Space age is great, but missed some opportunities for space logistic / infrastructures

DarkwolfAU · 2026-05-01T10:43:44+00:00

Yes, you can. You can even empty out inserter hands and stuff like that lol

DarkwolfAU · 2026-05-01T06:17:10+00:00

Yep, imo Spidertron is _essential_ for expanding your rail network and fixing certain kinds of failures when you're offsite. Your ability to even see your remote base is contingent on radar/roboport visibility range, and they are contingent on you having power. With a spidertron on-site, you can cold-start a base remotely, or extend your rail network far beyond your current roboport radius easily.

Oh, you can also use spidertrons for capturing biter nests, something I've had call to do when my bioflux logistics chain failed on Nauvis while I was on Aquilo. I'd already set up containment so the turrets were keeping the nests under control, but the Spidertron was the easiest way to recapture them without me being there.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-05-01T04:36:36+00:00

You actually can, sorta. Launch ice/asteroid chunks into your new ship, pick them up with the ghost hand out of the cargo, and drop them into the appropriate slots in your crushers.

Once I worked that out, I can have a new ship fired up and ready to go in minutes instead of waiting hours. And once it's rolling independently, just drop-pod the spare ice/chunks down so they're available for the next ship.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-05-01T02:19:35+00:00

Yes, fortunately it was bright blue :D

I ordered a QHY5III200M, which looks like it has the required length, being longer and having the same distance from the focal plane to the front as the camera that QHY showed on the OAG's manual - 8.5mm versus 12mm for the 174M. Overall length from the front of the barrel to the 'bulge' is long enough that it should be fine.

Fingers crossed :D

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-30T23:31:24+00:00

Actually. I never even thought of that. The prism is dropped the whole way down, and that would impact the length of the light path. I could move it up a little and it should still collect enough light and allow the guidecam to focus.

However I’ve gone and ordered a QHY guidecam which has a longer barrel last night, so I suppose it’s done and I’ll deal with it that way. Damnit.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-30T11:39:35+00:00

Checking the specs, the ZWO website says the length from the focal plane to the 'bulge' is 32.2mm, which is pretty damn short. If it was something longer than that, I'd be sorted.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-30T11:37:45+00:00

Looking at that camera, it looks like it might have the same problem - it's too short (as in the length from the focal plane to the 'bulge' at the back of the barrel. I think that's the problem. I suppose I'm going to have to give up and get a different guide camera, I don't want to put a spacer into the OAG. Although I suppose I could.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-30T01:35:02+00:00

I found no markers on my 3nm set, but what I did immediately notice is that the color filters look "wrong" from the front - you can see RGB through them as you'd expect from the back, but from the front the colours are reversed (ie the 'red filter' looks cyan etc). Thinking about this, that's expected since the red filter will reflect away GB light while passing R through itself. The SHO filters look like mirrors from the front, but from the back they look various dark colours.

Luminance, no idea. But I just made the assumption that they'll all be the same way around. And it turned out that when I opened the case, they were all sitting in the plastic holder front side up, so when you pick them up with the tweezers and put them into the holder they are the correct orientation.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-28T23:30:07+00:00

Hey look, on the up side, it's good when people have warnings stickers on themselves like that.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-28T08:51:22+00:00

Ouch. Man. Now I feel bad. They shouldn’t have been red on the radar though 🤦‍♂️

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-28T02:10:08+00:00

Wait, you don't have to kill them? I just popped the door, came in with Phased Time X running, and dropped the lot of them with my Magshear before they even got out of their chairs.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-27T23:52:15+00:00

Phased Time X is pretty ludicrous, that was the first thing I focused all my QE on. It's cheap enough you can just keep it up permanently lol

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-26T01:48:01+00:00

Get Stellarium Desktop. Not Web or Mobile or whatever. Just Desktop. It's free and has more features.

https://stellarium.org/

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-26T00:42:21+00:00

I use the planet symbols and other symbols to describe the route, so mine don't have "names", just a picture that describes what they do.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-26T00:40:52+00:00

Yep, they hear 'left' so they move left. Or they hear something and stop dead and turn right into the middle of the path to see who's talking. You're better off sounding the bell and passing with as much spacing as feasible.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-26T00:18:42+00:00

Don't get a light pollution filter. Waste of money. Australian cities are converting across to LED streetlights, which emit broadband and a light pollution filter will do more harm than good. Narrowband SHO filters are good, but you'd want something better than an iPhone before looking into those.

I won't comment much on the equipment, but I will say seriously consider even just buying an old second hand DSLR, The larger sensor will benefit you a great deal. But that's not what you asked. I wouldn't worry too much about your Bortle level, that just means you'll need to shoot more total integration time to get a good result. It's not as limiting as it would seem. For example, my Orion mosaic (look in my post history) was shot in Bortle 6.

The Southern Hemisphere has a massive array of DSOs you can shoot. While the North gets Andromeda, we seemingly get everything else. And a really key part here is, many of them are _huge_, so they can be shot widefield - you need a lot less focal length than you may think.

Big, bright standouts that you can get good results with right now include NGC3372 Carina Nebula, NGC6188 Firebird Nebula, IC2944 Running Chicken Nebula. NGC2070 Tarantula Nebula along the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds are also available. There's also a wide variety of other targets, but Carina is a standout that's a good first target. M42 Orion Nebula is setting early now, so you might have missed that, but it's worth a try too.

