Cargo ships need overhaul

[墨镜绅士]

Cargo ship needs an overhaul; it is so upset to see the only transportation perform so badly at the moment:

a) The cargo ships and pads are unnecessarily huge, it takes 31x31 blocks for both start pad and target pad, and have no buffer storage at all which means you need extra spaces to set up buffer storage.
b) The capacity of the cargo ship is way too small, a 2x2 small storage can hold 8 stacks but this 31x31 giant only take 10 stacks at a time which makes no sense at all
c) The cargo ship moves way too slow, in my testing it seems only move around 15-20 m/s which is even slower than jetpack.
d) The ship locks target pad before launch which makes totally no sense. That means if you have a start pad thousands of blocks away then during the entire flight time (which could be several minutes) no other cargo ship targeting that pad would even able to launch
e) There’re settings on the start pad to set the launch conditions. But if the cargo ship is blocked and unable to launch then loaders will keeps loading even it’s already over the capacity limit set
f) On the target pad, the cargo ship will occupy the pad forever until it’s fully unloaded. There’s no timer to set the maximum time on the target pad, and no button to kick the ship back to its start.
g) Only one ship provided per start pad, and no other methods to add ships into existing routes.
h) Ascending and descending procedure takes way too long, and the linear animation does not look natural.

These issues interfere with each other and make the ship hard to use. It is designed for long range transportation but in fact the longer range it has the weaker it is. This goes totally contradict to the term “Transportation” which should take advantages as distance go up, comparing with belt which takes no power or maintenance at all. Since this is a T4 late game tech and it should be good enough to carry large amount of resources across the map.

The best way to use the ships at current game version would be using it as a belt: only 1 type of item should be assigned to 1 pair of transportation pads (because issue f). And the best set up is about 2 start pad to 1 target pad (because of d and e), and you may need multiple sets at long distance (because of b, c and h), but this would takes a very large of spaces and belt routing (because of a)

To make the ship better I think these changes can be made:
- Shrink ships to about 1/4 in size and makes the capacity to at least 20 stacks
- Each start pad should be able to hold 4 ships on the ground
- Each target pad should have 4 landing slots or more
- Add buffer storage to both start and target pads
- Increase the travel speed and decrease the time for ascending and descending
- Launch cargo ship immediately once the condition is met, no more loading should be done afterward
- Cargo ship will only locks target pad during approach, if no slots available it should just circle around and wait
- Add timers on the target pad to set the maximum landing time, and a button to force a cargo ship to go back
- If possible: Use production line to produce cargo ships, and dock them in a modular ship dock. Player can set how many ships will be used in a route and the ship will automatically leave the dock and start transporting

[Kez]

Agreed, they are super huge and hold very little. They make setting up something far away not as great as planned since the flight time and amount you actually get isn't great. Your suggestions seem good to me.

To help with issue F, you can make as many unloaders as possible to get the storage out quickly.

[墨镜绅士]

Originally posted by Kez:

Agreed, they are super huge and hold very little. They make setting up something far away not as great as planned since the flight time and amount you actually get isn't great. Your suggestions seem good to me.

To help with issue F, you can make as many unloaders as possible to get the storage out quickly.

Yea that's actually what I was trying to do, point f is about something else: if your production line is blocked somewhere and does not consume minerals as fast as it should, and the buffer storage is full, all other ships targeting that pad would be blocked as the one on the pad would never able to fully unload by its own

I think a timer or just a kick button for manual intervention would be good enough at this moment. A better long-term overhaul can be introduced later

[Zaflis]

If buffer storage is full, is there any rush to send another ship though? Since you consume slowly, the next ship will still arrive way way before the resources run out.

If you had an actual high rate of consumption, the buffers would empty the same rate they are filled, leaving almost no gains in the actual storage.

But why isn't it possible to have another ship waiting in queue above the target?

[nbst]

Agreed and to me points a) and f) are the biggest offenders

[MadDawg2552]

Originally posted by 墨镜绅士:

The best way to use the ships at current game version would be using it as a belt: only 1 type of item should be assigned to 1 pair of transportation pads

I thought this was the intended way to use cargo ships. When I play Factorio, I don't assign more than 1 resource type to any train station, so I would do the same here in this game.

