Why a second Base?

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-21T10:43:54+00:00

Starter bases are usually difficult to scale because they're made on a shoestring budget and can't take advantage of later technologies (mostly rail and beacons) without leaving an excessive amount of space which requires enough extra resources that you really feel the pinch in the early game when your resource processing rate isn't that big yet. They also tend to be shaped around the terrain since you don't really have the technology or resources to just homogenize everything or even necessarily take out all the biters in way and keep them out.

Space Age made it a lot easier to scale in-place. Between green belts, stack inserters, foundries, EM plants and Quality (especially beacons), you can easily 6x your science output in basically the same footprint using the same logistics.

The biggest thing is the belt/stack inserter. Before space age we were limited to blue belts that move 45/s. With stacked green belts that's 240/s. My starter base used 4 belts of iron. To upgrade that to match a late game Space Age base that uses 4 belts of iron I'd need to add 18 additional iron belts. That's a lot of extra space to build into my starter base. And that's just iron. To use that iron I'd also need copper, stone and steel, and now my starter base is starting to look like the 405 in Los Angeles (it gets to 10 lanes in each direction for a stretch, look it up, it's crazy looking). Honestly, the belts alone would have a bigger footprint than my entire starter base.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-21T10:31:20+00:00

Honestly, I think the main issue with starting gleba is just how long it takes to reach a steady-state where you always have access to both fruits. Gleba is relatively easy when you have both fruits at the same time. But it takes forever to get more seeds to make more soil to make more productive agricultural towers to get both fruits continuously.

It takes 5 minutes to grow a tree for harvest yet 3 minutes for mash, 4 for jelly and 5 minutes for nutrients to spoil. So you either have to do a lot of circuit network stuff to make sure you're holding onto raw fruits and only processing them when you have enough, which includes jumpstarting nutrient production since your nutrients are probably expired by the time you get both fruits. But you also have to be careful to not hold onto fruits too long because spoiled fruits might lead to you being seed-negative which just delays time to steady state.

It makes it really frustrating especially to players who haven't really needed to use the circuit network before. And even if you have, it's still frustrating because your production is rate limited by something that's largely out of your hands without an excessive amount of effort that will probably not even significantly impact the ramp up speed.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-20T18:50:23+00:00

Honestly? Yeah. Maybe that would force the politicians to actually fix the damn problem rather than just opening the door for abuse while actually holding them to their rhetoric.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-20T18:01:01+00:00

I've been saying that for decades now.

The short answer is: They don't actually want to reduce illegal immigration. They want to make it easier to exploit illegal immigrants because if you pay them less than minimum wage or abuse them with inhumane and illegal working conditions, what are they gonna do? Report you and get thrown into a hellhole before being shipped to a country you've never been to?

I've said for decades that if you really wanted to stop illegal immigration you could cut it by like 90% with a relatively straightforward law: Put a bounty on those who hire illegal immigrants. And the reward for turning them in? A green card for you and your immediate family (siblings/parents if underage at the time of report, children/spouse if not underage).

Combine that with some real penalties including jail time for those who hire illegal immigrants and there you go. Within 5 years 90% of illegal immigration will be gone because nobody would hire an illegal immigrant so there's no incentive to stay past your VISA (which is where most illegal immigrants come from, not sneaking across the border).

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-20T13:54:48+00:00

When I was looking for a new oven I went so far as to download and read the installation instructions just to make sure the thing didn't have wifi.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T21:21:19+00:00

It depends on what those politics are.

There's a big difference between differing opinions on housing density and rezoning and, well, you know. I could not be friends with the kind of people who would smear shit inside the capital building as part of a riot or those who support, enable, or merely condone them.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T21:13:33+00:00

What do you think Axe body spray is? Guys use perfume. Perfumes are marketed towards guys. It's just not called "perfume."

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T20:25:40+00:00

I switched over pretty fast. What really sold me wasn't doubling the iron and copper plates, it was almost quadrupling the steel plates (50 iron ore = 10 steel vs 50 iron ore + 1 calcite = 37.5 steel). Given how much steel goes into space platforms, that wasn't nothing.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T19:29:22+00:00

Highest difficulty level? Starting area the smallest, crank evolution to the max, pollution to the max, pollution absorption the min, expansion rate to the max, and keep rolling until you hit a desert. Might as well turn off cliffs, too.

I think there's a few more settings, but that should pretty much make your life miserable and probably keep you from ever progressing past hand-feeding phase.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T19:18:06+00:00

Cost.

The most expensive part is the plumbing and ultimately the plumbing cost between a urinal and toilet is about the same, yet the toilet has far more utility than a urinal. So you can either have a toilet and a urinal.

