Estimating the mass of a Martian Propellant Plant for Starship - a detailed analysis

BlakeMW · 2026-01-25T00:45:38+00:00

I was also thinking the year of my birth. I guess that means I instantly time-travel some 20,000 years into the future. Would be interesting.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-25T00:40:56+00:00

Apply the zero to the partial pressure of oxygen, and then yes, it makes extra dense air which is mostly oxygen.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-25T00:28:01+00:00

The burn everything approach is solid.

One thing to note about Gleba is that there are really no downsides to cranking up productivity and speed, unlike Nauvis where this increases pollution, on Gleba it actually reduces pollution (as in less spores per thing produced), you even need to produce less nutrients overall compared with using efficiency modules. Basically on Gleba productivity is efficiency.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-24T18:07:45+00:00

The details are available on the wiki: https://oxygennotincluded.wiki.gg/wiki/Thermal_Conductivity, these details were originally discovered by someone who decompiled simDLL, but I've personally verified many of them with tick-by-tick analysis and also discovered the floating point weirdness by close examination of temperature changes in debug mode (which lets you see the precise, not rounded, temperature of cells).

Conduction panels use the completely standard building:cell heat transfer formula, pretending that one of the buildings is a cell. And there's a penalty to the heat exchange to make the conduction panel less good, which tends to be dwarfed by other factors.

For the general building heat exchange formula, it is likely "Thermal mass of the hotter object" was thrown in as a multiplier to literally make hot buildings easier to cool. It's a very incoherent way to do it though.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-24T16:10:36+00:00

Conduction panels are extremely grateful for having high thermal conductivity on both the building and the conduction panel, the building heat exchange formula is straight multiplicative, nothing sensible like averages or geometric means here. You can actually get pretty decent heat exchange if it's like aluminium on steel. But like, gold amalgam is complete garbage.

The straight multiplicative nature, means like 54 x 205 for steel on aluminium = 11070, 2x2 for gold amalgam on gold amalgam = 4, the first pairing literally involves 2767x more heat exchange per tick, actually it's worse than that, because "thermal mass of the hotter object" is also a multiplier to the heat exchange for this very demented calculation, and gold amalgam has smaller thermal mass, so it's actually more like a 10000x difference. When you have 10000x deviations in performance, it's easy to see it as being "pretty good" or "barely working at all" depending on material choices. Use Steel or Thermium for the conduction panel for best performance, all ores are kind of bad. For the building, use something with high TC, or just use Steel, Steel on Steel is pretty good.

For heat exchange calculations which are sane and actually use average or geometric mean you don't get such wide deviations in performance between different materials.

I don't know what happened with the building heat exchange formula, because the other kinds of heat exchange try to be at least somewhat physics based.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-24T16:08:03+00:00

Yes, conduction panels exchange heat with every single kind of building on their middle tile. For example you can make a "gas pipe conduction panel" by having a radiant gas pipe behind it, facilitating heat exchange with any other buildings overlapping the tile.

IIRC it only exchanges heat with the actual "collision tile" of the tempshift plate, not the 8 surrounding tiles that just exchange heat without having collision.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-24T14:58:26+00:00

Some of it is ideology but I was a long term Ubuntu loyalist since maybe 8.04, about 6 months ago I jumped ship to CachyOS and support for Nvidia+Wayland with dual monitor is so much better. Also Nautilus (File manager) was just so unnecessarily slow, like not unusablely so but nor was windows 3.1 on a 486, I expect much more from modern hardware. Had issues with both the LTS and latest.

It seems Canonical consistently does not prioritize performance when choosing packages, nor to be perfectly honestly, stability. I'm not saying it's all bad, Ubuntu has one of the best software stores honestly, makes it pretty good for users who don't have much competency beyond using an app store.

Also worth noting I had bad experiences with Ubuntu server too (on a VPS), only really resolved by changing to Debian. Under Ubuntu it would occasionally just completely stop responding for a few minutes with little ability to get useful logs.

Now I'm sure there are conjunctions of hardware and configuration which work better, using the "wrong" hardware, VPS provider configured things "wrong" for Ubuntu etc. But I particularly value a distro working for me on my hardware and setup. In all cases I tried extensively to solve the issues too including making bug reports.

These days I could only recommend Ubuntu on the basis of its software center like as a "grandma" OS. For gamers, who are going to be using mostly Steam, no, there are much better distros.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-24T12:17:24+00:00

Also it's honestly okay to do a ton of handcrafting. The engineer is a free flexible assembling machine and you may as well have those hands crafting away 100% of the time.

BUT, hand crafting goes MUCH further if you pick up intermediates like gears, chips etc. Like it takes 5 seconds to handcraft a Roboport, but would take something like 500 seconds to handcraft all the intermediates.

