Making enough explosives on space platforms past Aquilo

[GAMING_Alligator]

On the way to the system edge, even with advanced asteroid processing, and productivity modules 3, I'm unable to get enough sulphur and coal to make the necessary explosives for rockets and railgun ammo on ship to survive the trip (and I'm buffering 500 rockets and 1000 railgun rounds prior to departure). I know the theory, I'm just not getting enough asteroids to give me the volume of raw material I need.

I've spaced my asteroid grabbers out so that their "capture circles" don't overlap much. Was that a mistake, and should I just spam them side by side? I assumed there'd be no point having more than one covering the same area.

Or do I just need to build a ridiculous platform with a 100 grabbers that moves at 20km/sec?

How do people (that have got this far) handle this? I don't want to copy someone else's design, I just feel like I'm missing something important.

[Serendipitous]

I would recommend using better quality grabbers. Quality multiplies their effectiveness way more than usual 30%. For each quality level grabber gets an additional arm and all arms become faster, storage increases and so does collection area. The rate of collection goes way up.

[Serendipitous]

All space parts are also surprisingly cheap. Making it easy to craft with quality.

[GAMING_Alligator]

Hmm, quality might help, true. I've kind of ignore that so far. Guess I'd better set up a production line!

[Morpheus]

use productivity modules 3 on your crushers and chemical plants, quality productivity modules give more items at the same crafting time, so farm quality prod mod 3
quality beacons give more speed than regular beacons with speed modules
you have the best combo right there
also, do not throw away any asteroid chunk, use a loop belt system and use grabbers as asteroid holder, only put asteroid on the belt when is low than X asteroids on said belt loop

[argrond]

Tbh, I'm getting so much legendary explosives now I dunno how to use those. So, umm, making enough explosives is not the right mindset, that's easy-peasy, more importantly - are you prepared to use those to advance? )

[Chindraba]

It seems that there are two axioms in Factorio.

You never have enough.

You can always make more.

[knighttemplar1960]

You can also make your platform wider to increase the number of asteroids your platform encounters (preferably a delta wing shape to allow a staggered arrival of asteroids).

[GAMING_Alligator]

So LOL, I replaced my 9 basic asteroid grabbers with "Uncommon" asteroid grabbers (was trying to make rare ones, but got impatient). Now I'm getting so much raw material that my rocket assemblers are jamming up because their output's getting blocked.

The extra arms make all the difference. Got their without a scratch. Only problem now is it seems that's the end of the DLC :-(

So for anybody stumbling on this thread with a similar problem, the answer is quality.

[Schobbob]

set target priorities on your turrets like making railguns only shoot the biggest asteroids and ignore smaller ones, gonna save you lots of ammo.

[Hurkyl]

Sanity check: are you using asteroid reprocessing? There are so many oxide chunks out there you can easily refill your supplies of the other chunks when they're low.

If you're trying to collect just the carbonic ones... that sounds rough.