game, I used timer blocks for the same purpose).
I use uranium for two things: backup power for the off chance my batteries run down (has yet to actually happen as I design my ships accordingly) and for war-ships that I don't want weighed down by lots of batteries.
You could also have a small grid refinery on an exploration vessel that you can make as a nice bonus in late-game after you recover one of them from the Factorum.
It's not your only option, it's a nice add-on. No-one ever said you had to give up all your large grid ships if you find one of these!
Just as with my road-trip analogy: I can afford a nice, house size fridge, but I also have a tiny unit that fits in my car that I use for long road trips. One doesn't invalidate the other, they are different use-cases. I didn't buy the little one because I couldn't afford the big one. Quite the opposite: The little ones are a luxury item, a late-game bonus, so to speak.
Yeah, that's twice now where you ignored the fact that I pointed out that these are more efficient by both factors, and faster to boot.
We get it, you hate the small grid refinery.
That doesn't mean that everyone else is required to hate it too.
Different people have different tastes and different approaches to playing the game.
There are many posts in this forum where people claim that this game is unplayable in single-player mode. There are many of us who not only disagree, we play exclusively single-player. Neither is exclusively "right", both are.
So next time you find one, don't sell it, grind it... show it how much you hate it. Heck, maybe you should shoot it until it smokes instead.
But the only assembler you get in small grid is the survival kit, it can already make the kinds of ingots it can use, adding a refinery to it does not add capability.
Mobile refineries are very practical on official servers because a single refinery will do in 24 hours what 24 refineries do in 1 hour of single player play. There's also a multiplier, I think it is X3, so that may bring it up to an equivalent of 72 refineries if your single player setting has no multiplier.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3409367273
That said, I'm hoping the next update adds a small grid assembler, as that's obviously also needed. I'm not holding my breath though.
As far as official servers go, I've never connected to one and don't plan to. Far too limiting.
I don't mind scaling out. Building big is part of the fun.
To be clear, I have nothing against building large grid vessels and don't understand why some people in this thread are being so polar about it (I've never seen a discussion arguing about which grid size must be used before). I've made plenty of ships with mobile refineries, but I consider those refineries to be essentially for emergency purposes, with the exception of one big one I used in Never Surrender, I think the refineries were still churning uranium 50 waves in
Check out Ponos-G1 in the workshop... it's my reworked Ponos-F1 mayday signal ship that I managed to stuff both a fully upgraded assembler and fully upgraded refinery into. I think I added to reactors too (I know there's one, think I added a 2nd shortly before I uploaded it). I didn't really use the ship much, I just wanted to see how much I could cram into it without horribly altering it.
As I said before, this is a luxury item, not a necessity.