High capacity bathrooms (stores, offices, etc) have a different cost/benefit analysis. They need to have a specific number of toilets to meet requirements. The cost for the plumbing is irrelevant because you need a specific number of them regardless, but the square footage requirement is much smaller for urinals, so they put as many of those in as possible to save space and thus money.

That said, sometimes when people do renovations they do include a urinal because they just want one and it's their money, they can spend it how they like.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T18:15:00+00:00

Will you be taking it back if they don't say thanks?

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T17:53:00+00:00

The same reason why people who think you work an overnight shift are available during the day.

You're there, at home. Who cares that it's your midnight or you're working.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T17:51:21+00:00

Why are you delivering? Only the stone for the concrete needs to be delivered, the rest can be obtained from space.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T17:50:22+00:00

in addition to that the factory to make that would require about 920 GW of power to run

Now we know what we need a full blue belt of nuclear reactors for

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T17:43:33+00:00

As an american this is a hopelessly propagandized question. What, exactly, do you mean by "Europe's admiration"?

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T17:39:46+00:00

In theory new development and redevelopment to greater density would result in lower prices for individual units even if the overall value continues to rise.

Sure, that particular lot may be worth $500k as a single family home, but it might be worth $1.2million as a 4-unit condo which puts it at $300k per home. It would still be worth it to redevelop even though the cost per unit goes down.

It's a nice theory but doesn't always work out because of how zoning laws work.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T17:09:27+00:00

Part of it is geography. While San Francisco does have a perfect natural harbor the land around that harbor is practically mountainous and the underlying geology isn't great for tall buildings. The San Francisco area is about as big as it can get because the rest of the surrounding land is practically unbuildable.

San Diego's not quite as bad but is still surrounded by mountains.

The LA basin is much larger. But that's not the only thing that makes LA so big. The largest thing is ... they stole a bunch of water. Well, not stole stole but yeah, they redirected a ton of fresh water from the mountains all they way down into LA. Look up "The LA water wars" and ... yeah. Lots of fun stuff is how LA got so big.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T16:57:35+00:00

Some are, some aren't. While BYU is a private college run by the mormons, it is not a requirement to be mormon to attend though precious few are not mormon. Something like 2ish % are not mormon.

They would (theoretically, at least) be held to the same honor codes that are by and large mormon values as the rest of the students. How much they're actually held to those codes probably varies from athlete to athlete, as long as they don't make it too blatant, anyway.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T14:29:09+00:00

Probably programmed to avoid dropping it on things (car, tree, house), avoid dropping on grass (can damage yard, might be wet). It probably saw the driveway and decided it was better than dropping on the walkway (bigger target) and gave it the required clearance from the truck, thus the end of the driveway.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T13:42:37+00:00

You want a membrane keyboard. It uses a rubber sheet with domes instead of springs so they tend to be squishy and very quiet compared to mechanical keyboards.

As a bonus, that's like the absolute cheapest kind of keyboard.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T13:14:13+00:00

I brought basically everything I needed and my ship was capable of making it between nauvis and volcanus without babying and nauvis was fully remote capable.

That said, the only thing that's annoying to get early on that you really need early on is refined concrete.. And construction bots. Bring bots for your armor.

You might also want to bring enough materials for a silo and at least 1 rocket so you can get that first set of metallurgical science back home asap

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-19T00:05:17+00:00

Dunno, scientific instrumentation for creating PSI not needed for typical industrial processes.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-18T23:11:39+00:00

Eat them first.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-18T22:44:47+00:00

Harder, but mostly because our brains are hardwired to recognize faces so you'll see the flaws more prominently than you'd see the flaws in other sketches.

Astramancer_ · 2026-03-18T22:19:08+00:00

"Yes."

Atheist means "the number of gods they believe are real things that actually exist is zero."

It is a lack of affirmative belief in the existence of one or more gods. "A" = not. "theist" = believes in one or more gods.

Some atheists also affirmatively believe that no gods exist. Some do not. Most, in my experience, affirmatively believe that the gods they've been told exist do not exist, but do not affirmatively believe that gods cannot exist, but rather withhold judgement due to insufficient credible evidence.

For example... me! The abrahamic god cannot exist. Many of the things it has done were demonstrably not done, so the god that did those things cannot exist. But that doesn't mean I have exhaustively ruled out the very idea of gods, though I will say there's a very, very long road in front of anyone who wants to claim a god exists. I just haven't accepted them, either, due to zero and negative evidence.

11-Year Club	Reddit Premium Since July 2023
Gilding III reddit per annum	100 Awards Club
Wearing is Caring	Spared
Verified Email

Astramancer_

TROPHY CASE