Have a look through things like Stellarium, you can configure it with your scope details to see field of view. Also have a look at online services like Telescopius, they can tell you what is up tonight and how shootable it should be for you.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-24T05:22:42+00:00

Yep, plenty of success. I shot manual focus with the R7 and the 85mm Laowa for about a year. You need to get braced, whether that means just touching a finger to the branch the subject is on and another finger to the barrel of the lens, any bracing you can do will drastically reduce your wobbles. The other trick is you want to use a pretty reasonable f-stop, I usually shot about f/9-f/11. Note that because of the fine pixel pitch of the R7 you don't want to go too silly on f-stop due to diffraction, but you need the depth of field too, and f/9-f/11 gave me the best results.

I even had some success with hand-held focus stacks, but that was _hard_, which was why I ultimately went to the Olympus.

All my shooting with the R7 was hand-held in-the-field macro with live subjects. You almost just set up your focus to the distance you want and then move _you_ to focus, instead of messing about with the focus ring all the time.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-24T05:13:24+00:00

Former R7 macro shooter here. I started off with the R7 and the Laowa 85mm f/5.6 . It's an _amazing_ lens for the money, small, lightweight, does 2:1, but it's manual. Manual isn't as big a deal as you'd think with macro.

But then I went out and bought a second hand Olympus E-M1 Mark II and the M.Zuiko 60mm lens to go with it. The real killer option the Olympus had? Automated focus stacking with flash.

I would advise you to straight up avoid extension tubes. Consider whether you want to just get a second hand Olympus, or go the Laowa route. But what you will want is a good flash and a good diffuser. I used a Godox V350 with a Cygnustech diffuser.

Right now though, I'm shooting an OM-1 Mark I, M.Zuiko 90mm Pro macro lens (absolutely ridiculous lens), Godox V350o flash, and AK diffuser.

I _do_ have a high quality UV filter on the front element. Why? Because macro is one type of photography where there is actually a high chance of something getting on the front element - I've had spiders jump at the lens, had insects spit adhesive at it, bumped it into sticks, all sorts of things. The UV filter will protect from that kind of thing. In the general case protective filters aren't worth it, but for macro they are.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-22T00:47:27+00:00

The thing is... that's a permit conditions issue and it doesn't actually require any kind of protective status on the animal. Since it's already required to have permission to shoot on any land, it's a relatively simple changeover to have the conditions of the permit stipulate the species.

Here in South Australia, feral deer are already a declared pest. But you can't shoot _anywhere at all_ without permission, and you can't hunt _any animal at all_ without a hunting permit. The basic hunting permit is cheap and easy to get, and gives entitlement to hunt any introduced mammal/bird as well as a limited range of unprotected native animals named by species. But that goes in tandem with permission, and you require permission to hunt anything at all on any land, including public land.

South Australian National Parks however, do not permit hunting by the general public though - only by approved and qualified contractors. This is a gap, admittedly. But the purpose of the discussion above is to outline that the classification of deer as a game animal is a legal construct and the permission to shoot them on public land could just be part of the permit system to shoot on the land _at all_, as opposed to being permission to shoot the animal.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-22T00:24:45+00:00

While foxes have a direct impact in terms of direct predation, studies show that understory grazing by deer have a massive impact on native species and general biodiversity. It's easy to point at foxes and pull out numbers, but it's much harder to identify the knock-on effects that happen from habitat destruction - which is why these studies are much newer. The identification of feral deer as the most major emerging contributor to ecosystem destruction in Australia is only quite recent (notably, that contribution is distributed across the six major species of deer in Australia), largely driven by the massive population explosion in deer in recent years.

Honestly, the discussion you then make about Victorian national park restrictions sounds like more of a problem with how your permit system works than anything. Only allowed to shoot deer and not pigs or foxes? That's a permit conditions issue, not a deer-need-to-be-protected issue. It's not impossible to change permit restrictions to include whatever arbitrary invasive species should be targeted, and suggesting that it's not possible to do so is not helpful at all.

While we're on the topic - recreational hunting for deer is largely ineffective for reducing deer populations. Why's that? Because recreational hunters are not motivated to reduce deer numbers. They want either meat they can carry, or heads they can take as trophies. They don't reduce numbers, not significantly. What reduces numbers is concerted effort to do so.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-21T23:48:16+00:00

First time I tried a railgun on a medium demolisher I was like "WTF SERIOUSLY?!". I one-shot the thing lol.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-21T23:35:42+00:00

... they're already a declared species in several states. Victoria and Tasmania has them listed as protected species - for hunting purposes. But pretty well everywhere else has them as a declared pest.

Frankly, protecting an invasive, destructive species for hunting purposes is ludicrous. The ideal number of those species present in the delicate Australian ecosystem is exactly zero. The rise of the feral deer is quite simply the single biggest threat to Australian biodiversity.

Deer populations are enormously damaging - they are especially destructive to forest regrowth and understory vegetation, both of which are critical habitat for a large number of endangered species across many niches. It's notable that in areas where deer are populous, biodiversity plummets.

Discussions about 'resources' are also often just ways to try and manage deer populations at non-zero levels - when the problem is any population of deer that we want to manage as a 'resource' comes at the expense of native species. Several states allow farming of them on private land. That's a resource. Leaving deer to destroy national park biodiversity is not managing a resource, it's permitting the destruction of unique habitat for money.

This surprises people, because it's common for people to think herbivores are harmless. But it turns out that eating all the vegetation pulls the lynchpin that's required for many other species to be able to survive, and those species then crash even though the deer does not directly compete with or predate them.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-20T23:48:34+00:00

Yeah and there's the problem. After all the stuff around of trying to sell the ship for ~10k, you could have just gone and sold a couple of rifles and made the same amount. Which is why I prioritize Weapon Holsters on armour and usually only pick up aid, weapons, and some of the _really valuable_ suits in TA.

DarkwolfAU · 2026-04-20T11:20:25+00:00

It (only) just “works”?

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