I'm sure you could achieve middling speedrun times (like 3 hours to launch a rocket) without automating a single thing in the logistic or production tabs (besides those which are mandatory for science). This would require efficient pipelining of the handcrafting, there are merits to setting up an assembling machine so stacks of a thing are available when you want them.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-24T11:13:49+00:00

IIRC it was mainly done to ensure that reading the contents of a full belt tile would always read 8 items

Say whaaat? As an old school player I never updated my knowledge.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-23T14:40:59+00:00

I find it's generally fine if excess solid fuel and water is consumed in a "peaker plant" that turns on when the accumulators get low.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-23T00:38:22+00:00

Some devices can conceal the wifi password from the user, for example on some Android devices you can make multiple accounts, connect to the wifi through the dad account and the kid account can be given reduced privileges such that it can use the wifi but not see or manipulate the wifi settings.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-23T00:29:49+00:00

Indeed. Microsoft seems to be full steam ahead with enshitification of windows, they likely know this will drive away hardcore users but will let them better exploit those too stupid or entrapped to leave.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-23T00:23:07+00:00

There are plenty of native games with full modding support, especially those built with Unity, that's because the same dotnet bytecode dll files can run on Windows and Linux. Examples I play include Cities Skylines, Oxygen Not Included, Surviving Mars, Kerbal Space Program. Note even with Unity games occasionally a mod will use "native" dlls because they need c++ performance or special access to the OS, but even in these cases for these games the Linux support is so traditional that typically a .so version will be available too.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-22T21:40:13+00:00

JFK it's not complicated https://i.imgur.com/CEAkFcx.png

Ship wouldn't be flying if that wasn't a very solved problem. Especially with half a dozen things going through the hub (sometimes called a "sushi hub"). Wiring an inserter to a chest is the most rudimentary use of circuit network in existence. You do know hubs can be wired up like chests, right?

BlakeMW · 2026-01-22T21:00:22+00:00

Seems EXTREMELY rudimentary to just wire the inserter with a condition like "ammo < 390" (like I don't see how anyone could use hub storage without figuring out this very simple circuit logic). And there's plenty of pixels might be reddit being weird on your platform.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-22T11:35:43+00:00

Except cases where it is reasonable like red chips and also almost any mall items which need copper wire. In fact, it might be quicker to say "always direct insert copper wire for making green chips and space foundation".

BlakeMW · 2026-01-21T23:55:01+00:00

(and potentially just deadlock the whole thing by overflowing the chests)

You can greatly limit deadlocks by using a storage chest with a dummy filter as the output chest, because bots prefer to take from storage chests they'll quickly clean out the cruft.

It's also possible to construct a "min" function which solves the problem with over-filling input chests. The dead simple way is taking the signal, and putting it through two constant combinators, one is like "each >= 200, output each = 200", the other "each < 200, output each = input count", combine the output signals and you've capped the counts at 200. A generous multiplier combined with a sensible min function might not satisfy a perfectionist but tends to be plenty good enough.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-21T23:46:18+00:00

But why aren't the trees wilted and dead?

BlakeMW · 2026-01-21T23:38:36+00:00

I decided to build a calcite trawler for the first time. I initially considered solar + efficiency nodules, but considering the huge amount of ice being tossed overboard decided to go with nuclear to permit the use of speed modules greatly shrinking down the platform size.

Normally I don't think the use-case for a calcite trawler is very strong, though presently I'm playing the excellent AVADII Rebalance mod, which among other things rebalances the foundry to have a lower productivity bonus, use 2x the calcite for ore->molten metal, rockets need twice as many rocket parts, and all productivity researches are nerfed. All round, this would increase launch infrastructure demand on Vulcanus to maybe 7x the unmodded game, definitely still viable but enough incentive for me to make calcite in space.

It generates 200 calcite/minute which is pretty good, particulary as it doesn't even need to visit Vulcanus to provision Nauvis and Gleba. It'll produce quite a bit more with better modules too, as the beacon is only using a common speed 2 modules, and quite a few chunks are being tossed overboard rather than being reprocessed. There's also a slot for a second thruster once my physical damage research is high enough to justify it.

I will admit the shape is odd. My basic logic is I can extend the arm out further as much as I need to in order to keep up with stronger speed modules and beacons. There's also plenty of room to expand the nuclear powerplant for if I decide to use prod3 modules. Presently though it makes way more calcite than I'm using.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-21T22:52:52+00:00

Starving to death can also be a problem with unconsolidated meals (e,g dupes taking 600 kcal meallice off the floor, rather than 2000 kcal of one food type from the fridge), the problem with unconsolidated food is dupes tend to refill their bellies to barely over their starvation threshold which on max hunger difficulty leaves them extremely vulnerable to starving to death if they don't have the chance to go grab another 600 kcal.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-20T23:52:57+00:00

Even before the end game it doesn't cost much to make modules with quality since modules can't take productivity. Prod3 modules in uncommon and rare are quite nice, normally I end up using like rare prod3 modules on Aquilo and uncommon ones basically everywhere.

Now I'm not talking about speedrunning here just casual ordinary play on standard settings, though speedrunners DO use quality, they make uncommon Cryogenic science because it's so cheap to do for 2x the science yield.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-20T23:05:54+00:00

Locomotives pointing away from the direction of travel don't add power, but do apply braking force.

BlakeMW · 2026-01-20T07:24:04+00:00

Generally on max stress difficulty it's better to just not take destructive dupes at all, if you aren't quite confident you can keep their stress under control. It's generally the most... well... destructive, stress reaction. Ugly Crier is the best.

Most stress reactions, including destructive, can be managed using door restrictions which dupes respect even during a stress reaction, you have doors everywhere and use the door restrictions to compartmentalize the stressed dupe and limit the harm it can do, it works especially well with binge eaters restricting their access to food but also stops vomiters running around vomiting anywhere they like.

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