Assigning more than one resource type to a single output is just asking for a bottleneck. If one resource runs out and it's waiting for a ship to drop it off, but the landing pad is already occupied by another ship dropping off another resource type, but that resource isn't being used because it still needs the other resource, so the ship isn't unloading... You see the issue.

[Zaflis]

Originally posted by MadDawg2552:

thought this was the intended way to use cargo ships. When I play Factorio, I don't assign more than 1 resource type to any train station, so I would do the same here in this game.

Well, Factorio has advanced tools like train schedules with conditions, filters and circuits that can easily deal with mixed cargos. This game doesn't have the tools though, yet.

[Amphetamine]

Agree. In order to be useful you really need 2x target pads and a minimum of 3x source pads, along with all the buffer storage and belt spaghetti nightmare that entails. Which might not be *so* bad if you could just do it once and blueprint it...

I did try daisy chaining identically named target pads together with belts between them, but you can't input belts to target pads.

I thought about building a factory for each raw-mid process then putting target pads on the roof, which seems like a good idea until you realise that you need a 3x4 block of freight lift space for each green belt....

Why is everything so huge? Why do the station transfer warehouses take up a full industrial unit's worth of space but hold less bars than a toolbox size personal storage?!

[Axelay]

so... run conveyors everywhere (is what I'm hearing)

Thanks for the heads up, I might have tried cargo ships before, but now I know better.

[Restless_Rascal]

I totally agree with all points raised on this issue!
Transportation in this game is better served by using only belts as the game stands right now! I've set up a number of routes and found woeful performance in throughput. As for the size of these things it's bloody ridiculous when you only get to mover 2000 items! It should be 10x or even 100x more!

[JimboTCB]

Originally posted by Axelay:

so... run conveyors everywhere (is what I'm hearing)

Thanks for the heads up, I might have tried cargo ships before, but now I know better.

Yep. No power or infrastructure requirements, no bottlenecks, split/merge at any point you want to, you can stack belts on top of each other for as much throughput as you need, the only minor issue is the initial latency of waiting for stuff to start feeding through and and having thousands of conveyor segments worth of stuff buffered up in transit.

It's a shame cargo ships suck so much as they're a nice concept which should have been the equivalent of trains in Factorio/Satisfactory, but right now there's just not a compelling reason to use them.

[墨镜绅士]

Originally posted by MadDawg2552:

Originally posted by 墨镜绅士:

The best way to use the ships at current game version would be using it as a belt: only 1 type of item should be assigned to 1 pair of transportation pads

I thought this was the intended way to use cargo ships. When I play Factorio, I don't assign more than 1 resource type to any train station, so I would do the same here in this game.

Assigning more than one resource type to a single output is just asking for a bottleneck. If one resource runs out and it's waiting for a ship to drop it off, but the landing pad is already occupied by another ship dropping off another resource type, but that resource isn't being used because it still needs the other resource, so the ship isn't unloading... You see the issue.

The reason is simple, the flat space around base is tight and the target pad is huge. If we go multiple pads it would be difficult to find a good place as we have mountains in the game and no mass terraforming tools so far. If we put the target pad far then we still need to use long belts to bring resources back to base. Building the pads on top of the factory might be a way, but as we don't know if we need to extend vertically in the future, I'd say better avoid to do this way as this would block you to build higher. If we put the pad high, all the way to the skybox, then bring the resource back to base would be another pain, and it takes all the sunshine on your base

[Aieonae]

I think being huge was the whole idea... so player can see where they land XD

[Osnauticus]

Agree with all of this, especially size and flight speed. They're so huge its hard to actually see the other end of it to figure out what's blocking it so you end up having to blast a giant oversized zone to get it in. They're bigger than some of the modular buildings footprint wise! I'd say get rid of the radar dish, size the pad to be just big enough for the ship and move the panel to the side next to the stairs.

[Sokrydes]

Agree, ships need to be faster and hold more to be viable!

[Keldrath]

They're large but they work and aren't too bad once you get into utilizing as many of the outputs and inputs on them as possible with buffer chests so that the delay from the traveling is lowered since production stalls entirely when they are gone. The more inputs and outputs you use the faster they can load and unload and you'll just need buffer chests to fill while it's gone and empty while it's gone.